I recently had occasion to talk with a professor at a well-known human rights center on the subject of Palestine. Although the center claims to derive its mandate from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - a declaration whose very title insists on universal application - I quickly found that the professor's commitment to universality grew less firm when the rights in question belong to Palestinians. Although the Declaration is unequivocal in affirming the right of refugees to return to their homes and reclaim their property, the professor stated that she didn't support this particular right in all cases, specifically NOT in the case of Palestine. When I asked her about the validity of a Jewish state that practiced Apartheid, she told me that she saw the establishment of a Jewish state on Palestinian land as past history, and she didn't see the significance of debating it now. When I asked her what she thought of the ongoing practice of ethnically cleansing Palestinian communities within the Green Line (in what is now called Israel) in areas like the Naqab (Negev) through land confiscation and poisoning crops, she admitted that she knew nothing about it.

This conversation with a human rights professor at an academic institution wouldn't be a cause of great concern if it weren't also fairly typical of the human rights discourse on Palestine in American activist circles. This discourse is generally governed by two rules:

1. The discussion of Palestinian human rights must be strictly limited to the rights of Palestinians after 1967. The human rights of Palestinians before this period must consistently be ignored, denied, or deemed negotiable; and
2. The "Green Line" defines the players, their privileges, their rights, and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of their claims to protection under international human rights law.

These two rules have helped to ensure that the discourse on "human rights" does not serve Palestinians in a struggle to obtain their rights, but rather facilitates the ongoing colonization of their land.

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