Translating Human Rights of the “Enemy”: The Case of Israeli NGOs Defending Palestinian Rights

Abstract

This article explores the practices, discourses and dilemmas of the Israeli human rights NGOs that are working to protect and promote the human rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. This case can shed light on the complex process of “triangular translation” of human rights, which is distinct from other forms of human rights localization studied thus far. In this process, human rights NGOs translate international human rights norms on the one hand, and the suffering of the victims on the other, into the conceptions and legal language commonly employed by the state that violates these rights. We analyze the dialectics of change and reproduction embedded in the efforts of Israeli activists to defend Palestinian human rights while at the same time depoliticizing their work and adopting discriminatory premises and conceptions hegemonic in Israeli society. The recent and alarming legislative proposals in Israel aimed at curtailing the work of human rights NGOs reinforce the need to reconsider the role of human rights NGOs in society, including their depoliticized strategies, their use of legal language and their relations with the diminishing peace movement.

Tour guides and the transnational promotion of human rights: Agency, structure and norm translators in responsible travel

“…For those who do, Diem further responds by directing engagement towards reflection rather than confrontation. Diem's strategies is consistent with the concept of norm translators, who control the flow of information to influence others (Golan and Orr, 2012;Merry, 2006b;Sahlin et al, 2015). By working to address sensitive topics via optional reflective private conversations, Diem is working to control the flow of information to avoid public expositions and encourage private reflections among tourists in his tour groups.…”

Human rights litigation and the transition from policing to warfare: the case of Israel and its governance of the West Bank and Gaza in the Al-Aqsa Intifada

“…Many of these accounts equate courtroom losses to "no impact" and, building on the NGOs' poor record of success, assert that their litigation had a marginal impact on the governance of the West Bank and Gaza (Meydani and Mizrahi 2006, Barzilai 2008, Ben-Naftali 2011, Golan and Orr 2012. NGO practitioners, as will be discussed further, largely agree with these assessments.…”

“…Even if not engaging with a fundamental critique of the rights discourse, NGO practitioners have also questioned the consequences of their litigation. Golan and Orr (2012) quote NGO directors whom, at a conference entitled "Forty Years of Occupation: What Have We Done, What Have We Achieved and What Next?" critically discussed the impact of their work.…”

Vernacularization of liberal civil society by transnational Islamist NGO networks

“…In recent years, a second wave of normative change scholarship has brought up similar arguments and started to problematize the absence of norm-recipients' agency role, particularly that of non-Western local actors (Acharya 2004;Bettiza and Dionigi 2015;Boesenecker and Vinjamuri 2011;Golan and Orr 2012;Merry 2006;Orr 2012). 8 This growing body of literature, informed by agency-oriented conceptual models of historiography and anthropology, shift the focus from the norm-makers' diffusion strategies to the ways in which local entrepreneurs modify, hybridize, and adapt international norms to local cultural canons and their modalities.…”