The Jewish community and the stain of denial

It’s a sad day when Jews pretend that international human-rights standards do not apply to Israel.

Jews have a long history of support for human rights. The Jewish community should therefore respond to recent reports that describe Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians as apartheid, not simply reject the reports out of hand.

Jews have played a central role in the creation of international human rights. The man behind the 1948 Genocide Convention, the very first human-rights treaty, was Rafael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish refugee.

During that same period, Rene Cassin, a French Jewish jurist and judge, played a leading role in drafting the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the founding document of modern international human rights. In 1968, he won a Nobel Peace Prize for this work. Today, the European Court of Human Rights (where he served as president) is situated on the Rue Rene Cassin, in Strasbourg, France.

Jews also founded the world’s leading human-rights advocacy organizations. Amnesty International, the world’s oldest and largest human-rights organization, was founded by Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, in 1961. Benenson was born in London to a large Jewish family. In 1977, the organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work on prisoners of conscience. Today, Amnesty International has 10 million grassroots supporters around the world.

Human Rights Watch, the other leading human-rights organization, was founded in 1978 by Robert L. Bernstein, a publisher and rights advocate. It began as Helsinki Watch, a group created to monitor Soviet compliance with the human-rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Accords.  Human Rights Watch has grown to almost 500 full-time staff members who work in 100 countries, investigating human-rights abuses by governments, insurgent groups, corporations and others.  Kenneth Roth, the director since 1993, is Jewish (and a graduate of Brown University).

This proud legacy and deep Jewish commitment to human rights arises out of horrendous experiences.  Jews know what it means to be denied dignity and rights.  So it is deeply disappointing to see the mainstream American Jewish community’s knee-jerk rejection of Amnesty International’s recent report on Israel [“U.S. officials decry Amnesty International’s use of ‘apartheid’ to describe Israel,” February 2022].

Amnesty International’s 270-page analysis, released on Feb. 1, is only the latest report to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid.  It follows reports in the last two years by B’Tselem, Israel’s largest human-rights organization; Yesh Din, another Israeli human-rights group; and Human Rights Watch that made similar arguments.

These reports are painful to read. Amnesty International calls Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity.” The group reaches this conclusion by applying standards of international law, which outline the crime of apartheid, not by comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa. The report states that key components of Israel’s system are “territorial fragmentation, segregation and control, dispossession of land and property and the suppression of Palestinians’ human development and deprivation of their economic and social rights.”

Of course, the Israeli government has rejected the report as biased against Israel. In this, the Israeli government has behaved no differently from any other country scrutinized for its human-rights policies. When one reports uncomfortable truths about governments, no one should be surprised when government spinmeisters trot out denials.

But the American Jewish community can do better. The continued oppression and domination of Palestinians by Israel is the single biggest moral stain on the Jewish community today. The longstanding Jewish commitment to international human rights should lead us to engage with these reports, and then to take action to bring the illegal and immoral situation they describe to an end.

NINA TANNENWALD teaches international human rights at Brown University.