Influenced by the state-sponsored barbarism of the Holocaust, these Jewish activists believed that the nation-state should be supplemented by a system of international, not state-based, human rights. And the United Nations would be the body through which this new world order would be birthed.

“I wanted to work for something which was permanent, of universal importance, and indestructible,” Moses Moskowitz, one of the most dogged of these Jewish internationalists, said in an oral history. “I didn’t believe it will bring the redemption, but I believed that we could not proceed unless this principle [of human rights] was established solidly in an international treaty.”

But the international regime of human rights that Moskowitz and others had imagined, he bitterly reported, “died in the process of being born.” Indeed, the very treaty that founded the United Nations, though its preamble references universal human rights, made it clear that the main fulcrum of world order would remain statehood. Ironically for Jewish internationalists, the most significant thing the United Nations would soon do for the Jews would be to abet the creation of the Jewish nation-state—marginalizing Jewish internationalism and paving the way for a cascade of new states that the Palestinian Authority hopes could now result in one more.

***

In 1939, there were a half million Jews in Palestine but perhaps 20 times that number across Europe, concentrated in the east. It’s no wonder that international Jewish politics focused on Eastern Europe. The Jewish investment in internationalism began in the mid-19th century, and for more than 50 years, wealthy and powerful Jews in Western Europe and the United States focused their energies on trying to support and protect their brethren. While much of the action took place through Jewish philanthropic groups—as Jews tried to support their former shtetlach—elites tinkered with early forms of international organization.

Building on 19th-century precedents, after World War I the new states of Eastern Europe were made subject to minorities treaties. These arrangements were ways of protecting Jewish rights as minorities within nations. Since Jews were protected as a group rather than as individuals, the term “human rights” wasn’t yet used.

But in the midst of World War II, Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Committee revised this strategy. Ignited by President Franklin Roosevelt’s speeches about human rights, like his Four Freedoms address, they began to insist that Jewish concerns were simply a subset of everyone else’s. If the Jews supported international human rights, in other words, they would also promote the interests of their brethren abroad.

Moses Moskowitz was taken by this vision. Born in 1910 in Stryj, Ukraine, scion of a Hasidic dynasty, Moskowitz immigrated with his family as a teenager to New York, where he attended City College and Columbia University, specializing in international affairs. An analyst for the American Jewish Committee before World War II, Moskowitz served in the European theater with the U.S. Army during the war. Later, he played a special role in occupied Germany as chief of political intelligence in Württemberg-Baden.

When he returned to the United States in the spring of 1946, Moskowitz began to work to make the rhetoric of internationalism a reality by representing world Jewry as the United Nations began its life. The U.N. Charter offers so-called consultative status to nongovernmental organizations working with it, so Moskowitz formed the Consultative Council of Jewish Organizations with the assistance of like-minded co-religionists abroad.

Moskowitz’s venture was sponsored by the famous French Jew René Cassin. Cassin—whom Charles de Gaulle asked in the middle of the war to take over the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the oldest global Jewish advocacy organization—also helped author the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hersch Lauterpacht, a Galician Jew-turned-Cambridge don, promoted the cause of human rights in legal thought. Lauterpacht wrote the first—and for a long time best—book on the legal dimensions of human rights. Egon Schwelb, a former city councilman in Prague, became the second in command of human rights in the U.N. Secretariat. After working doggedly for the cause for two decades, Schwelb later retired and taught one of the first courses on human rights in this country. Still another Eastern European Jew, Raphael Lemkin, would almost singlehandedly push the genocide convention through the United Nations at precisely the time Cassin was working on the Universal Declaration and Moskowitz was getting the Consultative Council up and running.

For these men, the nation-state was insufficient as a forum for rights. If the war and the Holocaust had proven anything, it was that some supranational guarantees of rights had to be built; clearly the nation-state couldn’t be relied upon. Others disagreed, believing that this internationalist vision had been overtaken by events—especially when it came to the cause of Jewish protection. By 1945, the Nazis had decimated Eastern Europe, the homeland that had dominated modern Jewish history and provided the focus of Jewish internationalism. Aside from Jews in former Ottoman lands, the geography of the Jewish people had shifted, and there were no longer Jewish minorities to protect through international machinery.

Which is why few Jews (and non-Jews) paid attention to the attempt by Moskowitz and his fellows to update the old Jewish politics. For most, the goal after the war was to ensure the happy acceptance of Jews in the states that had gone furthest to integrate them: Britain, France, and especially the United States. Even more important was another aim: to create a new country to shelter stateless, vulnerable Jews—then and later.

In 1947, as one U.N. committee was putting the finishing touches on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the General Assembly ratified a Jewish state on part of the land of Mandate Palestine. The resolution’s procedures for how a Jewish state would come about were not followed—war broke out instead—but the United Nations certainly played a critical role in Israel’s eventual creation.

In the end, the triumph of statism at the very moment when some hoped a new form of internationalism would be announced is not surprising. In some ways Moskowitz and his fellows were working on an update to an old, perhaps obsolete, project, not a novel one. By the mid-1940s, Jewish internationalism had existed for decades, and the destruction of European Jewry may have actually made its resumption irrelevant. Jewish internationalism had died along with the 6 million murdered. Another Jewish observer, favorable in the 1940s to some forms of Zionism, saw nothing wrong in this development: Human rights, Hannah Arendt maintained in 1951, were now available as “national rights,” which the State of Israel proved.

In this way, the United Nations became a device of an ascendant statism in which the Jews proved to be the vanguard of much of the world. By ratifying the creation of the State of Israel, the United Nations played a crucial role in the reinvention—or was it abandonment?—of earlier Jewish internationalism. But it also set the stage for decolonization.

Obviously, Jewish internationalism wasn’t wholly superannuated, and isn’t even today. For decades, it remained important for Jews behind the Iron Curtain and in former Ottoman lands. But in both cases, postwar history was to resolve matters in favor of statism. The ingathering from both places occurred, and the shift from Eastern Europe and around the Mediterranean basin to Israel and the United States was complete.

***

In a way, this may have been inevitable. Contrary to the intentions of its founders, the United Nations became—in part based on the template of the early examples of Israel and India-Pakistan partition—a device through which empires fell and states rose.

There are very few cases on the specific model of Israel, in which the United Nations helped usher in a state that didn’t already exist. Most peoples moved from empire to nation only through the negotiated departure of imperial powers or force of arms on the ground. The United Nations recognized these new nation-states only after everyone agreed that the states had already come into being. These new states that arose from the ruins of empire transformed the global body where they could—adding many tools for the creation of states beyond the sort of resolution that Israel once got and that the Palestinians now seek.

Jewish internationalists, who had favored the creation of the State of Israel, proved much more nervous about decolonization. They had sidelined their own concerns about the violence of state power when it came to Israel’s founding. Then they watched from the sidelines, scandalized, as the international human-rights regime they cherished was completely redefined, and the United Nations became synonymous with the project of creating postcolonial states.

In the U.N. General Assembly, which the Afro-Asian bloc of newly decolonized powers made into a forum for airing charges of racism and colonialism during the 1960s and 1970s, resolutions abetting oppressed peoples flew fast and furious, even when these peoples’ states hadn’t yet been recognized. In this way, from Algeria in the 1950s to Namibia in the 1980s, the United Nations came to offer rhetorical kindling and symbolic authority to emerging states—indeed, as many would argue, what it is now doing for the Palestinians.

In one of the great ironies of this process, the creation and admission of new states also led to the stigmatization of Israel. Moses Moskowitz devoted his last book, The Roots and Reaches of United Nations Actions and Decisions, to explaining how the United Nations went so awry. By 1980, when the book was published, the denunciation of apartheid and racism had turned to target Israel, notably in the famous General Assembly equation of Zionism and racism in 1975. “The United Nations seems to be more adept at orchestrating tensions than at calming tempers; more adroit at arousing passions and inflaming prejudice than at achieving accommodation; more artful at acting out real or simulated rage than at resolving disputes,” Moskowitz wrote.

In the meantime, of course, Moskowitz’s dream of a human-rights regime has gone much further than he could have imagined. It didn’t happen through the United Nations, but largely thanks to civil-society organizations that hadn’t existed in the 1940s, like Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch, which arose to make sure the United Nations did not retain proprietary control over the cause of human rights.

The events this week surely justify recalling the fateful choice in the 1940s of Jews for the state—through and thanks to the United Nations. Jews helped write the script that stateless peoples of the world have followed ever since, including the Palestinians. By the end of his life, Moskowitz bitterly watched the United Nations become an engine for states rather than for transcending them. But he still paid attention: “Although opinion is deeply divided on the question of the efficacy of the United Nations,” Moskowitz noted, “the impact of the international organization for good or evil can be ignored only at our peril.”

No one mastered these techniques of persuasion better than Kristol. You can follow the progress he describes in the pages of The Neoconservative Persuasion itself. The earliest pieces gathered here come from a tiny magazine Kristol launched in 1942, Enquiry: A Journal of Independent Radical Thought. The “independence” was from the official Communist line, and it signaled the anti-Communist direction his thinking would continue to take. It also suggests the quality that Kristol described, in An Autobiographical Memoir, as having “a ‘neo’ gene”: “I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-socialist, a neo-liberal, and finally a neoconservative. It seems that no ideology or philosophy has ever been able to encompass all of reality to my satisfaction. There was always a degree of detachment qualifying my commitment.”

That succession of “neos” can be mapped onto Kristol’s career as a writer and editor. In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked at Commentary and Encounter, both liberal anti-Communist journals. In the 1960s he launched The Public Interest, the original neoconservative magazine, dedicated to challenging the assumptions of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Finally he became a key voice on the very conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, during the height of its influence in the Reagan years.

The irony, which Kristol relishes, is that his “Leninist” path carried him ever further to the right. It was to capture this evolution that he coined the term “neoconservative,” the ambiguous label with which Kristol became so closely identified. (This is the third of his books to use the word in the title.) To anyone who followed political and foreign policy debates during the George W. Bush years, however, that term took on an ominous coloration. To put it crudely, after September 11, 2001, “neoconservative” often became a code word meaning “Jewish warmongers.” It was common for critics of the Iraq War to blame it on a “cabal” of neoconservative advisers in the Bush Administration, all of whom happened to be Jewish—Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith were the most frequently named.

The idea that a secretive group of powerful, behind-the-scenes Jews were running American foreign policy became an article of faith to many on the American, and especially the European, left—people either indifferent to the anti-Semitic tropes in this discourse or those who positively relished them. A common corollary to this idea was the belief that the neoconservatives were acting under the influence of Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish political philosopher who fled the Nazis and spent his last decades teaching at the University of Chicago. Strauss, according to the caricature, was an elitist enemy of democracy, whose thought encouraged the “neocons” (some of whom, like Wolfowitz, had been his students) to lie the country into war.

It is not surprising that, in the wake of these developments, the label neoconservative has been abandoned by most of those who used to claim it. Naturally, readers will turn to The Neoconservative Persuasion for enlightenment: What did the “godfather” of neoconservatism think of the ugly turn the term took in the last few years? But while the subtitle of the book promises “Selected Essays, 1942-2009,” it turns out that very few of these pieces date from the last decade of Kristol’s life. Perhaps this is only to be expected—after all, Kristol was already in his eighties when George W. Bush became president.

The one place where Kristol indirectly addresses the connection of neoconservatism with the Iraq War is in the 2003 op-ed that gives the book its title. And his main reaction is, surprisingly enough, surprise that any connection has been drawn: “And then, of, course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy.” Instead, Kristol says, there are at most a few neoconservative principles or intuitions: that American power should not be subordinated to “world government” or “international institutions”; that America’s national interest requires global engagement, not isolationism; and that “the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from non-democratic forces.”

It was a little disingenuous for Kristol to deny that there is such a thing as a neoconservative foreign policy. After all, one of the eight sections of The Neoconservative Persuasion is titled “Foreign Policy and Ideology.” All but one of the essays in that group, however, were written during the Cold War, and it is fair to say that if neoconservatism—or Kristol himself—had a diplomatic philosophy, it was one totally shaped by America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union, with only limited application to the post-Cold War world.

Essentially, Kristol believed that America’s struggle with the USSR was the criterion by which everything else had to be judged. Anything that could hurt the United States or benefit the USSR was wrong, no matter how right it might seem on the surface. Perhaps the most uncompromising essay in the book is “ ‘Human Rights’: The Hidden Agenda,” in which Kristol totally rejects the idea of making human rights an American foreign-policy priority, as Jimmy Carter had done. His reason is that, if regimes are judged by human rights standards alone, many American allies—he is thinking particularly of right-wing regimes in South America—would come out quite badly. Rather than pick our alliances based on moral purity, Kristol writes, America should look to the differences between “authoritarian governments” and “totalitarian regimes.” The first—like, say, Pinochet’s Chile—may eventually evolve into democracies, and they pose no threat to America. The latter, like the Soviet Union, are inherently dangerous and must be opposed at all costs.

It’s true, Kristol acknowledges, that a torture victim in Chile has suffered just as much as a torture victim in Russia. But, he writes, “the perspective of the victim, whether in war or peace, is the stuff of which poetry (or perhaps theology) is made, not politics, and certainly not foreign policy.” This is probably the single sentence in The Neoconservative Persuasion that best captures Kristol’s entire worldview. Concern for victims—of war, of torture, of poverty, and of racism—is all well and good, but finally Kristol regards it as sentimentality. What really matters is power, and it would be suicidal for Americans to give up power in the name of sentiment.

For Americans, and also for Jews, Kristol famously joked that a neoconservative was a liberal who got mugged by reality, and the trajectory of his own thought was always in the direction of disillusionment. Over the decades covered in The Neoconservative Persuasion, the reader sees Kristol losing patience with liberalism, modern art, the welfare state, blacks and the civil rights movement, feminism, and gay rights. In each case, his initial sympathy or at least respect gives way to a disgusted sense that all these movements have gone too far, until the word “liberal” itself became a kind of imprecation to Kristol (as it did in American politics generally). By the time he wrote the essay “The Way We Were,” in 1995, he had given in to simple nostalgia: In his childhood, Kristol writes, “the reason there were no ‘troubled’ schools is that ‘trouble’ was not tolerated.”

But nothing in The Neoconservative Persuasion makes Kristol lose patience like the Jews. You can see it happening even in the titles of his essays: “The Political Dilemma of American Jews” (1984) gives way to “Why Religion Is Good for the Jews” (1994) and finally “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews” (1999). The stupidity Kristol has in mind can be summed up in the question his fellow neoconservative Norman Podhoretz asked in the title of a recent book: Why Are Jews Liberals? For it is unmistakable that, in every one of the movements Kristol deplores—modern art, civil rights, feminism, and so on—Jews have been enthusiastic supporters.

Once upon a time, Kristol grants, it may have been sensible for Jews to support liberal and progressive causes, “given the historic attitude of the European Right toward Jews.” But the same calculus of power and interest that he employs in foreign policy leads Kristol to conclude that Jewish interests now lie with the right, especially the Christian Right. Evangelical Christians are strong supporters of Israel; yet Jews, he complains, continue to pointlessly antagonize them by insisting so strongly on the separation of Church and State. Conversely, he argued several times in the 1980s, Jews continue to sympathize politically with African-Americans, even as black anti-Semitism and anti-Zionsim rise. In short, Kristol finds it absurd that Jews refuse to ask whether “a given turn of events or policy is ‘good for the Jews’ ”: “to ask that question in the United States today in Jewish circles is to invite a mixture of ridicule and indignation.”

Here, as so often in The Neoconsevrative Persuasion, Kristol seems to me to be right in part and wrong in greater and more significant part. Yes, Jews should be confident and realistic enough to ask what is in their best interest—just as Americans should apply the same standard to domestic and world politics. In each of these areas, we should not be afraid to identify our enemies as enemies and to oppose institutions and policies that sound virtuous but are actually harmful—one of Kristol’s favorite examples is the United Nations. The single best essay in the book, “The Myth of the Supra-Human Jew,” demonstrates the dangers involved in imagining Judaism as “a divinely intoxicated form of liberalism.” (That essay was written in 1947, and it is notable that Kristol’s most sophisticated and penetrating work was written in the 1940s and 1950s, before he became settled in his beliefs and began to write mainly op-eds: Op-eds are interventions, not explorations.)

But is it true, as Kristol believes, that American Jews would be better off in a more conservative, more Christianized polity—or, at the very least, that, since such a polity is certain to come, we had better reconcile ourselves to it? Is it true that an American foreign policy committed to human rights is shackled and enfeebled? Is it true that black and Jewish aspirations are now opposed? In his essays of the 1980s and 1990s, Kristol said all these things quite confidently. Yet despite the red/blue divide, the Moral Majority has not become a majority in America. In fact, contrary to the central premise of Kristol’s social thought, the most religious parts of America are now the parts most afflicted by divorce and teen pregnancy, while the most secular parts of America are the least afflicted.

Many of Kristol’s other premises have also been proved wrong. After the fall of the USSR, the American commitment to human rights led not to self-doubt and paralysis but to a more vigorous and interventionist foreign policy—in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, and even Iraq. (Not to mention the fact, slighted by Kristol, that the human rights movement played a major role in bringing down the Soviet empire.) In a 1984 essay, Kristol lamented that “Jesse Jackson [is] the political leader of American blacks,” and that Jackson “stands for black nationalism”—indeed, he writes about Jackson as if he were Louis Farrakhan.

But a quarter-century later, the political leader of American blacks is the political leader of America, Barack Obama, and the main charge against him from the left is that he is too committed to consensus-building. Finally, Kristol saw the gay-rights movement as a sign of American decadence, part of the Sixties assault on bourgeois values; today, the major gay-rights issues are the right to serve in the military and the right to get married. In each case, Kristol’s hard-headed realism turned out to be a poor guide to reality. Perhaps the inveterate Jewish tendency to care about “the perspective of the victim” has something to be said for it after all.

• The United States has likely not yet produced a written freeze extension deal because doing so would set the policy precedent of excluding East Jerusalem from the discussion. [JPost]

• A long-range rocket from Gaza landed in the western Negev; there were at least two earlier Qassam firings. No injuries were reported. [Haaretz]

• Durban III is to be held in September 2011 in New York, on the tenth anniversary of the notorious Durban I U.N. anti-racism conference. Except it won’t, be as the U.S. doesn’t like the idea. [JPost]

• After the U.N. proceeded with its more or less annual censure of Iran’s human rights record, a senior envoy vociferously defended the Islamic Republic’s right to stone criminals and the like. [WSJ]

• Egypt bristled at a U.S. call for foreign monitors to oversee its upcoming parliamentary elections. [AP/NYT]

The letter also directly addressed the question of whether the military wing of Hamas targets civilians with its Qassam rockets. “Human Rights Watch would also like to ask for clarification of recent statements by Hamas spokespersons that Hamas rocket attacks into southern Israel were intended to target Israeli military bases, but not Israeli civilians,” the letter said. “Previous statements by Hamas leaders, as well as our own research, indicate that rocket attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups deliberately targeted Israeli civilians or were launched towards Israeli population centers indiscriminately. The Goldstone report concluded that Hamas was responsible for serious violations of the laws of war, including war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, in connection with these rocket attacks directed against Israeli civilians.”

“Hamas, just like Israel, needs to make clear to its forces that unlawful attacks on civilians will not be ignored,” the letter said.

Hamas: Investigate Attacks on Israeli Civilians [HRW.org]
Letter to Prime Minister Haniya [HRW.org]

“A war crimes investigator who is an avid collector and trader in Nazi memorabilia is perhaps a new low,” Netanyahu’s policy director, Ron Dermer, told the Jerusalem Post. NGO Monitor, another HRW critic, said that the revelations, “when combined with his central role in the condemnations of Israel under false banners of ‘human rights’ violations and ‘war crimes,’ show that he is entirely inappropriate as a human rights reporter.” Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, issued a strong rebuttal, stating, “Gerlasco has never held or expressed Nazi or anti-Semitic views.” Gerlasco, it says, had a grandfather who was conscripted into the German military, though he never joined the Nazi Party. Gerlasco’s great-uncle, meanwhile, worked on B-17s for Uncle Sam; Gerlasco also collects U.S. Air Force paraphernalia.

Collecting Nazi memorabilia, of course, is not proof of being a Nazi sympathizer. And let’s concede that Gerlasco is no anti-Semite, and that his hobby is, well, just that. Still, we would gently advise HRW that endorsing Gerlasco’s views on Israel’s actions is not the best way to be taken seriously on an issue where, fairly or not, it is already walking on controversial ground. The point is not only to prevent bias from creeping into ostensibly neutral reports; it’s to avoid even the appearance of and potential for impropriety. This week, people who talk about Human Rights Watch’s reports on Israel are not talking about their substance, but about the process behind them, and that process’s alleged flaws. Is that really what Human Rights Watch wants?

Human Rights Watch Investigator Accused of Collecting Nazi Memorabilia [Guardian]
‘HRW Expert Collects Nazi Memorabilia’ [JPost]
HRW Responds, and So Do I [Elder of Ziyon]
Related: Broken Watch [Tablet]

The next day, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had declared political war on HRW and other non-government organizations that were continuing to investigate Israel’s conduct during last winter’s war in Gaza. “We will dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups,” Netanyahu’s chief policy adviser, Ron Dermer, told the paper. “We will insist that they defend their record and their values.” Last week, after HRW released a 63-page report accusing Israeli troops of killing Palestinian civilians who were waving white flags in Gaza, Ben-Dror Yemini, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, accused HRW’s deputy Middle East director, Joe Stork, of attending a 1976 anti-Israel conference organized by Saddam Hussein and of writing bitterly anti-Zionist screeds at roughly the same time. The story, which was translated into English and was reprinted on Commentary’s blog, provoked a heated letter from Stork, who said he had written exposes against Hussein in the 1970s and did not espouse the anti-Zionist views attributed to him. (Stork did not respond to e-mail or phone messages from Tablet.)

At a time when Jews are anxious about how Israel will fare in negotiations with the Obama administration over a peace deal with the Palestinians, the Stork and Whitson affairs present an unfamiliar problem to HRW: how to reassure liberal Jews, including HRW’s founder and one of its current board members, worried that the organization is playing into the hands of anti-Israel activists from New York to Riyadh. Whether or not its staff actively seek out ways to target Israel, as Netanyahu’s office claims, by appearing to focus so many of its resources on Israel—five reports have been issued already since the Gaza War, three of them criticizing the IDF’s conduct, and another report about Israel’s “wanton destruction” is forthcoming—and by hiring people like Stork and Whitson, HRW, under executive director Ken Roth, leaves those doubts unanswered. “Ken feels their facts are right, and the critics are wrong, next case,” said Sid Sheinberg, the former Hollywood mogul and vice-chair of HRW’s board. “I don’t believe that’s the way the Israelis should be treated.”

Founded in 1978 as Helsinki Watch—mainly to help insure that dissident intellectuals were treated fairly by the Soviet Union in accordance with the Helsinki Accords—HRW has, over the past 20 years, come to occupy a diplomatic position of heft and responsibility, “somewhere between a permanent and a rotating member of the Security Council,” jokes one longtime U.N. watcher. Even harsh critics like Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University who also runs NGO Monitor, which tracks HRW and other NGOs in Israel, concede that HRW is unmatched as a voice for exposing grave human rights abuses, from Sudan to China. According to Roth, its work in Israel is no different from its work anywhere else. “We look at the worst abuse on both sides,” he said, pointing out recent reports on Hamas rocket fire and executions. “It’s not that we’re exclusively focusing on Israel. But if the question is, ‘Why are we more concerned about the [Gaza] war rather than on other rights abuses [in Israel]?’ Well, we’ve got to pick and choose—we’ve got finite resources.”

HRW has been dogged for years by Israeli claims that it is unfairly biased, or, more specifically, that it has failed to hold others—namely, Hamas and Hezbollah, along with anti-Semitic groups worldwide—sufficiently accountable for human rights violations. But relations between Israel and HRW are now at their worst since 2001, when Israel, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, blamed the organization for failing to stand up against expressions of anti-Semitism during the United Nations’ 2001 conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. “This is the first time it’s really resonated,” said Steinberg. “It’s only in the past couple of years that Jewish board members, especially, began to be concerned and think there’s a problem.”

“They frequently say, ‘We’re trying to be evenhanded,’” said Robert Bernstein, the founder of Helsinki Watch and now a board member emeritus at HRW. “I don’t understand trying to be evenhanded, because to me Israel is interested and a believer in human rights and it stands out in the Middle East as practicing it in their country.” At its inception, he said, Helsinki Watch planned only to operate in closed societies—undemocratic, illiberal countries without freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and other basic rights. Operating in open, democratic societies like Israel is complicated because, as Bernstein noted, there are domestic organizations, like B’tselem in Israel, that do “a beautiful job” of holding their own governments accountable. “If you could cover every human rights act, it would be fine,” Bernstein said. “But you can’t, so you have to make choices about what you cover, and once you make choices, you’re political, whether you want to be or not.” The overall result of HRW’s current work, he added, “is to say we’re being evenhanded in a way that makes it come out that both sides are equal abusers of human rights—I don’t agree with that.”

But the organization also takes great pride in criticism, as evidence that it’s doing its job well. “I’m not going to do something to appease people who have no interest in the truth, or who are only screaming about Israel,” said Whitson, the Middle East division head. A former high-ranking staffer recalled being told by Carroll Bogert, Roth’s deputy, that “Human Rights Watch doesn’t pull its punches when it comes to Israel” after asking whether it made sense to release a document critical of Israel on the same day the organization was holding a fundraiser with Jewish donors. “There are human rights groups that deliberately choose not to cover Israel, and we’re not one of them,” said Gary Sick, a Columbia professor who is on HRW’s Middle East board. “If we backed away because it causes some discomfort, because of all the radical attacks that are directed at us, what we’d be doing is emasculating ourselves.”

After the Journal piece was published, Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg published a lengthy email exchange in which Roth acknowledged that the standard pitch in the organization’s fundraising efforts in the Middle East includes a reference to the “lies and obfuscation inevitably thrown our way” by Israel and its supporters. Roth, who said the organization hasn’t lost any significant donors over its latest round of Israel reports, told Tablet he interpreted the attacks as a sign of credibility. “If we were irrelevant, if people didn’t take us seriously, we would be left alone,” he said. Roth, whose father fled Germany in 1938, said he felt particularly strongly that Israel should not get a free pass—either from his staff or from his donors. “I identify with the persecution of the Jews—it’s why I do this work, and I don’t believe we should make exceptions for Israel,” Roth said. “The people who don’t believe in that principle, who want to apply them to the other guy”—Hamas—“and not to their favorite country, don’t support us already, and I don’t want them.”

But critics like Sheinberg, the legendary Lew Wasserman’s longtime No. 2 at MCA, respond that even being right isn’t the same as succeeding as a rights organization. Recently a donor called Sheinberg asking whether it was too late to have his donation to HRW refunded in light of an an op-ed Whitson wrote in the Los Angeles Times, in which she bluntly compared Israeli settlers to thieves. For Sheinberg, the message was clear: “Don’t we know when it’s time to talk and when it’s time to shut up?”

Correction, August 27: Ken Roth’s quote, “But if the question is, ‘Why are we more concerned about the [Gaza] war rather than on other rights abuses?’ Well, we’ve got to pick and choose—we’ve got finite resources” referred specifically to HRW’s work in Israel. It has been edited to clarify that.

UPDATE: Tablet contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg, on his Atlantic blog reports his email exchange with HRW chief Ken Roth whether it’s true that his organization fund-raises in Saudi Arabia by touting its “battles” with pro-Israel groups. Remarkably, and after lots of evasion, Roth basically says yes.

Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia [WSJ.com]