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del.icio.us Digg It!  new 'Things are far worse in Algeria' By Aryeh Dayan Tags: Amnesty International, Israel  In the past five years in her current position, Donatella Rovera has become closely acquainted with Israelis and Palestinians. Rovera is the principal researcher for Amnesty International in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and her job is, as she says, "to gather information about human rights violations on the part of the armed forces of Israel, the PA security mechanisms and the armed groups operating in the territory of the PA and the occupied territories." In speaking of armed groups, she makes a point of noting that she also includes "acts carried out against Israel and against Israelis, as well as acts carried out in the struggles between the groups." The reports Amnesty publishes every few months about what is happening in the region, which are generally accorded a great deal of international publicity, are based, in large part, on the information she herself gathers. Her permanent place of work is in Amnesty's London offices but she visits Israel and the territories frequently, often three or four times a year. This week she made one of her visits, which included a trip around the West Bank and in Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. For the most part, her visits last for two to three weeks and during the course of them she meets with victims of human rights violations (nearly all Palestinians), with human rights activists and with state officials from both sides. Through her work, she has acquired quite a profound understanding of public opinion on both sides of the Green Line (pre-1967 Six-Day War border) and with the behavior of the various leaderships in the region (Israeli and Palestinian, civilian and military, Hamas and Fatah). The Israeli leadership, she says, ignores her organization almost entirely. Advertisement The employees of the department for international organizations at the Foreign Ministry treat her courteously and grant her technical requests for things like visas and transit permits at barriers, but "at the level of the decision-makers, both in the government and in the army, no one is prepared to meet with me and no one replies to my questions on matters of any significance," she says. On the Palestinian side, the situation is not different. She says, "Everyone is prepared to meet me and talk to me as much as I want but they, too, do not give me real answers," she says. Amnesty is considered the most important human rights organization in the world but on Sunday, on the eve of International Human Rights Day, Rovera said that she had no illusions about the possibility of changing the attitude toward it from both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. In her opinion, most Israelis will continue to view it as an anti-Israeli organization, even if it publishes more reports like the two it published in recent years - one condemning the Palestinian organizations for the use of suicide terror attacks and the one that condemned Hezbollah for indiscriminately bombarding civilian population centers in the North of Israel. The Palestinians, who in her opinion are a little less rigid in their attitude toward Amnesty, will continue to praise it as long as it publishes reports that condemn Israel, and will condemn the organization when it produces other reports, such as those that reveal violations committed by the Palestinian security forces. She understands (although she does not justify) the Israeli attitude toward Amnesty. "Most Israelis do not read our reports, just as they don't read the reports of B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories)," Rovera says. "They base their anti-Amnesty attitude on short reports in newspapers or on TV that describe in a sentence or two the content of reports that are over 80-100 pages." Such reports, she says, naturally distort both the contents of the report and the organization's position. She believes the Amnesty report detailing the severe damage caused by the separation fence to the Palestinian fabric of life proves this claim. "Israelis who hadn't read the report were surprised to hear that Amnesty is not opposed in principle to the erection of the wall and that the report we published describes only the damages that the route of the wall causes to the Palestinians' lives," she says. "Some of them were surprised because they thought that the wall separated Israel from the territories and they did not know that 80 percent of its route was inside the territories and in fact separated Palestinians from Palestinians." It is this lack of knowledge that, in her opinion, has given rise to some of the hostility toward her organization. "The Israeli public lives in justified fear of suicide attacks," she says. "It justifiably wants to live in security and it supports the building of the wall because it is convinced that this will give it this security. And then all of a sudden it hears a report on TV, or reads two paragraphs in a newspaper, about how Amnesty is opposed to the wall and demands its demolition. When you look at things that way, it's not hard to understand why most Israelis don't have a good opinion of us." Rovera believes that if Israelis knew that Amnesty was opposed only to the route of the wall and that the organization did not oppose building the wall along the Green Line, at least some would change their negative opinion. At the same time, she expresses doubt as to the ability of people on both sides to make nuanced judgments. "In conflict situations, people tend to think only about the effect the conflict has on their own lives," says Rovera. "They are not aware of the fact that the conflict is affecting the lives of the other side in a way that is 10 times worse, or 100 times worse, and if they are aware of this then it is simply not important to them. I'm not arguing that such people are less good than other people. I am just arguing that in the midst of harsh conflicts, each side thinks first about its own security." This is true, she says, of both sides. "Nearly every day I meet Palestinians who complain that Amnesty reports on human rights violations that are carried by the Palestinian security mechanisms, and that we must reduce that activity of hours to deal with the ills of the occupation," she says. "The Palestinians are constantly telling us to deal with the occupation and only the occupation, and I am constantly explaining to them that Amnesty deals with and will continue to deal with every violation of human rights, everywhere and in all circumstances." Less than two months ago, Amnesty published a report that dealt with the bloody infighting in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas forces struck at Fatah activists and their families, and in West Bank towns, where Fatah forces attacked Hamas activists. The Fatah people welcomed the chapters that dealt with Gaza and claimed there was no basis to the chapters that dealt with the West Bank, while the Hamas people said the exact opposite. Nevertheless, Rovera is not claiming to have a balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She does say that Amnesty acts to reveal and deplore any violation of human rights, but also asserts most definitively that most of these violations originate on the Israeli side. One of the organization's recent reports, which was published on the 40th anniversary of the occupation under the heading "Enduring Occupation: Palestinians under Siege in the West Bank," analyzed the contributions of the erection of the separation fence, the roadblocks, the expansion of Jewish settlements and the establishment of outposts, to the destruction of the Palestinian economy and the crumbling of fabric of life in the West Bank; it called upon the international community to pressure Israel to change its policies. "We condemn any killing of civilians, but we do not ignore the fact that the number of Palestinians who have been killed since the start of the intifada comes to 4,000, whereas the number of Israelis killed comes to 1,100," she says. "We also do not ignore the fact that there are many violations of human rights from the Israeli side, which have no Palestinian equivalent. I have not heard of any Israeli who, in order to travel from Zion Square in Jerusalem to Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, has had to pass through three or four Palestinian roadblocks. Nor have I ever heard of a Palestinian bulldozer that has demolished houses in Eilat." Rovera was born in Italy 45 years ago, grew up in France and pursued Middle Eastern studies in Britain. Her father immigrated to Italy from Argentina as a child and her mother is a Gypsy who was born in Italy to immigrant parents from Romania. Her Gypsy roots bear no connection on her human rights work, she says. "Until the age of 13, I didn't even know that my mother was a Gypsy. Up until 15 or 20 years ago, no one in Europe took pride in his Gypsy origins." She is fluent in five languages: Italian, English, Spanish, French and Arabic, and also speaks reasonable Hebrew, which she studied prior to taking up her present position. Before coming into the region, she served as the principal researcher for Amnesty in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia from 1990 to 2000. At that time, a civil war was raging in Algeria, hundreds of political prisoners (considered missing by their families) were being held in the secret prisons in Morocco, and Rovera says she had to deal with a reality more difficult than what is happening here. "In Algeria and Morocco, no local human rights organizations were active and the few lawyers who dealt with such cases were scared and it was impossible to speak to them," she says. "The international interest in what was happening there was very low and did not at all resemble the interest in what happens here. In Algeria, there were acts of slaughter every week with hundreds of people being killed, about which the international press hardly reported at all." She knows that there are Israelis who would consider this additional proof of the claim that the world judges Israel according to different criteria, but Rovera believes there is no reason to complain about this. "This matter goes in both directions," she says. "Israeli violations of human rights get more extensive coverage than similar violations in other places, but terror attacks on Israelis also get more extensive coverage than attacks in Iraq or Afghanistan. Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were taken prisoner and the whole world knows their names. I don't think that this would happen to three soldiers in some other army." Bookmark to del.icio.us Bored with Israel A study shows U.S. Jews don't feel it's important to care about the Holy Land. League of their own The PA's first unit of policewomen direct traffic in the West Bank.   1.   Sorry, Rovera, but Amnesty reports are indeed biased 16:25  |  Joe Sittizen 12/12/07   2.   half a loaf is better then no loaf ? or is it? 17:30  |  victor hardman 12/12/07   3.   I wonder how do you compare human rights violations? 17:46  |  AA 12/12/07   4.   Human Rights violations 18:07  |  Leo 12/12/07   5.   people wake up 19:29  |  N R 12/12/07   6.   Help Palestinians return Home to Egypt(Genesis10-13,14) 19:59  |  sam 12/12/07   7.   No. 1 is spot on, and furthermore... 20:36  |  Michael O. 12/12/07   8.   Amnesty international - Totally biased!! 20:47  |  Dr eric 12/12/07   9.   More hairbrained arguments from Ms. Rovera 21:16  |  Michael O. 12/12/07

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