In the wake of their historic agreement, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization came in for some unusual praise in the State Department’s annual human rights report released this week.
The report, released Tuesday and covering the year 1993, noted that the Israeli-Palestinian agreement, “when implemented, should fundamentally transform the basic relationship between Palestinians and Israelis.”
Tim Wirth, the State Department counselor, told reporters Tuesday that he saw “progress” on worldwide human rights issues backed by the United States.
“Efforts by Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, by the people of Cambodia and the former Soviet Union, confirm the purpose of our commitment,” Wirth said.
The human rights report is viewed as a barometer of U.S. attitudes toward human rights practices in countries around the world. This year, 193 countries were covered in the report.
As in previous year, the report was critical of some Israeli human rights practices directed against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
It cited “credible reports” that in 1993, among other things Israel mistreated and sometimes tortured Palestinian prisoners, ordered administrative detention, and used questionable undercover units “implicated in possible extra judicial killings.”
“The longstanding U.S. position is that several Israeli practices, such as the transfer of prisoners outside the occupied territories and the demolition or sealing of houses for security offenses as a form of collective punishment, contravene specific provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention,” the report said.
But this year, with Israelis and Palestinians negotiating the implementation of their agreement, the report had some hopeful words about the future.
It noted other “positive human rights developments” in Israel and the territories in addition to the ramifications of the peace accord.
These developments included the Knesset’s decision to eliminate restrictions on PLO membership and Israeli court decisions limiting house demolition orders.
The report also noted that “in 1993 the government began seriously to address imbalance sin resource allocations to the Arab sector, especially in education and infrastructure development.”
However, the report included some sobering facts on the continuing violence in Israel and the territories since the Israeli-Palestinian agreement was signed.
From October through mid-December, six settlers were killed by Palestinians and eight Palestinians were killed by settlers, the report said.
On another controversial issue, the report noted that Israel’s decision last March to close off the West Bank and Gaza from Israel “resulted in restrictions on the numbers of Palestinians able to work in Israel and travel to Jerusalem.”
The closure decision was partially eased later in 1993, the report said.
The report “credible sources” who reported that in 1993, Israeli undercover units disguised as Palestinians killed 27 Palestinians as of late November, a “significant decrease” from the 1992 figure of 45 such deaths.
On the other hand, the report said that a total of 184 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces in 1993, up from 158 in 1992.
At the same time 49 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed by Palestinians in the territories in 1993, as opposed to 23 in 1992, according to the report.
The document also noted that 79 Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians as of mid-December, which represented a lessening trend. The report said that the Israeli government, on the other hand, had a figure of 139 Palestinians killed by other Palestinians.
A total of 9,573 Palestinians were in the custody of the Israeli Defense Force or prison service facilities at the end of 1993, the report said.
In response to a question on Palestinian prisoners, Wirth said Tuesday that the report showed “the beginning of a trend toward the release of political prisoners” in the territories.
He added, however, that “there are many more such prisoners to be released.”
In Syria, a country closely watched by the American Jewish community, the report said that “there was no basic change in the human rights situation in 1993.”
The report said that various Syrian government security services are “responsible for severe human rights violations.”
In noted, however, that Syria had made some gestures including easing the system whereby Syrian Jews seek permits to leave the country.
And it said that beginning in mid-December, the Syrian government had accelerated the rate of issuance of permits to Syrian Jews.
John Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights, called this development “quite positive.”
“We are monitoring that situation very closely to ensure that all Jews who wish to leave Syria are permitted to do so,” Shattuck told reporters Tuesday.
Syria’s small Jewish population and other religious minorities are “largely free to practice their religions,” the report said.
But it also said that Jews “are under more thorough surveillance by the intelligence services than is the general population,” and that Jews were restricted from certain jobs.
The situation facing Jews in turbulent Russia also came in for scrutiny in the report.
The report noted that although “anti-Semitism is no longer condoned by the government,” it continues to exist.
“The authorities at times have been unwilling to take action when anti-Semitic acts are committed,” the report said.
Overall, the report said that Russia had made “significant progress in recent years,” but still had an “uneven” human rights record.
Meanwhile, the report was critical of all sides in the continuing fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but it reserved much of the blame for the Bosnian Serbs.
“In 1993, as in 1992, all national groups were victimized by the conflict, and all sides violated the Geneva conventions,” the report said.
“But the BSA (Bosnian Serb armed militia), with Belgrade’s complicity, launched the Bosnian conflict through its aggressive ethnic cleansing campaign,” the report said.
Many American Jewish groups have been active in the effort to encourage the U.S. government to take stronger actions in Bosnia, because they see parallels between the Serbs’ “Ethnic cleansing” campaign and the Nazi Holocaust.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
