Seventy-five years ago today, on December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). 

At a time when the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, the Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans, the member countries of the United Nations nonetheless came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.

The United Nations itself was only three years old, having been formed in 1945 as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe. In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to set up the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit. . .

. . . The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”

Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”

Heather Cox Richardson

When I was very young, and first learned that Switzerland had been neutral in World War Two, I took that as a good thing.  They fairly didn’t take sides, the Swiss loved peace, I reasoned in my childish brain (they also made delicious chocolate, as I knew very well).  By the time I was eight, and saw nauseating film clips of what the Nazis had been up to not long before I was born, I understood that Swiss neutrality was essentially an acceptance of Nazism.   With friends like fair and balanced Switzerland, who needs Franco’s Spain?

How do we negotiate a world that demands a black and white taking of sides in so many cases?   Nuance is the weapon of obfuscating, timid pussies, we are told over and over by those with an interest in division and the loudest megaphones on earth.  The criticism of liberals and progressives often focuses on their presentation of detailed nuance rather than fierce, no holds barred, smashmouth, simple to grasp angry political rallying cries.  The right is not afraid to act like Nazis, including threats of violent reprisal against political opponents, why are the good guys so “principled”? 

There is something brutal about all politics, especially if one side is out for actual blood.   How do you discuss poisonous subjects with integrity?   The difficulty of this is hard enough to stop us from even trying, most of the time.   Can you actually come to a compromise with a Klansman, unless you somehow agree that their point of view is somewhat justified?  A separate question: why would you want to?

As I watch the unfolding horrors in Israel and Gaza I also watch the clannish response of so many.   Israel, as a haven to long persecuted Jews, has a right to exist.   The people of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians, have a right to exist.   May I go so far as to opine that all people, all creatures, have a right to exist?

There is an extreme right wing/religious fundamentalist government in Israel, the most extreme and divisive in its history.  The government is so extreme that hundreds of thousands of Israelis regularly march to protest Netanyahu’s ongoing plan to curb the Israeli Supreme Court, an institution that has long been Israel’s protection against anti-democratic and inhuman practices.

This fight between Israeli democracy and religious and ethnic autocracy provides the perfect historical moment for a murderous group, purporting to represent the persecuted, to attack Israel and inflict a grievous wound in horrific fashion.  No need to propagandize, Hamas provided the torture, burnings, slow death of parents in front of terrified children and vice versa.   They bragged about it themselves and took two hundred plus hostages.  No secret, Hamas said, we went to your villages to terrify you, make you feel vulnerable, enrage you, provoke the bloodiest possible response to make you look like the blood thirsty mass-murderers you are.

Now the world is divided into two simple camps on this awful question, as on most questions today.  The Jewish state has a right to exist, and to do anything necessary to survive, particularly after the Nazi-style atrocity on October 7.   The other side points in outrage to Israel’s long oppression of millions of Palestinians, to the open air prison conditions in Gaza and the impunity with which violent settlers dominate the West Bank, and demands that this oppression end now.

There is a moral core, and righteousness, to each argument, to both sides in this violent dispute to the death.  What does a person who sees both sides do?  In my case, I look up the history of the creation of the State of Israel, a country I’ve spent a lot of time in, whose language I speak.  

Nothing clean about that moment of international guilt, when, in the shadow of death camps for Jews, the Jewish state was “created” as a haven for a historically despised and persecuted minority.  Read about Mandatory Palestine, it was a shit show.  The British, as the Ottoman Empire was being defeated, were given control of newly created Palestine and all the inhabitants thereof.  There was also the “creation” of Lebanon, Jordan (Palestine was part of Transjordan), Iraq and the rest of the current Middle East, national boundaries drawn by the victorious European nations who had ousted the Ottoman Empire in World War One.  

The British Mandate was won in a war.   The winners imposed the rules, the local inhabitants had nothing to say about it.  Nations in the former Ottoman Empire were created by drawing lines on maps, in some cases combining, in the old British practice, warring tribal and ethnic groups in the same national boundaries.  The better to control them, if the newly created Iraqis themselves were fighting and killing each other, so much the better for ruling them.  European colonial powers had perfected this technique in Africa.

You had Jews displaced by Hitler’s plan to kill them arriving in Palestine, intercepted by the British, who were also fighting Hitler.  You had the “illegal immigration” of thousands of such persons.   You had Arabs who had lived on the land for generations and owned over 90% of the land.  You had the Jewish claim to the land rooted in the Old Testament, when God promised the land to His people.   That biblical claim, one must concede, is as problematic as any claim made in any holy book anywhere.   You had violence and killing, including by Jewish terrorist groups intent on ousting the British by any means necessary.  You had Arabs occasionally killing Jews, many of whom had escaped Hitler’s death machine.  There was a decade or more of desperate dealmaking, dealmaking that rarely included local poor people, Arab or Jew.

The vote for the creation of the state of Israel in the newly created UN was hotly contested, as was the map of the new state.   There was no worldwide recognition of the need for this Jewish state, in spite of Hitler’s heroic efforts to demonstrate the need for such a nation and our collective memory of this rare moment in history when support for Jews overcame long hatred.  Israeli independence squeaked through, with all kinds of compromises.  The British couldn’t wait to get out by then. 

Soon after Israel announced its independence the new country was attacked by a huge force of its Arab neighbors.  The war went on for months.  Israel’s existence was touch and go.  During the war 700,000 Palestinians became refugees.

We have the Israeli story of this exodus: Arab nations broadcast messages to the Palestinian Arabs to leave so that the Jews could be forced into the sea.  Once all the Jews were gone, they could go home in peace.  There were such broadcasts, but that was not the only reason Palestinians left.  

There was a war raging.  There were forced expulsions of Arabs from their villages in what was now Israel, war crimes, documented (see Deir Yassin) that terrified Palestinians and made them flee.  There was the usual displacement of any war.   There were multiple compelling reasons Palestinians fled.

At the end of the 1948 war Israel had expanded its borders slightly and the new status quo did not include the reintegration of Palestinians who had fled.  While understandable, from an Israeli point of view, that unaccomodated mass of refugees, which has lived in poverty for generations now, planted the seeds for what has followed.

The Israeli government’s position has long been that those refugees are Arabs and should be taken in by other Arab nations.   The Arab position was a hard “fuck you.”  The Palestinian refugee crisis was too good for Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and friends to pass up.  Nobody likes impoverished refugees, so how about a resounding, righteous international “Fuck Israel” instead?

Not to say that the Israeli position on Palestinian refugees being the responsibility of other Arab nations made much sense.  All of these talking points, if you take them one at a time, are easy enough to debunk as bullshit.  The practice of partisans on both sides is to have a few self-serving, one-sided talking points ready to deploy when needed, to make a complicated problem the sole responsibility of the enemy.

We cannot talk about these things calmly.  The killing of children, of old people, always rightfully enrages us.  I heard a journalist I love and respect (Amy Goodman) point out that Hamas had treated the 85 year-old Israeli hostage they later released humanely, even kindly.  Really, Amy, Hamas gets points for not beating and raping an 85 year-old hostage?

So back to the question: how to talk about what an Israeli fascist/theocratic government is doing in response to a hellish masterpiece of terrorist strategy in a world where Putin and Trump are the biggest beneficiaries of this kind of explosively divisive war.  If you have any idea, I’d love to hear it.