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Human Rights and Politics in Israel-Palestine

Anat Biletzki Jeff Halper: October 22, 2007; Running Time: 2:28:28

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Human rights are central to the fraught politics between Israelis and Palestinians, these two panelists argue. Any conceivable solution to such an endless conflict must begin by acknowledging the current bleak realities of Palestinian life under Israeli rule, they say.

Anat Biletzki and the group B'Tselem have conducted painstaking studies of how Israel’s longstanding agenda of allowing its civilians to settle on Palestinian occupied land constitutes an infringement of the Palestinians’ basic equality, property rights, freedom of movement, their very “right to self-determination.” The settlements were given a “cloak of legality,” sanctioned as they were by one Israeli government after another. Geographically, the settlements break up what might have been a contiguous Palestinian state.

Biletzki ties the settlements together with other work by the Israelis conducted in the name of security to demonstrate the existence of a forbidding, two-tier society : a system of roads off limits to Palestinians in the occupied territories, or permitted only via carefully guarded checkpoints; the wall (or separation barrier), which runs through Palestinian land; and the total control of Gaza, from the economy to communications, which increasingly makes it “a big prison.” This barricading of Palestinians has become a “routine phenomenon” –and not worthy of the headlines, in the way bombs and torture are, says Biletzki. She insists that “our political conversation must become a human rights conversation,” and hopes that she can make an impact on American Jews and policy makers, who don’t believe in the possibility of making a deal with the Palestinians: “If we give them the land, they’ll throw us into the sea.”

Jeff Halper describes the current situation for Palestinians as apartheid, knowing full well the awful resonance of the term. He sees the system of settlements, roads and the wall as a deliberate land grab, “imprisoning tens of thousands of Palestinians within cities, towns and villages.” The word apartheid “cuts through -- immediately you get it.” This is important because the situation in Israel “is a global issue that affects everyone. It’s the epicenter of instability in the entire region…one of the reasons you can’t take toothpaste onto an airplane.”

Reframing the issue will bring the kind of negative attention that South Africa once drew, as well as international sanctions, and corporate divestment. While Halper believes Israel has essentially foreclosed a viable two-state solution, he still imagines that the U.S. might persuade Israel to pull out of the settlements, so Palestinians can move back in. “There would be dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv,” Halper predicts, because so many Israelis “want this albatross off their back.”

Lecture Details

Location: 66-110

About the Speakers

Anat Biletzki

Chair, Philosophy Department, Tel Aviv University
Fellow, Program on Human Rights & Justice, MIT Former Chairperson, B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories)

Anat Biletzki has been teaching at the Philosophy Department in Tel Aviv University since 1979. She has traveled widely, as a visiting scholar and fellow at, among others, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Boston University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen, Norway. Her publications include Paradoxes (1996); Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language (1997); What Is Logic? (2002); and (Over)Interpreting Wittgenstein (2003).

Biletzki has been active in the peace movement and in several human rights projects in Israel for over 25 years. In 1997-1998, Biletzki helped establish the human rights movement "Open Doors" which worked on liberating Palestinian administrative detainees in Israel. She is on the board of Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace,and was chairperson of the board of B'Tselem - the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, from 2001-2006. In 2005 she was chosen as one of "50 most influential women in Israel" by Globes, the Israeli business monthly, and was nominated among the "1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005."

Jeff Halper

Coordinating Director, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

Jeff Halper is an Israeli anthropologist. He retired recently from Ben Gurion University. He is a harsh critic of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and, as founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), one of the leading peace and anti-occupation activists in Israel.

A transplant from Minnesota, Halper has lived in Israel since 1973. He has researched and written extensively on Israeli society and is the author of the book Between Redemption and Revival: the Jewish Yishuv in Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century Westview, 1991. Halper founded and directed Israeli's Committee to Save the Ethiopian Jews.

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