Why Israel Calls Human Rights ‘Terrorism’
Shehadeh reading from his book Palestinian Walks during an excursion organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature
Raja Shehadeh writes in The New York Review of Books October 27, 2021:
Editors’ Note: On October 16, we spoke to Raja Shehadeh about his work as a writer and as a lawyer and founder, in 1979, of Al-Haq, which soon became the leading Palestinian human rights monitoring group.
“My Ramallah world, with its proximity to the hills, was being transformed inexorably in a manner that mystified and frightened me,” he said. “The changes taking place through the Israeli army’s takeover of the land using various spurious legal ploys and replacing the names of the various land features, towns, and villages with Hebrew names, as well as the changes in the narrative that accompanied the process, were all preceded by the alterations that were taking place in the local laws.
“My legal project was to chronicle these changes and warn against their consequences. This I pursued with the hope of raising awareness in order to exert pressure to halt Israel’s colonization of our land.”
That four decades-long project of legal accountability was foreclosed last week when, on October 22, the Israeli government declared Al-Haq and five other NGOs “terrorist organizations,” effectively outlawing them. Shehadeh wrote the following response for us.
In 1978 I returned to Ramallah from my legal studies in London brimming with ideas about the importance of the rule of law and the possibilities for resisting the Israeli occupation using international law. The following year, I and two colleagues, a Yale graduate named Charles Shammas and the American lawyer Jonathan Kuttab, established an organization we called Al-Haq (Arabic for The Right) as an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Geneva. It was one of the first human rights groups in the Arab world and the first and only one of its kind in the Israeli-occupied territories.