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Look who's preaching to Israel: Last Wednesday, the U.S. State Department released its annual report on the state of human rights around the world. The chapter devoted to Israel makes the usual detailed and gloomy reading. Washington is critical of all the ills of the occupation, about which the human rights organizations and Israel have long since raised a hue and cry. On the one hand, it will now be hard to claim here that criticism of Israel emanates only from those who hate the country; now even its great friend is pointing a finger of accusation at the administrative detentions (arrest without trial), the mass demolition of houses, the light finger on the trigger, the targeted assassinations, the torture by the Shin Bet security service (which hasn't stopped, according to the report), the deprivation of freedom of movement, the uprooting of trees, and the discrimination against Israel's Arab citizens. From this partial point of view, the report is important.
The other side, however, is that the United States has by its own hand lost its moral right to preach to any country in connection with human rights. To begin with, since 1976, no fewer than 820 people - 35 percent of them blacks - have been executed in the United States. About 43.6 million Americans don't have medical insurance, among them about 8.5 million children. That in itself should stop the U.S. from speaking in the name of justice.
Second, the State Department, which authored the report, represents a state that tramples human rights more than most others. The policeman of the world is naked, especially after Sept. 11, 2001, when security in the United States became - as it is in Israel - a supreme value above all others. In the United States, exactly as in Israel, human rights have become a nuisance, an obstacle to security. According to the organization Human Rights Watch, the United States arrested about 1,000 people after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, crassly violating their legal rights.
A country that is holding 660 Afghan detainees at Guantanamo without trial and depriving them of basic rights is in no position to criticize administrative detentions carried out by other countries. A country that is holding members of the Iraqi political leadership in detention without trial, far from view, is in no position to complain about the conditions of detention in the prisons of other countries. And a country that is maintaining a tough military occupation regime in Iraq doesn't have the right to fulminate against a different occupation regime, however cruel it may be, in the Palestinian territories
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