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Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization

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Summary

Lynn Welchman studies the origins of Al-Haq, the first Palestinian human rights organization — founded in 1979 as Law in the Service of Man (LSM), the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists — and the methodologies it instigated under Israeli occupation and into the early Palestinian Authority years (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.18). Part 1 gives the Foreword, the Introduction and Chapter 1 in full, and Chapter 2 through PDF p.54: the founders’ rule-of-law (not initially human rights) framing, their deliberate nonpartisan distancing from factional PLO politics, the West Bank context of striking and working lawyers, Camp David “administrative autonomy” and “over-control” by Israel, Jordan and the PLO, and the 1977-79 correspondence with the ICJ in Geneva over an Israeli-section “clearance”, a not-for-profit company structure to insulate the organization from both occupation regulation and partisan takeover, and anticipated internal dynamics (PDF p.18-54). Part 2 completes Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 and opens Chapter 4: the ICJ Executive Committee’s approval of affiliation in October 1979, MacDermot’s unattributed courtesy note handed to the PLO representative in Geneva on 19 November 1979, his January 1980 visit and the censorship of the Arabic translation of his UN speech, Shehadeh’s four days of testimony as “M” to the UN Special Committee in May 1980 and MacDermot’s suggestion that it become a book, the departure of most of the original group and the reconstitution of LSM under Shehadeh and Kuttab as codirectors with Shammas as Steering Committee, then the three founders in turn — Shehadeh and The West Bank and the Rule of Law and the Israeli legal establishment’s counter-publication, Kuttab’s US-facing advocacy, documentation philosophy and defence of LSM against the “front organization” charge after the al-Fara’a report, and Shammas’s economics of dependency, MATTIN, the Enforcement Project and the al-Haq database — and the start of Chapter 4 on LSM’s 1980s organization and its 1983 leaflet (PDF p.55-93).

What the file is

Book, University of California Press, Oakland, 2021, in the Luminos open-access programme and the New Directions in Palestinian Studies series (no. 2) (PDF p.2-3, p.6-7). CC BY-NC-ND; DOI https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.102; ISBN 9780520379756 (paperback), 9780520976900 (ebook); LCCN 2020043226 (PDF p.7). 331 PDF pages; printed pagination runs to p.301 (Index) plus front matter. Text copy is clean with === PDF p.N === markers; PDF p.5, 9, 17 and 29 are blank. Dedicated “To Al-Haq” (PDF p.8). As-printed slips byte-verified in the text copy and held, not corrected: “Shehadah” for Shehadeh (PDF p.46) and “pro bona” in a quoted 1978 letter (PDF p.53); Bisharat is quoted with “Indeterminancy” while the narration on the same pages uses “indeterminacy” (PDF p.32-33). In part 2, “Shehadah” is printed again for Shehadeh (PDF p.58, byte-verified), Shehadeh is quoted with “summoud” for sumoud (PDF p.73, byte-verified), the Israeli ambassador is named “Dowek” in narration (PDF p.79) and “Doweik” inside Kuttab’s quoted letter (PDF p.80), and the Abu Jihad assassination is placed in the same sentence as the 1985 bombing of the PLO headquarters in Tunis (PDF p.90).

Section by section

Foreword (PDF p.12-13 / printed p.ix-x)

Beshara Doumani, Series Editor, opens with Mahmoud Darwish in a 1995 interview: Palestinian poetry had become conscious of “passing from Palestine as a topic or an object, to Palestinian as subject” (PDF p.12). The establishment in 1979 of Law in the Service of Man (later Al-Haq) exemplifies that shift in institution building and knowledge production; its founders took a “nonpolitical” stance in defence of the “rule of law” against a settler colonial project, and the organization had outsized local, regional and international influence through innovative self-governance and data collection under foreign military rule (PDF p.12). Its crises after the 1993 Oslo Accords, and the conflicts — political, personal, institutional, ideological — that followed the Palestinian Authority’s failures, are presented as inevitable given a formation straddling third-worldist anticolonial worldviews and a universalist liberal vocabulary of international law and human rights; the book is a prehistory of human rights work that globalizes the Palestinian experience, inspired dozens of similar organizations, and anticipated the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (PDF p.13).

Acknowledgments (PDF p.14-16 / printed p.xi-xiii)

Welchman records the research base: interviews and documents from Al-Haq people past and present, copies from Nidal Taha of the founders’ late-1970s correspondence with the ICJ in Geneva, Raja Shehadeh’s hard copies of his 1980 UN testimony (as “M”), and permission from Shawan Jabarin and the al-Haq board to quote al-Haq archives and internal material, and from the ICJ and Amnesty International to quote their archives (PDF p.14-15). Charles Shammas recruited Welchman to LSM in 1983 (PDF p.14). The book had been lived with since 2009; it is “an attempt at a history, not the history, of al-Haq” (PDF p.16).

Introduction — Writing al-Haq (PDF p.18-20 / printed p.1-3)

The study was invited by Shawan Jabarin, who joined as a field-worker in 1987 and became general director in 2006; Welchman worked intermittently with Al-Haq from 1983 to 1993 and steps into the first person sparingly; the work was not “participant observation” (PDF p.18). It examines the founders, staffers (“al-Haqqers”), the formative first decade and legacy, and the stresses of the first intifada, Oslo and the Palestinian Authority that forced structural change in the 1990s; the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) is the main focus, and the longer history of Palestine is not presented (PDF p.18-19). Sources are memories set next to public and previously unpublished documents, al-Haq’s fading paper archives, ICJ and Amnesty records, Nidal Taha’s 1977-80 correspondence, and interviews (PDF p.19). The most prolific source is cofounder Raja Shehadeh: West Bank and the Rule of Law (1980, with Jonathan Kuttab), al-Haq’s first publication; The Third Way (1982), journal extracts from 1979-80; Strangers in the House (2002); and Palestinian Walks (PDF p.19). Al-Haq’s own anniversary publications (1999, 2005 with Fateh Azzam’s retrospective on the staff-run period and the 1997 crisis, and 2009), its 1983 brochure and its bimonthly Newsletter (May 1984 to end 1987), and internal 1980s documents are also drawn on (PDF p.20).

Introduction — Scholarship: Al-Haq and Human Rights (PDF p.21-23 / printed p.4-6)

Staff and external scholarship is surveyed: Joost Hiltermann, Mouin Rabbani (1994), Lisa Hajjar (2001) — LSM’s central role in reframing political issues in legal language, which “served to politicize law itself”, and human rights framing as resistance that internationalises local conflict — and Lori Allen (2013) on officials acting “as if” human rights matters, alongside the later critiques of professionalization, NGO-ization, donor subordination and legalization that postdate al-Haq’s early years (PDF p.21-22). Against dismissal of human rights, Welchman sets Philip Alston, Makau Mutua (TWAIL) and Anthony Tirado Chase: “human rights are more about processes than ends—processes that can restrain state dominance, empower peoples and social groups, and advance individual and group agency” (PDF p.22-23).

Introduction — Framing the Work (PDF p.23-25 / printed p.6-8)

The founders were practitioners; the rule of law, not human rights, is the focus of their 1977-79 ICJ correspondence (ch. 2) (PDF p.23). Israel as occupying power held a monopoly on the idea of the “rule of law” and presented itself as its epitome; Hajjar argues Israel’s “enthusiasm for law and the ornate legalism of official discourse” catalysed a local human rights movement of legalistic resistance (PDF p.23). The 1977 Sunday Times torture investigation is given as the international flavour: Israel was judged because it “has always made justice, the rule of law and the fair treatment of Arabs central to its claim to nationhood”, concluding “torture has become, on the evidence, an accepted Israeli practice” (PDF p.23). Later frameworks — David Kretzmer’s colonial regime, Settler Colonialism, and Apartheid after John Dugard’s 2007 report — are noted; early al-Haq work already predicted them, Shehadeh in 1985 writing of Israel’s land policy that “thus, colonialism is to be formalized and made permanent in the guise of autonomy” (PDF p.24). The founders situated themselves in the PLO’s 1970s legal world and considered LSM part of the national struggle, yet deliberately distanced themselves from factional PLO politics — “leave your politics at the door” — proposing the rule of law, with human rights a secondary discourse, as the framework for resisting the occupying power (PDF p.24-25).

Introduction — Al-Haq Contributions (PDF p.25-28 / printed p.8-11)

LSM’s not-for-profit company setup was designed to avoid Bisharat’s “over-control” by the occupation authorities and partisan takeover by PLO factions (PDF p.25); its participatory governance, all-staff general meeting as “the highest decision-making body on programme-related matters”, did not survive Oslo’s expansion and tensions (PDF p.25). Its rule-of-law agenda extended inward: the first public law library in the occupied territories and an early “internal” agenda on workers’ and women’s rights (PDF p.25-26). With the ICJ’s right-to-development thinking, the founders stood with the Global South, attending to structure and cause — Israel’s unlawful annexationist agenda — and developed groundbreaking field-research methodology and a database drawn on worldwide (PDF p.26). The founders refrained at first from invoking Self-determination or calling for an end to occupation; the 1987 editorial on twenty years of occupation first reflected sustainedly on “systematic colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza”: “What first looked like a temporary military occupation” “has been transformed into a long-term Israeli effort to colonise the Occupied Territories” (PDF p.26-27). The January 1988 Jerusalem international law conference, the Enforcement Project on third states’ obligation “to ensure respect” for the Fourth Geneva Convention, the 1984 call to refer Road Plan No. 50 to the International Court of Justice, and early documentation of “grave breaches” are named as work that became a staple of later advocacy (PDF p.27).

1 Context — The Occupied Territories, Israel, and the PLO (PDF p.30-33 / printed p.13-16)

The group’s first approach to the ICJ was sent in April 1977, just shy of ten years into the occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza; Jordan retained its West Bank claim till the first intifada, Egypt had administered Gaza until 1967, and the Palestine Liberation Organization — founded by Arab states in 1964, taken over by Fatah under Yasser Arafat after 1967, ousted from Jordan in 1970 (“Black September”) and from Lebanon in 1982 — was headquartered in Beirut and then Tunis until 1994; PLO membership and even raising the Palestinian flag were illegal in the territories (PDF p.30). Shehadeh’s West Bank and the Rule of Law example: Bethlehem University students were convicted by a military court under Military Order No. 101 for T-shirts whose council emblem’s colours were claimed to add up to the Palestinian flag (PDF p.31). After the Arab League’s 1974 recognition of the PLO as “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” and Arafat’s UN address — “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand” — the PLO focused on the territories; pro-PLO candidates swept the 1976 municipal elections except in Bethlehem, and the second National Guidance Committee (1978) was “the first non-clandestine political framework” (PDF p.31-32). Israel declined occupier status, preferred “administered territories”, annexed East Jerusalem and renamed the West Bank Judea and Samaria, while presenting its occupation in the West as “the most benevolent in history” — the image LSM set out to meet (PDF p.32). Bisharat’s “over-control” names subjugation to Israel, Jordan and the PLO at once, with courts of interest to the authorities transferred to military courts or army-headed Objection Committees (PDF p.32-33).

1 — West Bank Legal Profession (PDF p.33-35 / printed p.16-18)

West Bank lawyers as a whole struck from 1967 against the annexation of Jerusalem, the transfer of the Court of Appeal to Ramallah and noncompliance with the Fourth Geneva Convention; appearing would, they thought, legitimize the changes (PDF p.33). The Jordanian Bar Association paid stipends; striking lawyers could practise only before shari’a and Christian community courts, practising lawyers were expelled from or denied the Bar, and Bisharat estimates some 60 percent were striking in the early 1980s, with no strike in Gaza (PDF p.33). In local practitioners’ view the military legal system aims “not to dispense justice, but to further the policy goals of suppressing Palestinian nationalism and facilitating Israeli settlement of the West Bank” (PDF p.34). A striking lawyer told Shehadeh: “All of you lawyers who work here are collaborators. Every move you make is used to consolidate the Israeli occupation” (PDF p.34). Movement was then comparatively unimpeded compared with today’s Wall, checkpoints and Areas A, B and C, but controlled by the ID card system, which Shehadeh in 1980 called the symbol of holders’ humiliation and of exiles’ exclusion (PDF p.34-35). Settler violence was an early LSM monitoring focus; the population was unarmed except the PLO’s military-political branch and collaborators, notably the Village Leagues (PDF p.35).

1 — Camp David (PDF p.35-37 / printed p.18-20)

The Village Leagues followed the 1978 Camp David Accords; Sadat’s November 1977 Knesset visit, Begin’s nonterritorial “administrative autonomy” — “autonomy was to apply not to the land but only to the people who lived on it” — a PLO excluded and Palestinians unconsulted, Egypt’s suspension from the Arab League, and the 1981 civilian administration under Military Order 947, which Shehadeh later called “the most important legal change” and “this was how apartheid was introduced to the Occupied Palestinian Territory” (PDF p.35-36). The Accords were rejected under “No to self-government, yes to the PLO”; the PLO meanwhile built an “institutional infrastructure of resistance” to “out-administer the enemy”, amid “acrimonious competition” among Fatah, the DFLP, the PFLP and the Communists and a “war of the institutions” over Joint Committee (PLO-Jordan) Steadfastness Fund money — the background to LSM’s insistence on nonpartisan positioning (PDF p.36-37).

1 — Human Rights Organizations (PDF p.37-40 / printed p.20-23)

There was no local Palestinian human rights group and no functioning West Bank lawyers’ association; Quaker Peace and Service ran East Jerusalem legal advice, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel did not as a rule deal with the territories, the ICJ’s Israeli section did not challenge Israeli measures there, and the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights under Israel Shahak published abuse information until its 1973 disaffiliation (PDF p.37-38). Internationally, the 1970s breakthrough narratives (Moyn, Eckel), FIDH (1922), Amnesty International (1961; Nobel Peace Prize 1977), the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (1978), Helsinki Watch (1978) and the ICJ (1952) are surveyed; LSM’s founders looked west at first for allies Israel would hear, with sustained Arab and Global South engagement only after the 1993 Vienna meeting (PDF p.38-40).

1 — International Law (PDF p.40-42 / printed p.23-25)

Human rights organizations in the 1970s did not address international humanitarian law; IHL was the ICRC’s and military lawyers’ concern, Israeli journals a main venue, and Yehuda Blum’s Israel Law Review argument that Israel was not bound to apply the Fourth Geneva Convention was central to its annexationist agenda (PDF p.40). The two Human Rights Covenants (in force 1976) share Article 1, “all peoples have the right to self-determination”, kept out of the UDHR and, Chase argues, included in good part due to the Palestinian case; yet the argument that an occupying power is bound by human rights treaty law had not been made, and the founders mostly steered clear of Self-determination, building instead a meticulous rule-of-law picture — at the risk Rabbani named, an “emphasis on micro-violations to the detriment of the bigger picture” (PDF p.41).

1 — Human Rights in the Region (PDF p.42-44 / printed p.25-27)

Unlike Arab counterparts, LSM’s founders did not consciously work for political pluralism or democracy, and were not political activists (PDF p.42). Regional firsts: the Tunisian League of Human Rights (authorized May 1977, the first Arab organization not set up by a political party), Morocco’s AMDH (1979), the Arab Organization for Human Rights (1983) and the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (1985); common drivers included 1967, the decline of Arab nationalism and the 1982 Lebanon invasion (PDF p.42). Human rights was suspect as a Western, Cold War discourse — Batrawi, a Kiev graduate and later al-Haq fieldwork coordinator, recalls the idea “was that it was a new form of colonialism, or imperialism, a western discourse” (PDF p.43). Carter proclaimed human rights the centre of US foreign policy while cosigning Camp David; his later Carter-Menil Prize was awarded jointly in 1989 to Al-Haq and the new Israeli organization B’Tselem (PDF p.43-44).

2 Beginnings — the 1977 letter and the ICJ (PDF p.45-50 / printed p.28-33)

In spring 1977 four Palestinian legal professionals — three lawyers and a judge — wrote to the ICJ in Geneva seeking a West Bank branch: there was no Law Council, Bar or lawyers’ association and no legal research centre; they upheld the rule of law and the Universal Declaration, had “no political affiliations nor would we support or advocate any specific political creed or future”, and needed intellectual and financial means to publish, translate, lecture and report on the administration of justice (PDF p.45-46). The occupation is mentioned only obliquely, as “the unnatural and most difficult conditions we have to operate under” (PDF p.46). Secretary-general Niall MacDermot responded with interest; Shehadeh later wrote “Our timing was impeccable” — “Shehadah” as printed (PDF p.46). The ICJ’s Israeli section, headed by Justice Haim Cohn, had in 1970 protested the ICJ’s 1969 Middle East report as “tendentious and misleading”, defending Israel as a state where every person has free access to courts enforcing “the Rule of Law without fear or favour” and dismissing UN censures as slanderous war propaganda (PDF p.47-48). MacDermot, by contrast, held settlements illegal — “To me the Israeli settlements are the touchstone of Israeli intentions” — and publicly supported Palestinian self-determination and PLO inclusion, pressing a reluctant Executive Committee until the ICJ became “one of the few non-communist NGOs to criticise Israel” (PDF p.48-49). The ICJ’s 1967 CIA-funding scandal through the American Fund for Free Jurists is also given (PDF p.49). MacDermot anticipated the Executive Committee would expect him “to invite the comments of our Israeli Section on your application”; the four replied “we have nothing to gain from such contact”, asking the branch be considered “entirely separate and independent” as they were “legally-speaking in two different countries” (PDF p.50). Cohn welcomed a section of practitioners without “political affiliations” if recognition implied no West Bank state, and offered an informal meeting (PDF p.50).

2 — Clearance, company form and safeguards (PDF p.51-54 / printed p.34-37)

The ICJ pursued a meeting with Cohn — Shehadeh calls it getting “clearance”; MacDermot argued the authorities would consult Cohn anyway (PDF p.51). Charles Shammas and Raja Shehadeh did visit Cohn informally; his verdict to Geneva was “we were okay. But too political”, which Shehadeh assumes rested on their view that settlements violate international law, while Shammas recalls Cohn was completely unaware of the military government’s practices (PDF p.51). On registration, an early 1978 letter set out “three species of corporate entities” — charitable society, cooperative society, limited public company — showing how, for the first two, powers over establishment, operations, committee membership and “each transfer of funds from abroad” were exercised by the delegated Israeli army officer, so permission for problematic societies “is simply withheld indefinitely” (PDF p.51). The company form was proposed as “not subject to the same degree of regulation and control”, with its charter in a contract with a foreign funder making it harder for “local forces” to compromise its independence “without precipitating its closure” (PDF p.52). MacDermot found the scheme “extremely complicated” (PDF p.52). The group’s autumn 1978 five-page reply grounded the framework in restrictions on assembly and association since the occupation (Military Proclamation 101) and a “still vigorous sectarian order” aggravated by the prohibition of organized political activity, which gave “sectarian political overtones to even the most loosely organized pro bona initiative” — “pro bona” as printed (PDF p.52-53). Gaza colleagues preferred their own direct ICJ contacts and a possible unified framework later (PDF p.53). In 1979 Jonathan Kuttab wrote “Good news: We have been officially registered” (PDF p.54). The limited shareholders were deliberate: to “insulate the Company from partisan take-over attempts” by a core group of founders and proven directors, since LSM was not a membership organization — Kuttab: “We wanted to make sure it wouldn’t be factionalized” “so we had to write the by-laws in such a way as to keep people out” (PDF p.54).

2 — Affiliation approved, MacDermot’s visit and censorship (PDF p.55-57 / printed p.38-40)

Regional counterparts faced the same membership-control problem: the LTDH debated a UDHR-based charter members would commit to and acted against branches judged a partisan risk, and an AMDH founder said “We couldn’t let everyone join who wanted to. To remain in control of the work you had to have a pretty tight structure” (PDF p.55). In the West Bank three more lawyers joined the group; eight of the nine signatories were shareholders, only Charles Shammas omitted as holding neither a law degree nor a West Bank or Jerusalem ID card, the company was registered, and in October 1979 Niall MacDermot wrote that the ICJ Executive Committee had approved affiliation (PDF p.55). MacDermot passed the registration documents to the PLO representation in Geneva with an unattributed cover note, handwritten “handed to PLO Representative by NMD 19/11/79”, describing LSM as formed to avoid “some of the more paralysing controls imposed on other forms of association by the occupying authorities”, with an elected Executive Council and three divisions (research, library and documentation; legal reporting; legal aid), and stating “It is intended to ensure that the Company remains non political” (PDF p.55). The note was a courtesy, not a request for approval, and the LSM correspondents were not informed (PDF p.56). In January 1980 MacDermot visited, signed an ICJ-LSM agreement with Nidal Taha, and the ICJ secured private seed funding; he also interviewed Prime Minister Menachem Begin (PDF p.56). Taha’s spring 1980 update reported introducing LSM to the mayors of Nablus and Hebron — Bassam Shaka’a, who months later lost both legs in bombings of West Bank mayors by underground Israeli Jewish groups, and Fahad Qawasme, who was deported along with Muhammad Milhem of Halhul and Shaykh Rajab al-Tamimi — and the failure of lawyers to prevent the deportations in the Israeli High Court (PDF p.56). MacDermot’s UN Commission on Human Rights speech was selectively reported in the Israeli press as favourable to the occupation authorities; LSM translated the full report, and the Israeli military censor refused permission to publish the Arabic translation — apparently the first censorship of LSM material (PDF p.56-57). The ICJ’s June Review entry “Palestine: Torture in the Occupied Territories” corrected the record: MacDermot had said he received no reports of physical torture in the last eighteen months but believed unacceptable psychological pressure was used (PDF p.57).

2 — Shehadeh’s UN testimony and the reconstitution of LSM (PDF p.58-63 / printed p.41-46)

The Review reproduced MacDermot’s reference to “prolonged periods of sleep deprivation, accompanied by prolonged standing or sitting, bound hand and foot and hooded and in complete isolation”, and his urging that Begin lay down permissible and impermissible interrogation methods; the later Landau Commission (1987) instead endorsed “moderate physical pressure” with secret guidelines (PDF p.58). The ICJ’s emphasis on social and economic rights influenced LSM’s thinking on collective rights and the right to development; the CIA-funding story fed West Bank questions about the ICJ in 1980 (PDF p.58). In May 1980 MacDermot sat through Raja Shehadeh’s evidence to the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices; Shehadeh — invited after telling a UN staffer the committee was “doing consequences not causes” — testified anonymously as “M” over four days, in closed session, on land seizure, land law, High Court rulings, amendments to Jordanian law, the judiciary, labour, tax, municipalities and security offences, warning “there is a programme, a full programme, to settle the whole of the West Bank” (PDF p.58-60). His Friday summary set Israel’s façade — a legal system continuing under Jordanian law, run by Arabs, with military tribunals following the Geneva Convention and High Court access “unprecedented” for an occupier — against the reality: judicial appointments taken over, administrative-law litigation removed, appeals reduced from four stages to three, land control, offices vested in the Officer in Charge of the Judiciary who “comes to hold 14 offices”, military courts used where the military had an interest, and Jordanian law changed across administration of justice, natural resources, town planning, expropriation, municipalities, licences, tax, pensions and police, so the law exercised was “entirely different from Jordanian law as it existed on the eve of the Six Day War” (PDF p.60-61). MacDermot told him the testimony would gather dust in Geneva and suggested a book the ICJ would co-publish, reviewing the manuscript line by line (PDF p.62). By publication most of the original group had left, over the reporting of MacDermot’s Begin meeting, CIA-ICJ allegations and the tightening working/striking lawyers fault line; the striking lawyers withdrew, a final meeting voted to dissolve the group, and the three who remained proceeded alone — shares reregistered under Shehadeh and Kuttab as codirectors, with Shammas forming the Steering Committee (PDF p.62-63).

3 Founders — Raja Shehadeh and The West Bank and the Rule of Law (PDF p.64-76 / printed p.47-59)

Chapter 3 considers the three cofounders, quoting documents at length. Shehadeh — AUB English literature, called to the bar in London, stagier in his father’s and uncle’s office — found his role indexing Israeli military orders: “all these changes weren’t random, there was a method to it” (PDF p.64-65). The West Bank and the Rule of Law uses Jordanian law as its frame of reference on Israel’s own declared terms, while emphasising that “the military occupation itself places the greatest limitation on the rule of law”, denying self-determination, representative government and an independent judiciary (PDF p.65). The LSM back-cover blurb omits human rights, deliberately; the method was testing Israel’s normative claims against the facts of its conduct — “rightful resistance” (PDF p.66). Shehadeh: “the main thing was: the rule of law, Israeli violations and correcting the record and not letting the Israelis get away with it” (PDF p.66). Funded by a Kuwaiti donor, translated into five languages, with 500 copies bought by the UN Human Rights Division for the General Assembly, the “dry little book” made understatement an al-Haq hallmark; the Israeli adviser on Arab affairs told Shehadeh they had considered banning it but decided against it because “that would make you a national hero” (PDF p.66). The Jerusalem Post saw its unspoken conclusion — “it is not a better, more just, more humane occupation he is after, but the end of the occupation” (PDF p.67). MacDermot’s preface noted that the territory’s entire legislation was unpublished, the first such case known to the ICJ; Rabbani commented that accusing Israel of repressing Palestinians was one thing, “but to accuse it of doing so illegally quite another”, and a discernible impact was more regular publication of military orders (PDF p.67-70). The Israeli section’s counter-publication, The Rule of Law in the Areas Administered by Israel (1981), carried a foreword by Haim Cohn calling the applicability debate “largely academic”, writing that the voices of resentment and the political agitators had now been joined by reputable legal scholars who had inscribed the motto “Law in the Service of Man” on their banner and won ICJ affiliation as “co-fighters for the Rule of Law”, stating the Shehadeh-Kuttab study “can in no way be accepted as a correct statement either of the facts or of the law”, crediting reserve-duty IDF legal advisers (above all Joel Singer), and concluding that in the history of military occupations throughout the world the Rule of Law had “never been better served and implemented” than by the rights and remedies Israel had made available to residents of the administered territories (PDF p.68-69). The wider dilemma of practising in the occupier’s courts runs through the section: Bisharat’s question whether advocacy legitimated the occupation, Shehadeh’s “nightmare” of providing it “a clean bill of legalistic health”, the deported mayors Qawasme and Milhem allowed back to appeal — Aziz Shehadeh preparing affidavits on the Fourth Geneva Convention and the 1945 Defence (Emergency) Regulations — and the High Court declining to recommend repeal, and the two deportees in Hiltermann’s 1986 al-Haq study who refused to appeal at all (PDF p.70-73). Sfard’s existential-dilemma question for the human rights lawyer is quoted, and Welchman notes al-Haq’s voice is no longer “neutralist” (PDF p.72-73). Shehadeh, decades later: “nothing proved more important in the fight against Israeli expansionist ambitions than our staying put on our land, our summoud” (PDF p.73). Stanley Cohen’s literal, interpretive and implicatory denial frames the response to Kuttab and Shehadeh’s analysis of Military Order 947, whose introduction lists four policies: control of the Arab population; close determination of Palestinian development and inhibition of state-serving institutions through permits; obtaining annexation’s economic benefits (tax, customs cordon, labour bureaus); and facilitating a dominant Jewish civilian presence through “State land” acquisition and settlement structures (PDF p.73-74). Singer defended the civilian administration in print; Shehadeh in 2008 held that with Singer’s help in drafting Oslo, “the apartheid structure established in 1981 became more entrenched” (PDF p.75). Shehadeh’s 1984 Geneva NGO presentation on Road Plan No. 50 — intended “to tie the Jewish settlements to Israel” by avoiding Arab towns — urged governments to seek an ICJ advisory opinion after the High Court approved the plan; LSM did not build the case or mobilise support, the PLO did not respond to the study, and two decades later the ICJ issued its Wall advisory opinion (PDF p.75-76).

3 — Jonathan Kuttab (PDF p.76-83 / printed p.59-66)

Jonathan Kuttab — history degree and JD, New York Bar, Wall Street corporate law to pay off debts — wrote to the Shehadeh office offering service, came late in 1979 as a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer on subsistence wages (“to learn Hebrew, understand Israeli law and work for justice, human rights and international law in the Palestinian community”), and qualified at the Israeli and then West Bank Bars (PDF p.76). His 1985 presentation to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, speaking as Palestinian and as American, named the basic cause as Israel’s annexation and expansion contrary to international law, producing violations from self-determination and due process to land and water seizure, and “a classic de facto apartheid system” of separate structures for Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, contrary also to US interests (PDF p.77-78). Kuttab was an engaging US speaker hosted by church and peace groups, helped set up the Palestinian Center for the Study of Non-Violence, and built LSM’s network and mailing list — including, from the 1982 Strasbourg founding assembly, the HURIDOCS governing Council, LSM’s first contact with the developing Arab human rights movement (PDF p.78). On documentation: “the first line of defense for any oppressive regime is denial”, so documents must reach a credibility that cannot be dismissed (PDF p.79). As Steering Committee member for the Fieldwork Unit, Kuttab defended LSM when its credibility was publicly challenged after the joint LSM-ICJ Torture and Intimidation in the West Bank: The Case of Al-Fara’a Prison: the Israeli ambassador called LSM “a notorious front organization created by local PLO sympathisers”, and Kuttab’s letter to the Foreign Ministry replied that the charge, if proven, would render LSM illegal and members liable to prolonged sentences — contact with a “hostile” organisation under Military Order No. 284 carried up to ten years — stated categorically that LSM was independent and duly registered, admitted only the aim of attracting world attention among the five attributed, and on affidavits committed LSM “to amend, or retract any published material that is proven to be materially inaccurate” (PDF p.79-81). His January 1988 paper “Avenues Open for Defence of Human Rights in the Israeli-Occupied Territories” sets out the method: the “court of public opinion”, whose first factor is “specific, detailed, and accurate documentation”, contrasted with “generalized, exaggerated, and heartfelt but inaccurate descriptions”; al-Haq never put out a “condemnation” (istinkar); appeals must be objective, in universal principles applied “to friend and foe alike” — a universality the founders shared, expecting to work on practices in Palestinian society as well (PDF p.81-82). Hiltermann: al-Haq took Israel at its word and held it to its commitments, “pressing it further and further as it retreated into a growing tangle of self-generated contradictions” (PDF p.82). Kuttab’s correspondence with Cohn over the November 1982 raid on LSM’s Ramallah office — in which first field-worker Ali Jaradat was beaten in the presence of an Amnesty International representative — closed by facing Cohn with the insulation of military irregularities from scrutiny (PDF p.82-83).

3 — Charles Shammas, the database and the Steering Committee (PDF p.83-89 / printed p.66-72)

Charles Shammas, the only nonlawyer, worked most closely on third-party states’ contractual obligations (particularly EU states); the founders “were pragmatists, and law and human rights was a tool to use to reach out” — engaging third states “under normative language that they themselves understood”, making claims on power that led to the enforcement approach; the Enforcement Project took institutional form in 1988 and departed amid controversy in 1992 (PDF p.83-84). His shock was the “culture of dependency”: Brooklyn-born, Yale philosophy of knowledge, years in Lebanon observing the PLO, he arrived in 1976 and set up MATTIN (Centre for Applied Production Development), whose silk lingerie export tested the European Community’s declared commitment to direct export from the occupied territories and documented Israeli obstruction; his pre-intifada Newsletter cover feature framed settlement produce labelled “made in Israel” against the exclusion of West Bank/Gaza goods from the US market in terms of the right to development and non-discrimination (PDF p.84-85). MATTIN drew negative interest from PFLP-associated leftist groupings, hostile Israeli interest, and was eventually forced to close (PDF p.85-86). In London in 1989 Shammas argued defence of human rights, enforcement of IHL and dispute settlement are inextricably intertwined, that twenty-two years of military rule had occasioned systematic violations and undermined the rule of law in the territories and in Israel itself, and that third-party guarantors must demonstrate commitment to enforcing humanitarian law (PDF p.86-87). MATTIN led to his investment in information technology — LSM got a telephone line only in 1984, email followed, and he pioneered the database to bridge institutional governance, established facts and thematic violations; the 1984-85 draft “Whence and Why the al-Haq Database?” rejects a bibliographic system for a structure “readily and cheaply available in the West Bank”, focusing on events as units of analysis to discover patterns al-Haq would act on, usually locally (PDF p.87-88). Nina Atallah took the work over; in 1988 al-Haq joined the HURIDOCS taskforce on standard formats for recording human rights events (PDF p.88). The Steering Committee section: Allen found the three to have “an assertive faith in facts and logic”; they were disparate in personality and focus, volunteers with other full-time occupations, part of the professional elite, nonaffiliated, all from Christian families and educated at least partly abroad, aware of the “class and culture gap” from the majority of Palestinian society; Rabbani observes that until end-1991 al-Haq was governed by only four (later three) individuals from nearly identical backgrounds, including Mona Rishmawi, who joined the Executive Committee that replaced the Steering Committee in 1985 and left in 1990 as al-Haq’s first executive director (PDF p.89).

4 Organization — context and the 1983 leaflet (PDF p.90-93 / printed p.73-76)

Chapter 4 opens: LSM began the 1980s as the only organization in the occupied territories focused on legal and human rights issues, recruited its first paid staff in 1981, and by the end of 1987 was one of the biggest private employers in Ramallah, with secure funding, new offices, a legal advice program and publications in English and Arabic (PDF p.90). Context given: the 1982 Lebanon invasion and Beirut siege, Sabra and Shatila protests, the 1985 bombing of the PLO headquarters in Tunis and the assassination of Abu Jihad in the same passage, regrouping after 1970s deportations, and Rabin’s summer 1985 “Iron Fist” of intensified administrative punishments — Hiltermann’s 1986 deportation study context — following the May 1985 exchange of over a thousand Palestinian prisoners for three Israeli soldiers held by the PFLP-GC (PDF p.90-91). LSM recruited field researchers with community access and confidence as well as legal researchers, expected to engage internal Palestinian processes, and aimed to develop “activists in the field of human rights rather than employees in a human rights organisation” (PDF p.91). The 1983 introductory leaflet presents LSM as “founded in 1980 by a group of West Bank lawyers and other individuals concerned with the legal protection of individual and collective human rights, and with developing and promoting the rule of law in the area” — collective rights invoking self-determination without naming it, and legal aid later realised in the Legal Advice Bureau (February 1985) (PDF p.91-92). Its projects — information, research and documentation, library — confirm Rabbani that legal research “assumed pride of place during al-Haq’s formative period”; the Know Your Rights handbooks by Rishmawi, The Land: Legal Means of Defending It (1982) before The Citizen: Search, Arrest, Military Trial (1983), reflect the causes-before-consequences order (PDF p.92). The Newsletter (May 1984, English and Arabic) announced phasing out “Law in the Service of Man” for “al-Haq”: the Arabic ‘insaan’ means “human being”, translated as “man”, and explanations had become “increasingly unconvincing”; the company registration remained LSM (PDF p.93). The leaflet’s documentation method — affidavits, monitoring and recording “alleged” violations, systematic field investigation on selected practices — and its statement that “LSM’s library is the first public law library in the West Bank” close this part (PDF p.93).

Key passages

  • “Palestinian poetry has, for little less than a decade, become conscious of the necessity of humanizing its themes and passing from Palestine as a topic or an object, to Palestinian as subject” — Darwish, quoted by Doumani (PDF p.12).
  • “human rights are more about processes than ends—processes that can restrain state dominance, empower peoples and social groups, and advance individual and group agency” — Chase, quoted (PDF p.22-23).
  • “What first looked like a temporary military occupation” “has been transformed into a long-term Israeli effort to colonise the Occupied Territories” — al-Haq, 1987 (PDF p.27).
  • “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand” — Arafat, 1974 (PDF p.32).
  • “we have nothing to gain from such contact” — the four founders to the ICJ, on consulting the Israeli section (PDF p.50).
  • “we were okay. But too political” — Cohn’s verdict to Geneva, as described by Shehadeh (PDF p.51).
  • “We couldn’t let everyone join who wanted to. To remain in control of the work you had to have a pretty tight structure” — an AMDH founder, quoted (PDF p.55).
  • “there is a programme, a full programme, to settle the whole of the West Bank” — Shehadeh to the UN Special Committee (PDF p.60).
  • “It cannot in fairness be denied that, in the history of military occupations throughout the world, the Rule of Law has never been better served and implemented than by affording the rights and remedies that Israel has made available to the residents of her administered territories” — Cohn, foreword to the Israeli section’s 1981 counter-publication (PDF p.69).
  • “A classic de facto apartheid system has thus been created, with two separate and differing structures, courts, residences and rights—one for Palestinian Arabs and another for Israeli Jews” — Kuttab to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, 1985 (PDF p.77).
  • “the first line of defense for any oppressive regime is denial” — Kuttab on documentation (PDF p.79).

Evidence the work relies on

  • Al-Haq’s own publications and archives: West Bank and the Rule of Law (1980), The Third Way (1982), the Newsletter (1984-87), anniversary publications (1999, 2005, 2009), internal 1980s documents, and the fading paper archives (PDF p.19-20).
  • The 1977-80 correspondence between the West Bank group and the ICJ in Geneva, from Nidal Taha’s personal archives, quoted at length in Chapter 2, and ICJ and Amnesty International archive documents quoted with permission (PDF p.14-15, p.19, p.45-54).
  • Interviews, meetings and discussions with people who worked at and with LSM/al-Haq in its formative period, and founders’ and staffers’ published accounts — Shehadeh above all, plus Hiltermann and Rabbani — set against external studies by Hajjar (2001) and Allen (2013) (PDF p.19, p.21-22).
  • Contemporary reporting and scholarship cited as presented: the Sunday Times 1977 torture investigation, Bisharat on the West Bank legal profession and “over-control”, Erakat’s Justice for Some (2019) on PLO legal work (PDF p.23, p.32-34).
  • In part 2: the ICJ Executive Committee affiliation documents and MacDermot’s November 1979 PLO cover note, Taha’s spring 1980 letter and the censored Arabic translation, the Review of the ICJ (June 1980), and the UN Special Committee session records of Shehadeh’s May 1980 testimony as “M” (PDF p.55-61).
  • The West Bank and the Rule of Law (1980) and its reception file in al-Haq’s archives (reviews, the Afrique-Asie, Jerusalem Post and Israeli-left notices, the US lawyer’s “sheer nonsense” letter), and the Israeli section’s counter-publication The Rule of Law in the Areas Administered by Israel (1981) with Cohn’s foreword (PDF p.65-70).
  • Kuttab’s 1985 House Foreign Affairs Committee presentation, his letter to the Israeli Foreign Ministry over the al-Fara’a report, his January 1988 “Avenues” paper, and his correspondence with Cohn over the November 1982 office raid; Shammas’s 1989 London symposium presentation and the 1984-85 draft “Whence and Why the al-Haq Database?” (PDF p.77-88).
  • LSM’s 1983 introductory leaflet and the Newsletter (1984-87), including the start-1986 explanation of phasing out the name Law in the Service of Man (PDF p.91-93).

Analysis

Welchman’s method is documentary and testimonial: memories are set next to public and previously unpublished documents from the time, with founders’ self-reflective writing treated as evidence of how the organization explained itself, and narrative caution is explicit — the book is “an attempt at a history, not the history, of al-Haq”, and organizational origin narratives are noted to settle into versions serving current needs (PDF p.16, p.19, p.21-22). The analytical claim in this part is that the rule-of-law frame, not a human rights frame, was the founders’ originating choice: it required a structural focus on cause, answered Israel’s own rule-of-law self-presentation on its own terms, and was paired with a nonpartisan institutional design (company form, limited shareholders, non-affiliation) intended to survive both occupation regulation and factional capture (PDF p.23, p.25, p.51-54). The insider/outsider position — Welchman worked at LSM/al-Haq 1983-93 and was recruited by a founder — is declared rather than concealed, and is the same access that produced the archive base (PDF p.14, p.18). Part 2 shows the method in operation: credibility and accuracy as the organization’s greatest asset — sceptical investigation of allegations, a standing commitment to retract material proven inaccurate, no “condemnation” (istinkar), and understatement — paired with taking Israel’s legal self-presentation at its word (PDF p.79-82). It also records the founders’ deliberate narrowness: a volunteer Steering Committee of three (later four with Rishmawi) men and women from nearly identical class, geographic, educational, confessional and professional backgrounds, aware of the resulting “class and culture gap” (PDF p.89).

People, organizations, places and events

Al-Haq, International Commission of Jurists, Lynn Welchman, Raja Shehadeh, Jonathan Kuttab, Charles Shammas, Shawan Jabarin, Niall MacDermot, Seán MacBride, Haim Cohn, Beshara Doumani, Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine Liberation Organization, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Mona Rishmawi, Joel Singer, George Bisharat, Mouin Rabbani, Nidal Taha, HURIDOCS, MATTIN, Landau Commission, Menachem Begin, Meir Kahane

Concepts

Human Rights, Rule of Law, Self-determination, Settler Colonialism, Apartheid, Sumoud

How it relates to other sources

To be completed in the final part.

Open questions

  • “Shehadah” at PDF p.46 is printed for Shehadeh in the sentence “Shehadah was later to write”; held as printed, not corrected.
  • “pro bona” at PDF p.53, inside the quoted autumn 1978 letter (“pro bona initiative”), is printed where “pro bono” would be expected; held as printed.
  • Bisharat’s quoted passage gives “Indeterminancy” (PDF p.32) while Welchman’s narration on PDF p.32 uses “indeterminacy”; both forms are recorded as they appear.
  • “Shehadah” is printed again for Shehadeh at PDF p.58 (“Shehadah had told him”), byte-verified in the text copy; held as printed, as at PDF p.46.
  • Shehadeh is quoted with “summoud” (PDF p.73) where the concept page and other sources use sumoud/sumud; the double-m spelling is byte-verified and held as printed in the quotation.
  • The Israeli ambassador in the al-Fara’a exchange is spelled “Dowek” in Welchman’s narration and in the opening of Kuttab’s quoted letter (PDF p.79), but “Doweik” later in the same quoted letter (“Ambassador Doweik states”, PDF p.80); both spellings are recorded as they appear, not reconciled.
  • At PDF p.90 the assassination of Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir) is placed in the same sentence as, and immediately following, “In 1985, Israeli planes bombed the PLO headquarters in Tunis”; the dating is recorded as the text gives it and is not reconciled.
  • Shammas is quoted in 1989 with “conquestatorial options” (PDF p.86); held as printed in the quoted symposium presentation.

Coverage

PDF p.1-93 of 331, read in parts 1-2 of 8. Remaining: part 3 PDF p.94-132; part 4 PDF p.133-171; part 5 PDF p.172-210; part 6 PDF p.211-251; part 7 PDF p.252-291; part 8 PDF p.292-331.

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