2. Human Rights in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The events in Gaza and on the West Bank, terrible as they are, are not the only – or even the most terrible – infringement of human rights to be found on the planet. One only has to think of the genocide in Darfur – or the torture camp at Guantanamo. It is necessary and desirable to ‘single out Israel’ but in doing so I have chosen to focus on universalist human-rights themes. We can – and must – debate the origins of these human-rights’ violations: the extent to which they are simply the kind of thing that happens in all prolonged occupations, the extent to which they arise from Israel’s demographic obsession with having a Jewish state and the racist fear this generates about Palestinian population growth as a ‘ticking bomb’; the old Zionist dream of a greater Israel, wanting Judea and Samaria but not wanting the Palestinians and so on. In this talk I have merely wanted to focus on what Israel is currently doing and, by implication, the need to mobilise opposition to it.