political involvement that goes with it. We can identify two great new challenges:
(1) The immense gap between the very poor and the very rich, which never ceases to expand. This is an innovation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The very poor in the world today earn barely $2 a day. We cannot let this gap grow even wider. This alone should arouse our commitment.
(2) Human rights and the state of the planet. After Liberation, I had the opportunity to be involved with drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948, at the Chaillot Palace in Paris . It was in my capacity as the chief of staff for Henri Laugier, assistant secretary general of the UN and secretary of the Commission on Human Rights, that I, with many others, was chosen to participate in drawing up this declaration. I will never forget the role played by Eleanor Roosevelt and by René Cassin, commissioner for justice and education in the Free French government in exile in London and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968, in formulating the declaration. Nor can I forget Pierre Mendиs France, a member of the UN Economic and Social Council, to whom we submitted our text before it went to the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee of the General Assembly. This committee included the fifty-four member states of the UN at that time, and I was its secretary. It is to René Cassin that we owe the term “universal” rights, and not “international,” as proposed by our Anglo-American friends. For the real issue at the end of the Second World War was to free ourselves from the threats that totalitarianism held over mankind’s head, and to do so, the member states of the UN had to commit to respecting universal rights. That is how to forestall the argument for full sovereignty that a state likes to make when it is carrying out crimes against humanity on its soil. That was the case with Hitler, who as master in his own house believed he was allowed to commit genocide. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights owes a lot to the universal revulsion against Nazism, Fascism, totalitarianism-but also, thanks to our presence, to the spirit of the Resistance. I felt that we had to move fast so as not to succumb to the hypocrisy of victors promoting allegiance to values that no one intended to enforce faithfully.
I cannot resist the impulse here to quote Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to a nationality”; and Article 22: “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international cooperation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.” Even if this declaration has only advisory, rather than legal, force, it has nonetheless played a powerful role since 1948. We have seen colonized peoples refer to it in their struggles for independence. It fortified their spirits in the fight for liberty.
I am happy to see that NGOs and social movements such as the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens, the International Federation for Human Rights and Amnesty International have multiplied and become increasingly active in recent decades. It is clear that in order to be effective today, one has to act in a network and be connected in other ways, taking advantage of modern means of communication.
To the young, I say: look around you, you will find things that make you justifiably angry-the treatment of immigrants, illegal aliens and Roma. You will see concrete situations that provoke you to act as a real citizen. Seek and you shall find!
Outrage Over Palestine
Today, my strongest feeling of indignation is over Palestine , both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank . The starting point of my outrage was the appeal launched by courageous Israelis to the Diaspora: you, our older siblings, come and see where our leaders are taking this country and how they are forgetting the fundamental human values of Judaism. I went to Gaza and the West Bank in 2002, then five more times until 2009. It is absolutely imperative to read Richard Goldstone’s report of September 2009 on Gaza, in which this South African judge, himself Jewish, in fact a self-proclaimed Zionist, accuses the Israeli army of having committed “actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity” during its three-week “Operation Cast Lead.” I went to Gaza in 2009 in order to see with my own eyes what the report described. My wife and I were allowed to enter, thanks to our diplomatic passports, but the people accompanying us were not authorized to cross from Israel into the Gaza Strip or the West Bank . We also visited the Palestinian refugee camps established after 1948 by the UN Relief and Works Agency, where more than 3 million Palestinians-the descendants over the past forty years of the 750,000 driven from their homes by Israel, first in 1948-49, then in 1967-await a return that is no longer possible.
As for Gaza , it is an open-air prison for a million and a half Palestinians. In this prison they must organize to survive. Even more than the physical destruction from Operation Cast Lead, such as the destroyed Red Cross hospital, it is the behavior of the Gazans- their patriotism, their love of the ocean and the beach, their constant preoccupation with the well-being of their countless laughing children-that haunts our memories. We were struck by their ingenious way of facing all the shortages imposed on them. We saw them make bricks, since they lacked cement to rebuild the thousands of houses destroyed by the tanks. It was confirmed to us that there were 1,400 people killed on the Palestinian side- including women, children and the elderly-in the course of Operation Cast Lead, compared with only fifty Israeli wounded. I share the South African judge’s conclusions. For Jews themselves to perpetrate war crimes is intolerable. Unfortunately, history gives few examples of people who learn the lessons of their own history.
I am well aware that Hamas, which won the last legislative elections, was unable to avoid the launching of rockets into Israeli villages in response to the situation of isolation and blockade in which the Gazans find themselves. Of course I think that terrorism is unacceptable, but we must recognize that when a country is occupied by infinitely superior military means, the popular reaction cannot be only nonviolent.
Did it serve Hamas’s interests to launch rockets into the town of Sderot ? No. It did not serve their cause, but the gesture can be understood as coming from the exasperation of the Gazans. In this notion of “exasperation,” we have to understand violence as a regrettable consequence of an unacceptable situation. Terrorism, we might say, is a form of exasperation. And exasperation here is a negative term. What is needed is not exasperation but hope. Exasperation is the denial of hope. It is understandable; I would almost say it is natural. Nonetheless, it is not acceptable, because it does not allow people to achieve the results that hope can achieve.
Nonviolence: The Path We Must learn to Follow
I am convinced that the future belongs to nonviolence, to the reconciliation of different cultures. It is along this path that humanity will clear its next hurdle. And here, too, I agree with Sartre: we cannot excuse the terrorists who throw the bombs, but we can understand them. In “The Situation of the Writer in 1947,” Sartre wrote, “I recognize that violence, manifested in any form, is a failure. But it is an inevitable failure because we live in a world of violence; even though it is true that recourse to violence to fight violence risks perpetuating it, it is also true that this is the only way to make violence stop.” To which I would add that nonviolence is a surer way to make it stop. One must not support terrorists, as Sartre did in the name of this principle during the Algerian War, or at the time of the attack on the Israeli athletes committed at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. It doesn’t work, and Sartre himself, at the end of his life, ended by questioning the meaning of terrorism and doubting its justification. To say that “violence doesn’t work” is much more important than to know whether or not to condemn those who have recourse to it. In this notion of “working,” of effectiveness, lies a nonviolent hope. If such a thing as violent hope exists, it is in the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire (“How slow life is/And how violent hope is”), not in the political realm. In March 1980, three weeks before his death, Sartre admitted, “We must try to explain why the world of today, which is horrible, is only one moment in a long historical development, that hope has always been one of the dominant forces of revolutions and insurrections, and how I still feel that hope is my conception of the future.”
We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence- choose the hope of nonviolence. That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: that is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate.
The message of a Nelson Mandela, a Martin Luther King Jr., is just as relevant in a world that has moved beyond victorious totalitarianism and the cold war confrontation of ideologies. Their message is one of hope and faith in modern societies’ ability to move beyond conflict with mutual understanding and a vigilant patience. To reach that point, societies must be based on rights whose violation prompts outrage-no matter who has violated them. There can be no compromising on these rights.
Toward a Peaceful Insurrection
I have noticed-and I am not the only one-the Israeli government’s reaction to the citizens of [the West Bank village of] Bil’in, who protest the wall each Friday by simply marching to it, without throwing rocks or using force. The Israeli authorities have described these marches as “nonviolent terrorism.” Not bad… One would have to be Israeli to describe nonviolence as terrorism, and above all one would have to be embarrassed by how effective it is in gaining the support and understanding of every enemy of oppression in the world.
The Western obsession with productivity has brought the world to a crisis that we can escape only with a radical break from the headlong rush for “more, always more” in the financial realm as well as in science and technology. It is high time that concerns for ethics, justice and sustainability prevail. For we are threatened by the most serious dangers, which have the power
