Rights-Based Community Practice and Academic Activism in a Turbulent World

Putting Theory into Practice in Israel, Palestine and Jordan

Jim Torczyner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000318524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on a theoretical model of coexistence premised on universality, reciprocity and inclusion, this book focusses on the development of academic social work programs and cross-border partnerships to promote social justice and peace in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.

Using the model of rights-based practice initiated by Professor Torczyner in Montreal and brought to the Middle East in the 1990s, it shows how the creation and brokering of cross-border partnerships added the concept of rights-based practice to the lexicon of these countries, established groundbreaking advocacy centers in the hearts of disadvantaged communities, developed academic social work programs, and initiated important policy changes in each country to reduce inequality and promote social inclusion. Showing how this evolving method of rights-based practice rooted in theories of coexistence was uniquely adapted in different contexts and cultures while negotiating complex, volatile political environments, it illustrates how long-term peace can be advanced when like-minded people —irrespective of nationality or religion—find ways to promote common interest and a regional culture where all people share the same rights.

This book will be of interest to all social work students and practitioners interested in community organization and rights-based practice, as well as scholars, policy makers and practitioners of international development, political science, peace studies, Jewish studies, Middle Eastern studies, reconciliation, and conflict resolution.

1
The evolution of an academic activist

This book describes my 25-year experience of engaging core academic institutions in Canada, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine to work side-by-side in a common effort to promote in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods the central idea that all people share the same rights. This process, which evolved without a long-term plan or design, intuitively understood the interconnectedness of reducing inequality within each country and promoting peace between them. To do so in Middle East conflict zones required a respected, neutral convener. That role has been filled by the International Community Action Network (ICAN)¹ at McGill University on the institutional front and by Canada as our base. Moving forward was premised on a fundamental belief that the core values of peace, justice, and equality were shared by and transmitted in each country and culture and that it was possible to attract individuals and leaders who would champion the ideas of rights-based community practice and academic–community partnerships with a combination of passion and imagination that could deliver unique results. How this came about and what was achieved among institutions and people who had no prior relationship with each other and whose history has been replete with violence, fear, and blame is the subject of this book.

This concerns not just practitioners, including those who are interested in rights-based community practice, international development, and the Middle East. It also directly concerns anyone interested in war and peace, economic and social security, coexistence, globalization, and the management of uncertainty, trust, identity, and meaning. It understands the centrality of these concepts and underscores their accessibility in the telling of this story. The book seeks to capture how this evolving method of rights-based practice – rooted in the ultimate pursuit of coexistence, grounded in multidisciplinary theory, and uniquely adapted in different contexts and cultures – negotiated complex, volatile political environments while pushing forward a regional culture that all people share the same rights.

***

During the summer of 1974, I was a young community organizer door-knocking in the melting-pot Montreal neighborhood of Côte-des-Neiges. I had arrived a year earlier from Berkeley as an American, Jewish single father whose high-school French from New York City limited my outreach potential in the mostly francophone city as I launched a rights-based community practice project from my new job as an assistant professor of social work at McGill University. I started in Côte-des-Neiges because it was – and remains – where many of the city’s long-established Jewish community organizations are and where the number of poor Jewish citizens belies the clichés about wealth in a city whose vibrant Jewish heritage produced both the Bronfmans and Leonard Cohen.

One day, as I was door-knocking, I tried a basement apartment in a rundown building that hadn’t answered on previous occasions. This time, someone opened the door; a man who was old, pale, and had an intense, hollow aura about him. His entire apartment – walls, ceilings, and floor – was painted black, and there was very little furniture. As the son of Holocaust survivors, I instinctively glanced and saw the number tattooed on his forearm from a Nazi death camp. He spoke only Polish and Yiddish, so my English and Hebrew were of little use. After reassuring him non-verbally that I was there to help, I wrote my name and phone number on a piece of paper, placed it in his hand, looked directly into his eyes and let him know that I would be there for him.

Three weeks later, I got a call from the police, who’d found my number. They said that, about once a month, they’d find him in the middle of the night out in the street, stark naked and screaming.

“And, what do you do?” I asked.

“We bring him to the station or the hospital.”

“And then what?”

“We pick him up the next time.”

I went back to this man’s apartment with David Rome, a historian and archivist from the Canadian Jewish Congress, who spoke both Polish and Yiddish. Haltingly, the man shared his story. He had been liberated from the Treblinka concentration camp, where he was to be murdered by the Nazis on a date they had informed him of. His bunkmates had carved out an opening in the side of a wall that he could barely squeeze into and hid him inside. He would stand in that small space all day. He couldn’t eat, speak, move, or go to the bathroom. At night, his comrades let him out. Now, late at night, he would go out into the streets and scream for someone – perhaps the very stars themselves – to hear his pain. Somehow, he landed in Montreal within walking distance of services, synagogues, and community institutions in Côte-des-Neiges, but no one knew of him.

Shortly after he finished his story, there was a knock at the door. A middle-aged black woman handed him some torn clothes to repair and one dollar. He took them and nodded his head, and she left. I knocked on her door. “Excuse me, but do you by any chance speak Polish?” She smiled and said,

I don’t have to speak Polish to feel that man’s pain. As a Black woman, I feel it and it’s deep. And I’ll tell you something. Those clothes weren’t torn. I rip them myself, and then give him a dollar to repair them – he used to be a tailor over there. And you know why I do it? Because every human being has a right to feel he is a part of something.

I was blown away. I had a doctorate in social work from a very respectable American university and this woman – her name was Jasmine Williams – had just lit up my world. She opened my imagination to the possibility that there were other people like her, motivated not by self-interest but by a desire to do the right thing and to find meaning, power, faith, and solidarity in helping others – people who could be organized to advocate on behalf of their neighbors. In one conversation, Jasmine Williams taught me to believe in the unharnessed power of practical altruism – to search out and find people like her in some of the world’s most fraught, preoccupied, and occupied neighborhoods. She was the inspiration for the model of rights-based practice I developed first in Canada at Project Genesis, then adapted to the Middle East with the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building (MMEP).

Jasmine’s simple act of kindness wasn’t based on self-interest. That limited view of human behavior and potential reduces humanity to its lowest common denominator and distorts the very foundations of rights-based practice: reciprocity, altruism, finding joy and meaning in doing what’s right not because one is compelled or obligated to do so. Ideals, morality, and faith are but some of the forces that shape possibilities and contours for coexistence and form the substance of social capital in every community. Trust, solidarity, identity, and the meaning we seek in our lives are more powerful motivations.

Promoting change from a rights perspective begins when people understand that they have rights and can access them. It is rooted in three principles. The first is that all people share the same rights. This is the idea of universality and universal human and social rights. The second concerns reciprocity. We have the right to live in reciprocal relationships with the expectation that all members have the opportunity and possibility to influence each other. The third idea is the right to be included – to be full participants and that as a society we will safeguard the rights and include those individuals unable to exercise their rights on their own.

Jasmine William’s example would reverberate first in Côte-des-Neiges with the establishment of Project Genesis and then in the Middle East – In Israel, in Palestine, and in Jordan. This is the subject matter of this book, and throughout it you will meet many other people imbued with the same passion as Jasmine.

It is always individual people coming together to pursue a shared vision that produces transformational change. This book is really the story of these people – including our graduates; persons of influence in each country; supporters abroad; academics and practitioners; Jews, Christians, and Muslims; ordinary people struggling; and the highest levels of aristocracy who were joined together through a loose association to support this very vision and became its architects.

The kind of people you will get to know in the following chapters include Sami Al-Kilani, a Palestinian poet who was a delegate to the historic Madrid Conference on the Middle East Peace Process and also an Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience who was imprisoned for five years during the first intifada because his poetry was deemed “inciteful.” Upon his release, he founded much of the Palestinian nonviolent activity for independence and reconciliation. He wrote joint scripts for Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street. Sami Al-Kilani – a member of the second fellowship cohort (1998–2000) has impressed me greatly and taught me much. I often quote him: “I will struggle for independence as if Palestine was a true democracy, and I will struggle for Palestine to be a true democracy as if we were an independent country.”

Amal El Sana is a Bedouin feminist from an unrecognized village in Israel and a member of our first fellowship cohort in 1997–98. Amal founded the Arab Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation, which has become a major force representing the Bedouin community through a range of projects and a multi-million-dollar budget. Amal completed her PhD in 2017 and is now the executive director of ICAN. Her journey from herding sheep in the Negev as a girl to becoming an internationally respected social justice activist has captivated scores through her TED talks.

Merav Moshe Grodofsky, who grew up in Long Island, New York, moved to Israel when she was 19, became the coordinator of fieldwork at Ben-Gurion University, and was my partner in implementing the first center in Beersheba under the auspices of BGU. Merav later went on to do an interdisciplinary PhD in social work and law, which I had the pleasure of supervising, focused on the interrelationship of rights-based practice and peace building. Merav became the director of the school of social work at Sapir College in Sderot, where she pioneered three rights-based centers serving underserviced, at-risk communities along the Gaza border.

These are a few of the many people who have stuck together for a quarter century – despite often seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It’s the chemistry among these people and the ideas they brought to the table that generated the ability to think about and take risks with footsteps into the unknown. Prompted by passionate beliefs that we all share the same rights and that there are things that we can do together to advance them – even in war-stricken environments – by focusing on those things that we have in common, on those dreams that we share together, and on our ability to reciprocate with one another. True longstanding partnerships developed because joining together served the interests of each partner. And while all this was unplanned and unexpected, the players and their institutions found ways to dodge, bounce off of, and find their way through and around a variety of unexpected political, economic, and social events that reshaped local communities, the region, and the world.

There are numerous examples everyday – and increasingly so in the age of social media – whereby people in the same neighborhood or across the globe take up causes and identify with the struggle of others in matters from which they derive no personal benefit and in expressions that we share the same rights, the same planet, and the same destiny. When I lived in Berkeley, I learned from the great example of labor activist César Chávez, who had organized and unionized farm-workers in the fields of California. As portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath, farm-workers had endured 100 years of wrenching hardship with no union because of the power of the growers. Chávez worked tirelessly with his base through kitchen meetings in countless dwellings in the fields to develop a movement of committed individuals who, at great personal risk, held steadfast for the dream of equal rights. Chávez’s struggle may not have succeeded had he not had the capacity to galvanize hundreds of student groups, thousands of churches and synagogues, labor movements, and community groups across the United States and abroad to join him by boycotting non-union grapes. Because of the collective power of a symbolic act – not eating grapes – growers were forced for the first time to negotiate with farm workers. We could help symbolically through this boycott, and when hundreds of thousands of people did so without personal gain, it helped farm workers attain recognition, labor rights, safer working conditions, and benefits. And each of us who boycotted grapes enjoyed the opportunity and found satisfaction in explaining to our children how we can make a difference by what we do and the choices we make in the moment.

Rights-based practice invokes this paradigm. We are our brother’s keeper for altruistic reasons but also because it is ultimately in our interests to live in a society that is based on reciprocity, universality, and inclusion. My grandmother, well into her 80s, would often sit on her porch smiling. She had spent the war hiding in a cemetery in Belgium, where she buried her prayer book, published in 1895. I read from it on Yom Kippur. “Why, are you smiling?” I would ask. “Because my neighbors are happy,” she’d reply. “And when they are happy, I can live in peace.”

Rights-based practice works to transform relationships to promote the form of coexistence so naturally explained by my grandmother. On a practical level, it means changing the public discourse, making people aware, finding support from people who are not directly affected, understanding power dynamics and utilizing nonviolent conflict strategies – all as part of a process to promote the three interrelated values of universal rights, reciprocity and inclusion. These values are the core of our practice.

***

The initial idea I had in the early 1990s was to bring the model of rights-based practice that I had developed in Montréal with Project Genesis in 1975 to Israel with the assistance of the Montréal Jewish Federation-Allied Jewish Community Services (AJCS, later renamed Federation CJA Montreal). I have a deep and long involvement with Israel. I grew up in a home that, for generations, was deeply committed to the establishment of a Jewish state. My parents survived the Holocaust. I studied in Jewish schools and learned to speak Hebrew as well as I learned to speak English – and often spoke with my father in Hebrew – despite neither of us having ever lived in Israel. My father first brought me to visit Israel when I was 10, which established a lifelong connection to the people, the land, and the vision of a Jewish state that affords full rights to all people irrespective of religion or background.

I moved to Israel in December 1965 and lived there from ages 20 to 24. My son, Doron, was born in Jerusalem, where I worked for the municipality as a community organizer, working with street gangs and delinquent youth. In Jerusalem, I had the very good fortune of working for and learning from Avner Amiel, considered the father of the most significant social justice movements that arose in Israel between 1965 and 2000. Born in Jerusalem and of Moroccan descent, Avner spent the Israeli War of Independence in a British prison at Latrun, where he was strongly influenced by the writings of Gandhi. Avner rose to head the Jerusalem Department of Community Work, where he worked for 40 years.

Avner’s ideas about working with young offenders and the communities in which they resided were considered revolutionary at the time – ideas that were at the root of a rights-based perspective. Psychopathology was the popular, secular institutional lens of the day in 1965, while the observant saw lack of religious guidance as the root cause of juvenile delinquency. According to these views, clinical family interventions, cultural “enrichment,” and remedial education were the intervention strategies of the day, which were steeped in cultural paternalism about Mizrachi Jews who, along with the indigenous Palestinian population, represented Israel’s underclass.

Avner, however, saw delinquency as an expression of anger against a state that did not provide the Mizrachi poor with equal rights, respect their culture and identity or consult them about their own poverty. In relation to young offenders, Avner affirmed that you cannot ask young people to change if institutions do not change their policies to become more inclusive, responsive and reflective of the minority communities in Israel, especially the Mizrachi or Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Arab lands and who were quickly becoming the majority.

Avner, my mentor, became a key actor in this story as a founding board member and even as a field work supervisor for students launching the first rights-based center in Beersheba. Avner passed away in 2020 at age 92. Avner’s work and mentorship shaped my ongoing commitment to rights-based practice. Rather than referring young offenders to therapy, Avner and I began to challenge government institutions to change policies that discriminated against poor kids and poor communities. We began to organize communities themselves about their social rights – these included demonstrations by the elderly against cutbacks to their health care, challenges to schools that did not admit low-income children, to government employment agencies, which relegated most low-income kids to menial jobs with no security – pushing forward the principle that all people share the same rights.

We were municipal employees – often in violation of municipal policies such as speaking to the press without authorization. At the same time, Avner had a unique ability to frame issues in terms that touched core values and through which he could develop allies outside of the municipal government who were prepared to join in the struggle. It is this ability – surviving inside the establishment by creating broad support outside of it – in low-income communities, in the press, labor unions, academia, and the like – that explains his effectiveness and longevity. Appealing to core values across diverse constituencies became a fundamental strategy in establishing and developing ICAN within the complex bureaucracy o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The evolution of an academic activist
• 2 Dancing between the raindrops: the politics of totally locally owned
• 3 Crossing boundaries
• 4 It’s about relationships: the launching of the McGill Middle East program in Civil Society and Peace Building
• 5 You don’t have to love your neighbor – just accept that you have one: a regional program with Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian partners takes form
• 6 Moving toward the people
• 7 Empowering the marginalized in times of violent conflict
• 8 Advancing peace
• 9 Furthering the vision in practice
• 10 Survival and transformation in the wilderness
• Epilogue
• References
• Appendix 1: A model of rights-based community practice
• Index