A scil-ful way to gain understanding

A group of over 50 law students from around the world recently gathered at Hebrew University to learn about the issues with which this country must contend.

By PAMELA PELED
Conference participants listen during a session. (photo credit: Courtesy)
Conference participants listen during a session.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Most Israelis could probably tell you whether they live “inside” or “outside ” the Green Line. But the origin of its color is a more difficult question. Is the grass always greener on the other side of the line? Does the border have to do with naiveté, or freshness, or jealousy?
Not at all. Green was simply the random marker that Moshe Dayan used to draw the new post-1967 lines on a map; if he’d pulled a red pen out of his pocket, we would be crossing red lines today. What is more, Dayan’s indelible ink was thick and imprecise; Israelis and Egyptians spent many long hours hammering out agreements on who owned the land under the line. So Israeli negotiators wanted to keep Taba, and its luxury hotel, on Israel’s side; the Egyptians argued that it belonged to them.
Ambassador Alan Baker, one of Israel’s leading international law experts, was present at these negotiations, which took place in situ at Taba’s Sonesta Hotel.
“At the time the beach there was Israeli,” he recalls, “and nudist. There we were, the Egyptians and us, trying to negotiate seriously, with a colony of naked swimmers sunning themselves right under our noses.”
Eventually the Egyptians declared themselves unable to concentrate, and the talks moved to Cairo and Tel Aviv. Israel gave up the stretch of beach, of course, and the hotel; the nudists presumably migrated to other shores.
Baker recounted some of his negotiating experiences last week to a group of over 50 law students from around the world who gathered in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Law Faculty for Project SCIL (Student Conference on International Law): Where Theory Meets Practice.
This four-day experience, organized by the university’s StandWithUs Fellowship Program and endorsed by the National Union of Israeli Students, aimed to build a strong network with future leaders of the international legal arena. In addition, organizers hoped the event would promote peace in the Middle East by educating people about Israel and defusing misinformation that often clouds contentious issues in the area.
The crammed program included a visit to the Supreme Court and a meeting with one of its judges, ex-attorney-general Elyakim Rubinstein, as well as a tour of Jerusalem’s Old City and a visit to the “Night Spectacular” at the Tower of David.
Participants met with an impressive cross-section of the country’s legal experts, including retired Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar; Miri Eisen, who served as the prime minister’s international media adviser; Eitan Diamond of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Israel; Lt.- Col. David Benjamin, legal adviser to the IDF; and Ambassador Arthur Lenk of the Foreign Ministry. Prof. Yuval Shany of the Hebrew University discussed balancing human rights with security needs, while Military Advocate- General Capt. Nimrod Karin spoke on lawfare and the current dilemmas in the laws of war.
International law raises a whole host of issues in the Middle East. Is a country at peace with another country unless they are at war? Israeli and Iranian soldiers are not targeting each other today; are the countries therefore at peace, despite Iranian leaders’ continual call for Israel’s destruction? And Pakistan? That country has no diplomatic relations with Israel, consistently votes against it in the UN and supports terrorism; does this put Israel and Pakistan in a state of war?
There is the question of human shields, and the issue of aerial bombardments and collateral damage. Is “collateral damage” more acceptable if NATO is responsible, rather than the IDF?
Then there is the thorny issue of semantics. When UN Resolution 242, the supposed cornerstone of peace in the Middle East, calls for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories,” does this mean “the territories,” or “all the territories,” or “some of the territories”? And what constitutes a “refugee” in international law? If they receive aid from UNRWA, the UN agency set up to aid Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948, does this not technically abrogate their right to be classed as refugees?
These are just some of the questions with which SCIL participants grappled this week as they gained new insights into the complexities of our region.
Ehud Ya'ari, an experienced journalist and commentator on Middle Eastern issues, opened the conference with an introductory overview of the conflict and the history of partition plans. Each proposal to divide up the land since 1936, he told SCIL, has been consistently rejected by Arab parties.
Ya’ari, who has been covering the various peace initiatives for many years, recounted how his Australian wife used to call him up during the second intifada, when bombs were going off all over Israel, to ask if it was safe to go to the supermarket. “She thought that as I was an expert on the conflict, I would know where the next suicide bomber was going to explode.”
Unfortunately, he admitted, he couldn’t help her with that. But he does claim to know what the final parameters of a peace process will look like.
“Everyone understands that it will include a land swap of around 4 percent, financial compensation for refugees and some kind of international authority over Holy Places,” he said. According to Ya’ari, the question is not what the deal will look like, but whether the Palestinians will ever really want the deal to happen. At this moment, he concluded, he is not sure they will ever agree to compromise.
For the law students from 24 countries, these presentations were riveting. Suddenly the academic issues that they had learned about in campus forums back home became real and compelling.
Ali Turkovic from Bosnia found it easy to relate to national conflict, having grown up in a nation riven by strife. But that’s not the only similarity he discovered between his homeland and Israel.
“Sarajevo is called the Second Jerusalem,” he explained, “as there are synagogues and mosques and churches in very close proximity there, too.”
Dana Contac, who came to the conference with four other Romanian students, said that since facing the complexities here, she now hoped to do her legal dissertation on the Middle East. Jinesh Lalwani from Singapore, meanwhile, was impressed by the calm, good energy of the Holy City, despite the foreign news reports of violence.
And then there’s the new mantra that students of international law can’t help hearing these days: that Israel is an apartheid state.
Daniel Els from South Africa was interested in gaining a firsthand understanding of the background for this controversial claim, often voiced today in his homeland.
“There is a stigma attached to Israel by some people in South Africa,” he admitted, “although there are differences of opinion. I wanted to see the facts for myself.”
Law Prof. Avi Bell of Bar-Ilan University posits that the world judges the Holy Land by different standards.
“Tell me what you know about Goa,” he challenged his audience. “What do you think of when you think of India?”
Goa evokes visions of sandy beaches full of tanned, long-limbed beauties who soak up the sun by day and dance under a full moon at night. Mind-altering drugs, perhaps. Trance parties. Not many people remember that India invaded Goa in 1961 and captured it from the Portuguese; Indian citizens can now freely move to live there.
“But one of the legal arguments against Israeli settlements is that when land is taken in armed conflict, countries can’t transfer parts of their populations into the occupied territory,” claims Bell. So where is the international outcry against India’s occupation of Goa? And where are the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Western Sahara, captured by Morocco – why did the International Court of Justice refuse to condemn that invasion? East Timor and Quebec – there are other “occupations.” Why, he asked, is Israel always the country in the dock?
Tal Dror, a 25-year-old international relations student and coordinator of the SCIL conference, says that raising these issues is exactly what StandWith- Us is about.
“The organization was formed in 2001 by activist leaders (including present CEO Roz Rothstein and President Esther Renzer) to run educational programs and counter misinformation about Israel,” he explains. “This is what we are doing here in Jerusalem.”
For the last five years, StandWithUs has run fellowship programs on six campuses in Israel with 150 fellows participating each year; their alumni network boasts 700 members. Alumni activities include speaking missions abroad, like the “Israeli Soldiers Speak Out” program, in which soldiers are given the tools and the opportunity to share their army service experiences and shatter misconceptions about the IDF and Israel.
The group also trains fellows to become full-time shlichim (emissaries) abroad, and brings over 5,000 international students to Israel each year, as well as running educational conferences abroad.
The SCIL participants paid their own air fare, but the organizers here raised NIS 150,000 to cover all the other expenses.
“We were determined to be very organized down to the last detail,” notes Sidelle Peled, a 24-year-old student and logistics coordinator. “From rooming arrangements and visa applications down to the T-shirt size of each person, we carefully considered everything.”
SCIL Jerusalem participants also found themselves in the thick of practical political debates that could shape the future of the Middle East.
In a debate on “Self-determination: On the Way to Palestinian Statehood,” for example, Prof. Robbie Sabel of the Hebrew University’s Law Faculty claimed that Israel and the Palestinians have to negotiate borders; simply declaring a state at the UN in September is not going to work. Professor of political science and international relations at Al-Quds University Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi, however, disagreed.
“Borders have become less important in the age of globalization; borders are permeable today,” he maintained.
Baker, meanwhile, shared his experience of studying the rights of prisoners of war while sitting in an outpost during the Yom Kippur War.
“We were being bombarded by the Egyptians,” he recalled, “and everyone in my bunker was sure we were going to be captured. Suddenly every soldier was tremendously interested in international law!”
The SCIL Jerusalem conference will likely not ensure that Israeli soldiers no longer find themselves under attack, or that the parties to the conflict spontaneously work together to resolve it. The organizers hope, however, that conferences like this one will provide a fuller understanding of Israel’s position and lead to a more balanced view of the Middle East by future players in the international arena.
The writer is a lecturer in English Literature at Beit Berl and IDC in Herzliya. She has just published her first novel about Israel and the media, For the Love of God and Virgins.