Not too long ago, in Kibera—a slum in Nairobi, Kenya—the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

Even though it is, by most accounts, the largest slum in Africa, no one is certain precisely how big Kibera is—the Kenyan government, different ethnic groups, and a host of international organizations have been quibbling over its exact borders for years. Nor is anyone certain how many people live in Kibera: The numbers range from the Kenyan Census’s figure of 170,070 to the White House’s estimate of 1.5 million people. You wouldn’t find Kibera on a map; at least, that is, until the kids came along.

There were 13 of them, young men and women, most of them still teenagers, all of them residents of Kibera. They knew that Jamhuri Park, with its thick foliage and its perpetual shade, was a favorite hideout spot for rapists, that the area in the shadow of the Nairobi Dam was rarely free of marauders, and that, come payday, robbers roost along Karanja Road and assault those foolish enough to try and take their salaries to the bank. With the HIV infection rate in Kibera 50 percent higher than Kenya’s national average, they also knew which local clinics offered affordable treatments. They knew all this and more, but many others in Kibera were not as aware of their sprawling surroundings. With living conditions so rough, a recent U.N. document argued, there was little by way of communal awareness in Kibera. Survival left no room for solidarity. Nor did the numerous NGOs scattered around the slum do much to alleviate the suffering: The best intentions notwithstanding, the machinery of charity often put its own needs above the most pressing ones of Kibera’s residents, hiring local men and women for short-term tasks and leaving them without any real skills or a sense of empowerment. What Kibera needed was a rebirth.

Such was the genesis of the Map Kibera project. Organized by three Kenyan organizations, the project engaged the 13 young activists, equipped each with a GPS device, and sent them out to the field. There they collected over 500 data points, documenting anything from lighting posts to language schools. Their goal was to create a thoroughly detailed map of Kibera, one that would provide the slum’s residents with all the information they needed to stay safe and healthy. They uploaded the raw data onto OpenStreetMap, a free, open-source, online mapping application, and asked the blogosphere for help. Within days, thousands of volunteers responded and began to input the data onto the map, with each location falling under one of four categories: Safety/Vulnerability, Health Services, Informal Education, and Water/Sanitation.

Intrigued by the project’s potential, UNICEF got involved. Rather than mere mapping, the organization—the United Nations body entrusted with the welfare of children worldwide—sought to turn the project into a community-building opportunity. When the data upload was complete, the amateur cartographers printed their work on cheap paper and distributed copies in the community, arranging for a series of meetings to discuss their effort and its implications. Seeing their neighborhoods mapped out for the first time—given concrete shape, drawn out in detail—Kibera’s residents added their own bits of knowledge, laying tracing paper over the map and marking up more spots. Many signed up to receive SMS updates: Lacking access to computers, Kiberans use cell phones to be updated every time a new entry is added to the map or a particularly relevant piece of information becomes available. The organization’s immediate concern is to focus on GBV, or Gender-Based Violence: In meetings, more than 60 percent of Kiberan girls expressed a concrete fear of being raped, 40 percent said that they were afraid of a specific person or persons in their neighborhood, and only 25 percent said that they had a safe space to which to retreat if threatened. The mapping project, UNICEF hopes, will not only give young girls the knowledge they need to keep out of danger, but also put young women in touch with community leaders, leading to changes in policy and heightened awareness.

“This is a pilot,” said Gerrit Beger, chief of the youth section in the division of communication at UNICEF, “and it is using innovations and new forms of technology to empower the most vulnerable. We know it works, and I wish it could be replicated in many more communities.”

For now, it has remade Kibera into a safer, more hospitable place, and it has given its people the power to believe that their actions have meaning. Like the first Man and Woman in this week’s parasha, Kiberans acquired their wisdom through suffering. They still have a tough road ahead of them, but now it is neatly mapped out.

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.