The right context - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
►http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/the-right-context-1.397580
In the past, we human-rights litigators tended to cite progressive rulings by Western countries’ national courts when we argued before Israel’s Supreme Court. Lately, we have been finding that the most effective comparisons are to Western nations during their darker days. Even during segregation and apartheid, these countries’ national courts sometimes succeeded in defending human rights. For example, to challenge the new anti-boycott law, which prohibits publicly promoting boycotts of Israeli institutions and settlements, a good comparison would be to the U.S. during segregation, when the Supreme Court defended the freedom of expression of black institutions such as the NAACP when they boycotted racist white companies and state services. In making the case against the Israeli citizenship law, which banned family unification in Israel between Palestinian-Israeli citizens and their Palestinian spouses from the West Bank and Gaza, the best comparison is a landmark decision by a South African court that struck down the apartheid-era policy, which banned family unification between blacks in urban cities. During the Supreme Court hearing on the Nakba law last month, the state argued that no country would allow some of its citizens to mark its Independence Day as a day of mourning. We responded that not only do many natives in settler countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand still perceive the national Independence Day as a tragedy, but those states have in many cases apologized and recognized their historical injustice, and even fund some of the native populations’ commemorative days.