When Symbols Become Substance

...Rabbi Without Portfolio Another sign is a concerted campaign of public pressure to win recognition being waged by a feisty, 62-year-old, Long Island, New York, Orthodox rabbi, Rubin R. Dobin...

...is well known and respected in those parts of the world where it is used...

...unlike all but one of the others, it is not officially recognized as a member of the Red Cross "family...

...MDA since 1939 has provided relief supplies in more than 48 countries for victims of epidemics, wars, and natural disasters...

...Unlike other groups concerned with human rights, it refrains from inquiring into the reasons for imprisonment and detention, or the causes of civil strife and authoritarian rule...

...But the symbols can be approved only by governments, in the infrequent diplomatic conferences or in the quadrennial International Red Cross Conference (where Red Cross societies and the two central bodies also have votes...

...Rather, it claims that the emblem, reversing the colors of the flag of Switzerland, honors that country's role as the birthplace of the movement...

...Togo...

...But as far as Israel's Society is concerned, therein lies the catch...

...To this day the 25-member committee is entirely Swiss (In fact it was all Gene-vois, hunt Genevois, until after World War I. when a German-speaking Swiss member was elected...

...Dobin asserts repeatedly that he is acting as an individual, representing neither the Israeli government nor any American Jewish organization, including the American Red Magen David for Israel, which raises funds through 75 chapters in the U.S...

...The International Committee is influential and can propose and lobby for changes in the official symbols...

...The third party consists of the national societies, which range from largely-paper organizations to highly complex institutions with large professional staffs and thousands of active volunteers...

...According to the statement of the slim majority, "It was...

...One of the seven sacred "Fundamental Principles" of the International Red Cross is "universality...

...At the 1976 session of the diplomatic conference, the delegations of Canada, West Germany, Nicaragua, and the Philippines attempted to win recognition for Magen David Adorn indirectly through a technical amendment, but Arab and other Third World delegates blocked the move...

...others are known as Red Crescent Societies (some of whose crescents are curved to the left, —Pakistan, Tunisia, and Turkey— others' to the right...

...Whether the split was inadvertant or significant is unclear...

...nonrecognition snarled the ordinarily efficient international system for blood collection in wartime...

...After visits to prisons and internment camps, the International Committee of the Red Cross will give a country a chance to correct inhumane conditions and desist from inhumane practices without public exposure...

...The Red Cross, Red Crescent, Red Lion and Sun, and the Red Shield of David," Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, Vol...

...International Red Cross experts regard Magen David Adorn as one of the best national societies...

...The State Department favors recognition, and the U.S...

...after all, where governments and international legal scholars have failed, why should a relatively obscure individual without diplomatic or legal background succeed...

...Nor are the disabilities entirely hypothetical...

...The Red Cross argued that further multiplicity of symbols would endanger the protective function that the symbol gives war wounded and prisoners: "What we must avert at all costs is the possible confusion between these emblems and the neutral symbol of fraternal and mutual aid in time of war...

...Be it a red cross, black cross, or whatever, the use of any cross would not be acceptable by a Jewish State as an official symbol...

...A year later, as the conference drew to a close, Norway and Libya (sic) co-sponsored a resolution aimed at a new universal symbol, the effect of which would be to open the way to MDA admission...

...in the 1970's alone, it sent relief shipments to Nigeria...

...Red Cross should be able to take a decision on its own symbol without reference to governments...

...The conference gives ample opportunity for opposition by the Soviet Union and Arab States...

...It is just this kind of duplicity, deviousness, and 'half-facts' that disturbs us so much...

...The ICRC, the original body established in Geneva in 1863, is the drafter and monitor of international humanitarian law, which consists of those pillars of the laws of warfare, the four Geneva Conventions (and their 400 articles), to which most countries are signatories...

...The Red Shield of David, while recognizing that this emblem, which is several thousand years old...

...But little support has come from the American Christian community, according to Dobin, except from fundamentalist groups...

...While Syria and the Soviet Union (and Switzerland...

...The next International Red Cross Conference before which a proposal for a change could be presented is scheduled for October in Bucharest...

...a 19th century Swiss businessman, was himself an advocate of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine...

...Israel signed the Geneva Convention in 1949, with the reservation that it could adopt neither the cross, the crescent, nor the lion and sun in place of the red shield of David...

...Since Israel expressed a reservation on the three-symbol rule when it signed the Geneva Convention in 1949, and it was not challenged, the League of Red Cross Societies presumably has no grounds on which to deny MDA's recognition...

...Henry Dunant...

...At the First Zionist Congress in 1897 Theodor Herzl called him "a Christian Zionist...

...His campaign is proceeding along classical lines: pamphleteering, use of the media, petitions, writing campaigns, enlistment of prestigious figures, resolutions by state legislatures, and appeals to other organizations...

...But the position of the ICRC was and is that symbols should not proliferate beyond these three...

...Since the triumph of Communism on the Chinese mainland the ICRC has recognized only the Red Cross of the People's Republic, not the Red Cross on Taiwan...

...Dobin, who is also associated with the American Action Committee for Israeli POWs and MI As, has traveled to several European countries to press the MDA cause...

...The resolution failed to gain a two-thirds majority, but it saw a break in the monolithic opposition...

...The failure to recognize Magen David Adorn, an issue since 1949...

...David Forsythe, Humanitarian Politics: The International Committee of the Red Cross...

...Allegations of torture by Israeli military authorities have also been made and investigated not only by the Red Cross but also by Amnesty International...

...The quality of their work is also diverse and unpredictable...

...And MDA has contributed generously to Red Cross disaster relief campaigns throughout the world...

...In the meantime, the issue was raised independently, in a major three-year study of the International Red Cross sponsored by the Red Cross but conducted by an independent international staff...

...Israel has defended some practices as military and security necessities, pointed out that the number of Arabs refused residence in the territories is small, and insisted that all detainees have been humanely treated...

...Shabtai Rosenne, Israel's Ambassador to International Organizations in Geneva, has done an exhaustive analysis of the recognition issue...

...But the Committee felt unable to accept this de facto situation, owing to the risk of establishing a new precedent and rendering the desired unification still more difficult...

...including delegates who mqy be resident at trouble spots for periods ranging from weeks to years...

...the Red Shield of David Society...

...Individual national Red Cross societies also conduct a delicatessen of peacetime functions, some of which, depending on the country, are vital, (e.g., blood collection), others trivial (anachronistic health services that bear almost no relation to need in some of the world's poorest countries...

...Attempts to place the issue before various Red Cross meetings over the next two decades failed, and the deadlock continued, little known in the Jewish community...

...And along with these pragmatic disabilities, nonrecognition of the MDA is yet another symbolic affront to Israel...

...the Indians would prefer the red locust, for example, and Thailand the red flame...

...is now emerging from the corners of scholarly journals, abstruse discussions among international legal scholars, and hushed diplomatic interchanges, into the consciousness of the wider Jewish public...

...The Red Cross, then, is a principal actor in the worldwide human rights effort "industry," which is expanding with the growth of authoritarian regimes, anticolonial and secessionist movements, international terrorism, and the Carter Administration's boldly stated intent to exert moral leadership in this realm...

...However, the Committee cooperates quietly and informally with such vocal organizations as Amnesty International...

...Nicaragua, Italy, Ethiopia...

...This argument was countered by non-Israelis as well as the Israeli representative, and it is interesting to note among them the French, who declared: "Unity [of the emblem] should not be attained at the cost of legitimate national or religious pride...

...Turkish Cypriotes...

...ICRC reports reproached all parties for mistreatment and lack of access to POWs, but whether private protests were made to the Syrian government is not known...

...Chile, Haiti, the Philippines...

...Of the recognized National Societies in 124 countries, the majority use the original emblem of the red cross...

...Dobin was genuinely impressed by the fact that ICRC officials had him to lunch at Geneva's only kosher restaurant, and that they (including Alexandre Hay, the ICRC President) spent long hours with him...

...But others, including Egypt, followed the lead of Turkey...

...The chairman of one of these, Christians for Israel, in San Antonio, Texas, wrote, "We understand the stigma attached to the 'cross' by [the Jews...

...Israel sends its army into the field without the security afforded other sovereign nations...

...In the wars of the 1960's and 1970's, MDA cooperated with the Committee in establishing communications between families in Israel and the Arab countries which refuse to maintain postal communication with Israel...

...They have competed and occasionally contended with one another, and in fact their relations are governed much as those between sovereign nations, by a written agreement...

...the League of Red Cross Societies, and officially recognized national societies the world over...

...Sharply worded ICRC protests, however, may well have been an effort to assuage Arab sensibilities so that it could continue to work throughout the Middle East, by avoiding any impression of collusion with Israel...

...In one country or another, Red Cross services include first aid, kindergartens, holiday camps for the elderly, home visiting services, help to immigrants in finding jobs, rehabilitation homes for prostitutes, and reforestation projects...

...For example, the head of the West German Red Cross recently delivered a detailed blueprint for recognition of the Magen David Adorn which, while termed legally faulty by the ICRC, is said to have hit Geneva "like a bombshell...

...That judgment would be strengthened immeasurably if somehow Magen David Adorn were recognized and admitted to full membership in the Red Cross family...

...Identification of Israeli POWs, shipment of packages to them, and prisoner exchanges must be conducted through third parties instead of directly with the recognized Red Crescent Society of an enemy country...

...In many respects the ICRC is a private diplomatic service, but because of its rigorous neutrality, it has potent persuasive power—greater than the remonstrances of individual countries, which are always suspect on grounds of national self-interest, or of many other international organizations...

...Nonetheless, ICRC inspections have improved the welfare of innumerable political prisoners...

...Professor Yoram Dinstein, of Tel Aviv University, an international legal expert and chairman of Amnesty International in Israel, claims that under international law, Israel could have tried and executed the thousands of guerrillas it has captured in the Six-Day War...

...Also outside the pale is the Red Cross Society of Cyprus, on the grounds that it denies membership to a group of its nationals...

...The American Red Cross supports recognition, and Emanuel Celler, National Chairman of American Red Magen David, has written that the American Red Cross "made every earnest effort to have [Magen David Adorn] recognized as one of the Red Cross Societies...

...In his final report in 1975, Donald D. Tansley, a high-ranking Canadian civil servant who directed the study, declared, "To the outsider, whether viewing it from a humanitarian viewpoint or from a viewpoint of logic, the present situation seems ridiculous...

...Of all the international organizations that have had anything to do with the Middle East conflict, starting with the UN and ending with the World Health Organization, the only one which has maintained a modicum of neutrality, with a few exceptions here and there— nobody is perfect—is the ICRC," says Dinstein...

...But what may in the end resolve the issue indirectly is the ICRC's worry that the red cross itself may have to yield to another symbol altogether...

...in a technical sense, be violating international law...

...That provision holds that if there is no opposition to a reservation expressed by a country when it signs a treaty, the signatory's view becomes acceptable to the others...

...MDA has sent teams to African countries to give first aid training, and...

...When gas warfare was used in the civil war in Yemen in the 1960's, for example, the ICRC called upon all the belligerents to refrain from the practice, but it did not name the guilty party...

...It supplied ambulances and stretcher bearers for wounded Arab POWs when they were repatriated and medical services, ambulances, and food for returning Arab refugees, and helped equip Arab hospitals in territories under Israeli control...

...which is based on considerations closely resembling those which inspired the very legitimate exceptions previously granted...

...Some of their operations dovetail, but they are staffed separately and located in separate buildings two miles apart in Geneva...

...If Israel has bristled at ICRC criticism in the Middle East from time to time, the prevailing impression is that Israel regards the Red Cross positively...

...Of the MDA's work in the exchange of prisoners of war following the Yom Kippur War, the International Red Cross delegation said, "The excellent collaboration between us in furthering humanitarian causes has once again been proven...

...However, proposals for a universal symbol have been turned down on each occasion they have been advanced...

...Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Fall 1977...

...With Israel's independence, the red shield of David became the official emblem of all Israeli medical services, military and civilian, and Israel designated Magen David Adorn as the national voluntary aid society under the Geneva Conventions...

...The public perceives the Red Cross mainly as a provider of relief in time of disaster, ranging from floods to earthquakes to wars...

...Nobody is Perfect" Since World War II, Israel's relations with the ICRC have been largely satisfactory...

...It has a staff of some 400...

...Ambulances and hospitals marked with the Red Shield of David have not been fired upon by enemy forces, medical personnel bearing MDA armbands are treated as noncom-batants, and captured Israeli solRichard Magat, an editor, was on the staff of a major study of the International Red Cross in 1975...

...you disclaim responsibility for not recognizing the Israeli Society...

...Niger...

...The ICRC has issued sharp rebukes to Israel for destroying civilian homes on the West Bank, for expelling some Arabs from territory seized during the Six-Day War, and for certain interrogation and detention practices...

...In fact, Israel points out, it has abolished capital punishment in territory where it had existed under Jordanian rule...

...National societies operate in countries as ideologically different as Chile and China...

...Relief and Diplomacy Behind the MDA recognition issue are three institutions which bear a loose but complex relationship to one another: the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC...

...Cameroon...

...Yet adroit legal or parliamentary maneuvers do not necessarily carry the day...

...Closer to home, the claim of a Palestinian Red Crescent society was rejected because the Palestinians had established neither a state nor a government in exile...

...in a professional sense, extremely competent while some West European societies are feeble...

...He is co-author of Community Control and the Urban School...

...But Red Cross principles were dealt a blow in the Yom Kippur War when Syria shot large numbers of prisoners of war...

...At the same time, the ICRC's legal authorities have in the last few months published scholarly articles on the emblem issue—a sign at least that the issue is very much on the Committee's mind and possibly that an initiative toward change may be in the making...

...The Tansley report says, "the Red Cross movement itself has largely avoided the problem by hiding behind the shelter of governments...

...MDA is willing to use a neutral, non-religious symbol if the red star of David is unacceptable, so long as all other symbols are surrendered and all national societies use the new symbol...

...Thus...

...The Kurdish minority in Iraq petitioned three years ago for recognition of a Kurdish national Red Cross society as part of an attempt to create a new Kurdish state...

...In any event, the diplomatic conference's main business lay elsewhere—in the extraordinarily difficult and controversial tasks of extending the Geneva Conventions (in the form of some 200 new articles) to provide protection and relief in civil wars, enlarging protection of civilian populations (by curbing strategic bombing, for example), and widening the definition of prisoners of war...

...We cannot know until the issue is forced...

...As a solution, the report suggested using the red cross along with the symbol of each National Society...

...Indeed, a regional grouping of Arab Red Crescent and Red Cross societies, whose establishment a few years ago dismayed the good fathers in Geneva, has already passed resolutions denouncing Israel and Zionism...

...The lack of agreement on a common symbol suggests disunity, lack of universality, lack of equality...

...opposed the move, many African countries and some Arab states abstained, and a few Third World countries actually voted in favor...

...It suggests partiality against other religious-cultural groups and against Israel...

...The Catch To take the Red Cross at its word, the only obstacle to recognition of the Magen David Adorn has been the Israeli organization's insistence on using the red shield of David as its emblem...

...In addition to its extensive domestic work...

...Amnesty criticized Israel, but Professor Dinstein attributes this to the fact that "we live in the era of symmetry of justice...

...With the financial support of the West German Red Cross, Magen David Adorn runs a program of physical rehabilitation for hundreds of Arab invalids from the Gaza Strip and Sinai...

...The issue surfaced acutely (though not for the first time) during the Lebanese civil war, when Moslem and Christian forces fired on ambulances marked by each other's red emblems...

...But the ICRC also provided diplomatic protection not specified by codified law—to victims of hijackings, refugees, and political prisoners, for example...

...Cambodia...

...Were this to be adopted, it is likely that other national symbols besides the shield of David would bloom...

...The ICRC ruled negatively...

...Recognition of a national Red Cross society, as Professor David Forsythe of the University of Nebraska, an authority on international humanitarian law, notes, "is frequently part of the game of realpolitik and partisan politics...

...That is, he says, if an inspection team goes to Israel and to Syria, it feels compelled to say that both sides are at fault...

...Tel Aviv...

...Nor is it without paradox...

...There is danger that national emblems, symbolic of belligerence, might take the place of the symbol of charity that must be essentially neutral...

...Among them is Israel's Magen David Adorn (MDA...

...He recalls that the majority of the governments represented on the key committee in the 1949 conference rationalized rejection of the red shield (by a vote of 2221, with seven abstentions) in the interests of unity within the Red Cross movement...

...The situation is not without irony...

...Indeed, if it were to do so governments might well follow in terms of changes in international law...

...The French delegation does not see how it will be possible to refuse an exception...

...excludes Israel In 124 nations throughout the world, voluntary organizations participate in one of the most durable humanitarian movements in history—the Red Cross...

...Among the exceptions was the Israeli recapture of a hijacked Belgian plane that terrorists had landed at Lod Airport in 1972...

...Bangladesh...

...His target is the ICRC, notwithstanding its insistence that the power to change the rules on recognized symbols lies with the diplomatic conference (governments) or with the International Red Cross Conference (123 National Societies along with governments), neither of which is immune to international realpoli-tik with respect to Israel...

...The presence in Israel of the authors and guardians of the Geneva conventions demonstrates Israel's concern with world public opinion and may also serve as reminder to elements in Israel that are seeking to settle in occupied territory that the government respects, and is constrained by, international humanitarian law...

...To qualify for membership in the League of Red Cross Societies, a national society must first be recognized by ICRC...

...But, mirable dictu, the ICRC invited Dobin to Geneva...

...The humanitarian protection function is largely the province of the ICRC...

...eighteen Moslem countries have now adopted the red crescent...

...His campaign occasionally suggests the work of a quixotic zealot...

...Dobin has been at it a little over a year...

...there is the danger that a profusion of signs might weaken the protection afforded to ambulances and wounded soldiers...

...Many non-Christian countries, such as Japan, Korea, and China did not challenge this concept as they signed the Geneva Conventions without reservation...

...But if admission of Magen David Adorn is the cart before the horse of a general Arab-Israeli settlement, even an initiative by the grave Geneva burghers might crumble under the weight of yet another Arab-Third World rebuff to Israel...

...Critics charge that the practice of discretion gives governments a way of deflating foreign criticism by permitting access to political prisoners or other civilian detainees...

...armed forces' most recent handbook for behavior in combat shows the red shield of David along with the red cross, crescent, and lion and sun as symbols whose neutrality must be observed...

...and an acceptance of politics of the very kind that the Red Cross professes to abhor...

...None of these cases is analogous to the Magen David Adom's, but they underscore the likelihood that politics are not far from the root of the matter...

...diers are covered by the Geneva Conventions specifying humane treatment...

...Yet he appears to be making headway...

...Turkey, Roumania, Peru, Indonesia, Nepal, Costa Rica, Colombia, Dahomey, India...

...Strategy on the MDA issue seems to have moved off the visible, political stage, and there are some signs of progress...

...If the ICRC presented a new symbol for the entire movement and it carried, the legal hurdle to Magen David Adom's admission would evaporate...

...During the Sinai Campaign and the Six-Day War, MDA provided mobile clinics for the care of thousands of Arab prisoners of war and provided them food, clothing, and sports equipment...

...For several months he corresponded with the Committee, not always with kid gloves (e.g., to the deputy director of the Committee's department of principles and law...

...The Magen David Adorn Society had been established in Palestine in 1930, but no issue of membership in the International Red Cross arose because recognition by a government is one of the ten conditions to international recognition as a National Society...

...The League of Red Cross Societies is an association of the national societies, created largely under American impetus following World War 1. The League and the ICRC are cousins, but not quite on intimate terms...

...The ICRC recognized neither the Red Cross of North Korea or that of South Korea during the Korean War, but now recognizes both...

...Third World countries lacked the voting strength they now have, but opposition by Arab, East European, and some West European Catholic countries was enough to win out...

...Furthermore, Israel thus far has enjoyed many of the protections afforded by the International Red Cross system...

...He attributes the overture not only to the trouble he says his campaign is giving the organization but also to its growing discomfort with the issue...

...Cyprus, and Honduras...

...But because MDA is not officially recognized, a country disregarding the symbol during combat would not...

...During the American blood collection effort for Israeli soldiers in the Yom Kippur War...

...5/1975...

...The scope of legal protection expanded over the next century to embrace the tracing of civilians dislocated by war and the protection of individuals caught in civil wars as well as of wounded soldiers and POWs...

...The Committee carries weight because another of its principles is discretion...

...Israel countered that it had not asked the Red Cross to intercede with the terrorists...

...and one country, Iran, has a symbol all to itself, the red lion and sun...

...It suggests partiality in favour of Christian and Muslim peoples and in favour of Iran...

...Dobin, who once led congregations in Newark and Texas but is now retired from the active pulpit, is the international chairman of Operation Recognition, "a worldwide effort for International Red Cross recognition of the Red Star of David," of which Senators Javits and Ribi-coff are national co-chairmen...

...Despite nonrecognition of Magen David Adorn, the Israeli government and the Red Cross movement have worked amicably on many occasions, including the wars since Israel's Independence...

...some Communist-bloc Red Cross societies are...

...known as the International Red Cross...

...Armistice terms were still being negotiated, and it had not yet been admitted to the UN...

...The founder of the Red Cross...

...Because it is neutral and discreet, because so many countries have ratified the Geneva Conventions which undergird its positions, and because it has been at it so long, the ICRC since World War II has had access to 300,000 political detainees in more than half the countries of the world, including some of the most extreme authoritarian regimes...

...The first Geneva Convention, in 1864, established that medical personnel and civilians who came to the aid of wounded soldiers were to be considered neutral...

...The ICRC is engaged in a two-year study of the emblems...

...Further, the Committee position (taken in hindsight, say its critics) holds that the red cross does not represent Christianity...

...It will call public attention to a violation of the Geneva Conventions only when behind-the-scenes efforts have failed and it believes disclosure will be effective...

...The 1949 diplomatic conference was the first major international forum outside the United Nations in which the new State of Israel was represented...

...The Committee accused Israel of using Red Cross negotiators as camouflage and of reneging on a pledge not to use force...

...Its importance goes beyond its services in trying to assure improved internment conditions for captured Israeli soldiers and serving as a tracing service...

...In 1949, as now, the opposition was at least as political as legalistic...

...Some legal scholars say the ICRC could employ a more direct route, recognizing MDA under one of the provisions of the international law on treaties...

...solely to avoid creating fresh obstacles to the adoption of a single emblem, that the Committee refused to recognize new symbols, such as...

...meaning that its work transcends national, political, and sectarian interests...