The speech delivered by B’Tselem executive director Hagai El-Ad at the UN Security Council Oct. 14 generated a political storm last week in Israel. While the angry responses did not surprise anyone, bad timing contributed to the public furor: The speech was delivered only 24 hours after UNESCO passed a resolution that denies the connection of the Jewish people to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
Between the lines, in his reactions to the speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared the B’Tselem activists to traitors and threw all the Israeli human rights organizations to the dogs. But beyond Netanyahu’s anger and his irresponsible attacks against B’Tselem, El-Ad’s speech raised all the main issues that concern Israeli society regarding these organizations. Is it legitimate for Israeli sources to express criticism of the occupation and the enlarging of settlements in an international forum? Have the organizations’ key activists crossed redlines in their human rights activities and entered the domain of governmental political activity? And finally, are the organizations investing their efforts on the global front because they have lost all hope of generating change in Israeli public opinion?
Following the attack on him, El-Ad explained in a Haaretz article that “the world’s intervention against the occupation is legitimate, like any issue connected to human rights. This is all the more true with regard to an issue like our control over another nation: This is not an internal Israeli issue. It is clearly an international one.”
Most of the human rights activists agree with this position. They believe that the continuation of the 50-year-old occupation, with no end in sight, is not a purely political-governmental issue, but clearly an issue of the violation of human rights. To their critics they respond that even Netanyahu, who likes to belittle the UN, stands up year after year to deliver a speech at the General Assembly meeting. In addition, all the right-wing movements have international departments and send their representatives to Jewish communities throughout the world in order to present their worldviews and the importance of Jewish settlement in all parts of the land of Israel (term used by the right wing for Israel and the West Bank). How can this be permitted to the prime minister and right-wing activists, yet forbidden to left-wing organizations?
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