Nousland

A “Real” Paradox in Human Rights Anat Biletzki - Dept. of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

Abstract

The oft-repeated mantra of human rights organizations is that “human rights are not political’,” human rights being grounded in universalism, which is diametrically opposed to political partisanship. The philosophical question to ask is: how can rights discourse be anything but political? This gives rise to a conceptual paradox concerning the very fundamentals of human rights; it also leads the way to pragmatic quagmires in which “global” human rights organizations find themselves. But the epitome of this (conceptual and concrete) dilemma is to be found in conflict situations where local/national human rights groups operate, for these groups literally embody the contradiction between universal moral principles and particular human interests. Does this mean, then, that the ideological opposition between politics and human rights, as originally contrued in standard and traditional human rights talk, has brought the concrete manifestation of human rights to a dead-end? Is there any way for local human rights organizations – real, operational, organizations that are not globally oriented – to substantiate their particular focus without reneging on universal demands? Or are they doomed to represent, in their respective agendas, their political, “biased” context? Finally, and going back to the conceptual level – does this imply that the foundational idea of human rights indeed harbors an irreconcilable paradox?  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the human rights organizations that accompany it, will serve as a very germane illustration of this problematic. From the semantics of human rights concepts (“victim”, “perpetrator”, “non-combatant”, “conscientious objection”, etc.), to the pragmatics of human rights discussions in a specific area and time of strife, one can identify the alienation of universalism as the clear and almost immediate consequence of  a context so rife with “politics”. Social and cultural phenomena within each society (Israeli and Palestinian), the convoluted state of the relationships between their respective NGOs, and the tensions arising between local and global organizations provide a working example, a case-study, of the “real” implications of this inherent paradox.