Hillel Neuer: Un-Hijack Human Rights

How a Movement Founded by Jews Can Be Restored

In a powerful essay that has become increasingly urgent in the wake of October 7, Hillel Neuer explores the history of the international human rights movement, how it was commandeered by forces that often work to achieve the opposite of its original goals—and what can be done about it.

Hillel C. Neuer is the executive director of United Nations Watch, an independent nongovernmental human rights organization based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Jerusalem Event: Join the author for a live Jewish Priorities launch event on February 7, 2024 at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, featuring Yossi Klein Halevi, Einat Wilf, Hillel Neuer, Izabella Tabarovsky, and David Hazony. The event will also be webcast live. For information and registration click here.

The following is an exclusive reprint from the anthology Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, edited by David Hazony. Copyright © 2023 Wicked Son. Reprinted with permission.

Un-Hijack Human Rights

How a Movement Founded by Jews Can Be Restored

Hillel C. Neuer

The year 2023 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of two seminal events in modern history: the United Nations’ adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the creation of the first Jewish state in two millennia.

In 1948, it seemed natural that supporters of Israel such as Eleanor Roosevelt and René Cassin were also leading figures at the United Nations in crafting its human rights declaration and ushering in the international human rights movement.

Today, however, in the most influential human rights circles, it is the opposite: Jews who do not publicly disown their attachment to Israel, as well as non-Jews known for supporting the Jewish state, are pariahs.

Jews need to understand the seismic transformation that has taken place within the human rights movement. In the last half-century, it has turned against Israel and its supporters, channeling a new form of antisemitism. The time has come to undertake an effective strategy to fight back.

Such a strategy, however, is at hand. A few indomitable organizations still hold out against the tide. Given enough transformational help, a new human rights movement can emerge, one that is loyal to the principles that first animated the movement three-quarters of a century ago.

But to understand how this is possible, we need a closer look at how “human rights” became so central to the global conversation in the wake of World War II—and how it was subsequently commandeered by the radical forces that control the discourse to this day.

***

Few people today are aware of just how much of the global human rights movement that emerged in in the second half of the twentieth century can be traced to the work of heroic Jewish lawyer-activists who were proud of their heritage.

René Cassin was a French legal scholar and judge who served as a founding member of the UN Commission on Human Rights, co-drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968. He was also a public defender of Israel’s rights. On the eve of the Six-Day War, Cassin published articles in Le Monde and elsewhere arguing that Gamal Abdel Nasser was the aggressor under the law, while Israel had the right to defend its “legitimate right to exist.” In 1968, when a UN human rights summit targeted Israel, Cassin, head of the French delegation, walked out in protest.

Cassin’s work was influenced by Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, the towering international law authority of the twentieth century, who published his International Bill of the Rights of Man in 1945, which was credited for inspiring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the European Convention on Human Rights. He conceived the idea of including in the charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal the legal concept of crimes against humanity, which was used to convict Nazi war criminals. Lauterpacht was also a lifelong Zionist activist who taught himself fluent Hebrew, founded the World Union of Jewish Students, married a Sabra woman from Jerusalem, and, at the request of her niece’s husband, Abba Eban, contributed in 1948 to the drafting of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

A contemporary of Lauterpacht was Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who initiated the UN Genocide Convention and coined the term. In Warsaw, before the war, Lemkin advocated for Jewish minority rights in Poland, published articles and poems in Hebrew, taught law at a Zionist rabbinical seminary, wrote a Yiddish column in the leading Zionist daily newspaper, and was secretary-general of a Zionist organization.

Across the ocean, one of the leading figures of the U.S. civil rights movement was Morris Abram, a Jewish lawyer from Georgia who won landmark cases for the equal rights of African Americans, and who helped draft the UN convention against racial discrimination. Abram was also president of the American Jewish Committee and a leading advocate for the right of Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union. In 1993, after serving as U.S. ambassador to the UN in Geneva, he created UN Watch, an independent organization to hold the world body to its Charter principles—which I have had the privilege of directing for nearly two decades.

For these Jewish trailblazers of international human rights, their commitment to both universal principles and Zionism was regarded as complementary. After 1967, however, attitudes in the world of human rights would dramatically change.

***

Very soon after the founding of Israel, some in the West already began to depict the Jewish state in demonic terms. In the 1950s, the renowned historian Arnold Toynbee, who had earlier described the Jews as a “fossilized” and “extinct” society, literally wrote that Zionism was “demonic.” He pioneered the idea that the movement for a Jewish homeland was a form of Nazism. In his monumental A Study of History, Toynbee accused the Zionists of being “disciples of the Nazis” who chose “to imitate some of the evil deeds that the Nazis had committed against the Jews.” In January 1961, as reported in the New York Times, Toynbee told students at Montreal’s Hillel House that “Jewish treatment of Arabs in 1947 was as morally indefensible as the slaughter by the Nazis of 6,000,000 Jews.” In his books, he wrote that Israel’s crimes were even worse than those of the Nazis.

Toynbee’s libels didn’t stick at first. At that time in the Western world, Israel’s struggle against Arab armies was seen as David fighting Goliath.

In June 1967, however, everything changed. Soon after the Six-Day War, some Western European leaders, eager to appease the oil-rich Arab world and perhaps to alleviate Holocaust guilt, began to characterize Israel as an aggressor. Charles de Gaulle, France’s president, and hero of the French resistance to the Nazis, spoke at length at a November 1967 news conference about the “apprehensions” many felt at an empowered Jewish nation-state. “Some even feared,” he said, “that the Jews, hitherto dispersed…would, once they were reunited in the sites of their former greatness,” acquire an “ardent and conquering ambition.”

Meanwhile, the analogy of Zionists as Nazis was propagated throughout the Soviet Union and disseminated by its global disinformation apparatus throughout the Third World. Drawing upon classic antisemitic themes and popular antisemitic sentiments across both the Soviet bloc and the Arab world, Israel became the singular evil lurking behind every form of Western malfeasance. Eventually, in the West, the Communist meme became a mantra of the New Left. Toynbee’s narrative of Israel as a Nazi-style aggressor began to stick.

A new mutation of antisemitism had emerged. The Jewish state was not acting in self-defense but was rather a colonialist, imperialist, and racist aggressor. By 1975, the United Nations General Assembly, the same body that had once voted for a Jewish state, declared Zionism to be a form of racism. In the United States, university campuses, lib­er­al church­es, the labor movement, and oth­ers on the Left gradually turned against Israel.

The shift in the culture influenced the human rights movement. There were some activists like Bob Bernstein, the head of Random House, who published dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky, and Václav Havel, and who formed Helsinki Watch to monitor basic freedoms behind the Iron Curtain.

But a more dominant camp emerged from the Vietnam antiwar movement, and it targeted anti-Communist regimes allied to the U.S. in the Cold War. This camp was deeply influenced by the Left’s 1960s ideology of anti-colonialism, in which the traditional Marxist paradigm of class struggle was replaced with a Manichaean view of a world divided between the West and the rest.

***

Perhaps no one person has embodied this radical ideology more than international law professor Richard Falk, a prolific author who taught at Princeton University and served for years on the advisory board of Amnesty International’s U.S. branch, on a Human Rights Watch board, and as an official of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

Falk admired violent radicals who attacked Americans. In 1973, he defended Karleton Armstrong, who pleaded guilty to bombing the University of Wisconsin Army Mathematics Research Center, which killed a researcher and injured three others. Falk appealed for full amnesty for those who used violence to oppose the “illegal, immoral, and criminal” war in Vietnam.

In 1979, days after Ayatollah Khomeini seized power, Falk reassured the world, in a New York Times op-ed entitled “Trusting Khomeini,” that “the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.” Khomeini’s entourage, insisted Falk, had “a notable record of concern for human rights.” In 2004, Falk wrote the foreword to The New Pearl Harbor, a conspiracy tract about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks authored by his disciple David Ray Griffin, which Falk praised as “authoritative.”

In 2007, Falk published an article accusing Israel of planning “a Palestinian Holocaust,” which he said was “especially painful” for him “as an American Jew.” Falk has previously described his family background as “assimilationist Jewish with a virtual denial of even the ethnic side of Jewishness.” When useful, however, he invoked his status as an ashamed Jew.

The next year, at the request of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Falk was appointed by the UNHRC to a six-year term as Special Rapporteur on Palestine, tasked with investigating “Israel’s violations of the principles and bases of international law.”

Falk went on to champion Hamas, justifying their use of violence and hailing their “spirit of resistance.” He insisted that Hamas aimed for “long-term peaceful co-existence.”

Over time, like others in the world of human rights, Falk became obsessed with Israel. In a 2011 blog post outlining the twenty-first-century agenda for the Left, Falk ranked “support for the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, including its BDS campaign” at the top.

***

Falk was not alone. Kenneth Roth, who recently retired after three decades as director of the powerful organization Human Rights Watch (HRW), relentlessly depicts Israel with Nazi-like terms, accusing the Jewish state of “crimes against humanity.” Over the past two decades, whenever Israel’s cities and towns were targeted by Hamas and Hezbollah with thousands of missiles, HRW rushed to publish reports condemning Israel. These were then regurgitated by Arab-sponsored UN commissions of inquiry and sent on to the International Criminal Court as grounds to indict Israeli leaders and officers.

Like Falk, Roth was born Jewish. He has little, if any, attachment to the Jewish people or faith, identifies primarily as a member of the Left, and rarely speaks about his Judaism except to invoke it as a shield when condemning Israel.

Under Roth’s leadership, HRW hired anti-Israel activists such as Sarah Leah Whitson, Joe Stork, Omar Shakir, and Sari Bashi. The result, according to a 2010 article in The New Republic, was that the organization published more reports on Israel than on brutal dictatorships in the region such as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. The objections of HRW’s founders—notably Bob Bernstein, its founding chair emeritus, who in a bombshell New York Times op-ed in 2009 accused the organization of having “lost critical perspective” in its obsession with Israel—fell on deaf ears.

In 2010, George Soros announced a $100 million grant to HRW. Roth now had carte blanche, and his anti-Israel animus only intensified. Year after year, Roth and HRW pilloried the Jewish state.

In April 2021, this culminated in HRW’s publication of a massive, 224-page report accusing Israel of “apartheid” and “persecution,” which amount to “crimes against humanity” that are “among the most odious crimes in international law.” The report involved three years of work by more than thirty people, including Roth.

Not coincidentally, a year later, in February 2022, Amnesty International published its own 280-page report, entitled “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity.”

Kristyan Benedict, a senior Amnesty campaigner who has been accused of making antisemitic remarks and of threatening to “smack” a pro-Israel activist, tweeted gleefully about all the Amnesty T-shirts and other merchandise to support their “End Israeli Apartheid” global campaign, along with “loads more resources”—including an Amnesty online course about Israeli apartheid, an “End Israel’s Apartheid” social media toolkit, flyers, stickers and posters, and a blueprint on how to lobby MPs to support their campaign.

When Amnesty official Philip Luther came to Israel to present the report, he was asked by the Times of Israel’s Lazar Berman why the organization has yet to apply the same apartheid investigation to China’s treatment of the Uighurs, Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds, and other countries such as Iran, Iraq, and Syria. “There were discussions about where [else] we might start to do it,” explained Luther. “But we haven’t started.”

Let there be no doubt: When the world’s largest human rights organizations orchestrate global campaigns to portray Israel falsely as a racist state that commits crimes against humanity, indeed as the most important human rights villain in the world, they have been poisoned with the hatred of antisemitism.

***

So, what is to be done?

Jews will always be engaged in universal human rights. Intervening to fight injustice is part of Judaism. The biblical Abraham became the first human rights lawyer in recorded history when he intervened to challenge God’s plan to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, pleading: “Would You also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?”

Although we are obligated to call out the lies and distortions coming out of what were once respectable human-rights bodies, this cannot be the exclusive focus for those who truly care about human rights. The challenge today, rather, is to find alternatives—international human rights organizations that continue to fight the good fight in the spirit of the movement’s founders and have not been hijacked by anti-Western ideology and antisemitism masked as human rights and anti-racism—and to invest in their expansion. To rebuild the human rights movement, in the spirit of Lauterpacht, Lemkin, Cassin, Abrams, and Bernstein—but through alternative institutions.

To be clear, such worthy groups exist today. One is the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) based in New York. Thor Halvorssen, its founder and CEO, was born in Venezuela. His family members suffered under the regimes of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, and he has a visceral resistance to authoritarianism. HRF is best known for its annual Oslo Freedom Forum, an elegant conference featuring dissidents from China, Cuba, Russia, and other tyrannies. The event brings together activists, journalists, artists, and philanthropists. Garry Kasparov, the Russian world chess champion and dissident, serves as chair of HRF and is an active presence at the Freedom Forum.

A like-minded organization is the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, founded and chaired by Irwin Cotler, Canada’s former justice minister and one of the world’s preeminent international human rights lawyers. My former teacher at McGill Law School, Cotler has for decades acted as counsel for political prisoners around the world. Cotler is also one of the most articulate voices fighting anti-Israeli bigotry and serves as Canada’s special envoy to combat antisemitism. With his gravitas, the Montreal-based center enjoys access to high-profile figures, which it has used to advocate effectively on behalf of political prisoners in Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

Finally, there is UN Watch in Geneva, the only human rights group dedicated to fighting anti-Israel bias and antisemitism at the United Nations, where it holds accreditation as a non-governmental organization. UN Watch monitors the world body by the yardstick of its Charter and promotes fundamental freedoms for all.

A key participant in the debates of the UN Human Rights Council, UN Watch’s speeches have been viewed online by millions. When the Islamic Republic of Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, UN Watch led a successful campaign to expel the regime. Less well known is UN Watch’s work to defend courageous dissidents, such as by bringing them to testify at the United Nations to call out their oppressor regimes, many of whom, ironically, sit on the UNHRC. UN Watch leads a coalition of twenty-five small human rights groups, which together organize the annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy. The gathering provides a global platform for dissidents from regimes such as Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.

Taken together, organizations like HRF, the Raoul Wallenberg Center, and UN Watch form the core of what could emerge as an alternative global human-rights movement, one dedicated to the principles of freedom, rights, and human dignity that first animated the movement—and a much-needed alternative to the anti-Western and anti-Israel agenda dictated by HRW and Amnesty.

Such an outcome, however, will require a massive investment. Today, HRW has 600 employees, a $100 million budget, and $238 million in assets. Amnesty International, a sprawling global organization with millions of members, has 2,500 staff in seventy countries, and in 2021 spent $374 million.

By contrast, HRF, the Raoul Wallenberg Center, and UN Watch combined have a staff of sixty, and an annual budget of about $14 million.

What the world of human rights desperately needs is a massive counter-initiative—effectively a rebirth. Far-sighted philanthropists who care passionately for both human rights and Israel need to come forward with an ambitious and innovative funding plan, to help existing and new human rights organizations change the narrative—to move away from falsely demonizing Israel and the West, and to focus instead on helping millions of victims in desperate need of the world’s attention to fight tyranny and abuse. The potential to scale up the impact is significant, by producing exponentially more social media campaigns, reports, legal briefs, op-eds, press releases, conferences, videos, podcasts, and meetings with decision-makers. The effect would be to change the narrative—to fix what is wrong in the culture of human rights.

In the twentieth century, Jewish visionaries gave the world universal human rights. It is time for a new generation to save their legacy—to turn human rights away from its present obsession with Israel and the Jews, and toward saving humanity from the rampant abuses of evil regimes around the world.