Friday, July 11, 2008

Human Rights as Travesty - 1

Once upon a time I was a lefty, progressive, peace-mongering bleeding heart liberal groupie. I got over it eventually, partly through the experience of life, and partly through the efforts of our Palestinian neighbors, who did their utmost to disabuse me of the foolishness. As Barack Obama will say by and by, when the facts of life disprove your theories about them the right thing to do is to modify the theories. Or as John Maynard Keynes already said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. And what do you do sir?"

Why do I mention this? Because even though I've become an evil reactionary, I still have some friends deep in the mire of Israel's far-left scene, and they give me updates on the current lunacies. The other day one of them called my attention to an article titled The Holy City in Human Dimensions - The Partition of Jerusalem and the Right to Social Security, by Yehezkel Lein. The article appeared recently in The Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights. Fortunately, this publication is not accessible online unless you pay, which you wouldn't want to do. However, subscribers of Ruminations can now download the full article, here.

It's awful. I mean, really bad. Hair-raising. However, at the moment I don't have the time to deal with it. So if you feel that you've been really bad and deserve to be punished for something, feel free to read it; by and by when I get around to ruminating about it, hopefully sometime soon, you'll be able to feel all smug for having prepared for class in advance.

For those who don't have need for atonement, here's Lein's own abstract:


In the failed final-status negotiations that Israel and the Palestinian Authority held in 2000, the sides reached agreement on the main parameters of a solution on the question of Jerusalem. However, both sides ignored the fact that according to these parameters, East Jerusalem Palestinians would be denied almost completely their social security entitlements under the Israeli social security system. This article argues that, regardless of what will be agreed in any future agreement, according to international human rights law, Israel would continue to bear at least some responsibility for ensuring the right to social security of Palestinian Jerusalemites, even though they live outside its territory. Moreover, a sweeping denial of social security benefits would also be deemed a violation of the right of property under Israeli constitutional law.

1 comment:

kai said...

Remember Albert Einstein saying:
"Die Majorität der Dummen ist unüberwindbar und für alle Zeiten gesichert. Der Schrecken ihrer Tyrannei
ist indes gemindert durch Mangel an Konsequenz."

This week, we had a discussion with a Christian Human Rights Group putting all their energy into advertising for the Geneva "accord".
Allright so far.

When we faced them with some uncomfortable questions, we got these responses:

1) They don't care about terrorism and victims of terrorism. They believe it's more important to accuse civil rights' violations. (Apparently, there is no human right to pure survival.)

2) They don't care about historical truth. It makes all things too complicated.

Yaacov, I'm not kidding!

Shabbat shalom.