Taking on so grand a topic as "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment" is above my pay grade, so to speak, especially as a member of only disorganized Catholicism.
Even so, I must take on at least those parts of the debate I do know something about, namely Durban and human rights groups. Beinart's piece filled me with dismay, not only because it will likely further polarize and divide a community one depends on these days for upholding the values of Judeo-Christian civilization -- "the West" in the face of growing illiberalism and violent challenges -- but because once again, the facts are presented incorrectly on Zionism=Racism and the Durban World Conference Against Racism.
Jewish and non-Jewish liberals castigate Jewish conservatives and Zionists for saying incorrectly that "Zionism=Racism" was in the final declaration of the failed UN World Conference Against Racism. No, it was not literally, as in a Google word-search, in this document -- a factoid that some pounce upon with even malicious glee in their quest to prove Zionists out of touch and hidebound.
But here's the thing. As I've written before, Israel is still singled out alone among nations in this document . No other state is mentioned in this fashion as Israel is, in par. 63, where Palestinians are referenced under the rubric "Victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance" and Israel is mentioned twice. Yes, antisemitism is also referenced, as is the need for security by the state of Israel -- all to the good. Yet Palestinians are still singled out in a way that implies they are victims of an alleged state-sponsored racism, and in a way that no other victims' group is. So the Zionists have a case on this point, and the liberals are wrong, unfortunately for their cause. Read the document, in order to understand why, if this is the political result, the UN has insufficient credibility to broker the peace.
It's important to remember the context of pre-911 2001. By that time, it wasn't an act of civic courage to keep "Zionism=Racism" out of an international UN document. That's because by that time, it was very much officially repudiated. The Soviet Union, which maintained Z=R as a staple of foreign policy propaganda, had collapsed in 1991, and Russia, a Permanent Council successor, dropped it, as did their allies. The old propagandistic UN resolution was in fact revoked in December 1991, the only such UN resolution to get such abrogation. Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary General, said that the Zionism=Racism canard was a "low point" for the UN. So UN officials knew, years before Durban, that this propagandistic formula was no longer acceptable as "collective political will of states" and could no longer be defended, whatever their personal sympathies.
Very early in the Durban regional and international negotiation process, Zionism=Racism was dropped and the Organization of Islamic Conference knew not to push it, politically. But it crept in through the back door, and that back door came in the form of the sometimes state-sponsored chanting of the discredited NGO forum groups of the slogan "Israel=Apartheid State," and came in the form of the proposal to single out Israel as the only state mentioned in the document. The former was the reason for why a group of NGOs which I helped to lead disassociated themselves from the UN-sponsored NGO forum; the latter was the reason for why the U.S. rightly walked out of the Durban conference. Both the dissident NGO position and the U.S. position were positions of liberalism and consistency of universality -- not a Zionist position, or "influenced by Zionists". If states with notorious state-sponsored racist practices were going to get a pass in this document (Chechens, Bahais, and Dalits could all make credible claims regarding state-sponsored racism), not to mention many country situations where state neglect rather than a conscious state policy were at issue, why single out Israel?
To her credit, High Commissioner Mary Robinson, convener of the World Conference Against Racism, kept Zionism=Racism out of the negotiation process -- but as I noted, this was the expected norm at the time, and not the chief political task for this conference, which was more subtle and complicated. What she did not do was keep the demonization of Israel out of the document, and keep out the sole singling out of Israel. Arguably, as a UN official with limited capacity to influence states, she could not do more on this. There is endless speculation about her own sympathies and her own role behind the scenes. What's operative, however is this: the states were responsible for negotiating this document, and the EU, upon whom rested the civic duty of keeping out the unfair obsession about Israel once the U.S. walked out, did not sufficiently rise to the challenge -- albeit getting in the concepts of Israel's security and antisemitism-- and other good actors -- a few East European or Latin American or other small states -- were too weak.
Final documents at the UN generally hew to the thematic; singling out Israel is a practice which mars a number of UN institutions, from the General Assembly to the Commission on the Status of Women to the UN Human Rights Council. This discredited, politicized practice, producing a storm of resolutions, committees, missions etc. every year appears not to have had a whit of influence on the Israeli government.
When I have this discussion with people who weren't in Durban about what is actually in the final document and what happened there, I find that very rarely, their claim that the Zionists are "wrong" or that the document was free of hate (it wasn't) are thereby remedied. Showing them these tedious facts of the paragraphs in the final document and explaining the political climate doesn't make an impact. And I suppose that's because this issue goes to the heart of the strife and division in the Jewish community in the U.S., but also to a recurring issue for liberals and the UN in general -- the idealistic idea to get achieved through international institutions what you cannot achieve at home in your own community or with your own government.
There are all kinds of worthy liberal causes that we as human rights activists try to move through the UN, that the U.S. is reluctant to make progress on. These range from issues of child soldiers and landmines and women's rights to the death penalty. They involve the human rights wrongs of democratic states friendly to the US and the even worse problem of non-democratic states with worse human rights wrongs that the U.S. needs for this or that geopolitical reason.
So the tendency for people who cannot rally sufficient power behind their cause within the United States, in Congress or the White House or new or old media, is to say "Let's have the UN bang on the US". So all kinds of campaigns and coalitions and causes get started that appear universal in nature, i.e. "let's get rid of child soldiers everywhere" or "let's ban landmines everywhere" but which, in practice, wind up taking a lopsided form.
They take a lopsided form for two reasons, which I will illustrate with a topic less contentious than Israel:
1) the U.S. refuses to make the sort of nominal commitments that other states make with less due diligence to women's and children's rights and don't sign treaties; that puts the U.S. in the pariah's corner with Somalia as the only country not signing the children's rights treaty
2) it is difficult or even impossible to get states like Uganda, Sudan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo and others to act on the issue of child soldiers substantively, as even where there is good will (and there often isn't) incapacitated states are overrun by rebel movements in the field. That means we can end up clamoring more loudly about the fact that the U.S. allows some 17 1/2 year old high school students in ROTC programs into the armed services -- because maybe we could affect some change -- than seemingly, about vicious warlords abducting 10-year-olds in the bush and turning them into killers even of their own families.
It's a bad business, and the problem with UN-sponsored universality everywhere, which isn't easily fixed. Regarding Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territories, some say that until you fix the peace, the UN's tendentious propaganda storm won't abate. Others say that unless you chip away at the unfairness and anti-universality of various UN bodies, you will not make progress on the Middle East peace. Likely we will never know, because there aren't enough people of high intellect bothering with the UN bodies.
This brings me to the issue of Bob Berstein's op-ed piece in the New York Times last year, which continues to be a source of controversy. I have to say that I have shocked some NGO colleagues by aggreeing with Bob, who was chair of the organization when I worked there for 10 years in the early days in the 1980s and early 1990s.
I agree with Bob, not for the reasons that his ardent debaters think he means, and I think they have either misunderstood him or wish to exploit the incident to make other points.
That is, I affirm universality, and universal human rights principles, and don't believe that there are countries that are "special cases" or that "get a pass" because they are allies, democracies, in hostile encirclement, poor, or any other reason. The prohibition against torture under the Convention Against Torture must hold regardless of the circumstances. Yes, Israel does not get to be shielded from scrutiny (and isn't; it's the target of obsessive scrutiny). No, singling out Israel does not promote either universality or improvements in human rights in the OPT.
My sharing of Bob's concerns come from a different, more technical place, if you will. I think that there are three ways to do human rights work, and any organization, even a wealthy and large one, has to husband its resources and decide which of the three, or which in combination with the others, is most effective, at any given time. These methods are as follows:
1. Direct human rights work: Entering a country, documenting human rights violations based on testimony from victims and other witnesses, cross-checking facts, compiling reports, and presenting them to governments to respond -- they may not.
2. Targeted human rights work: Focusing on a government that might respond better to concerns, because it is democratic, has institutions like an independent judiciary or a stated reform course or a vigorous NGO community or parliament, because targeted efforts will yield more effective results.
3. Indirect human rights work: Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch, calls this "surrogate advocacy". When you cannot get at the actual object of your concern by either direct or targeted human rights work, because the country is too closed or too abusive and dangerous, you can go to your own government, or some other related government, and urge them to change their policies regarding that particular abusive state.
Some countries only get the benefit of one of these methods; Israel has benefited from all three.
It then becomes a matter of an individual organization's policy -- its politics -- not a matter of universality and universal human rights -- as to which method, and which combination of methods are judged to be most effective in human rights work.
Usually in debates with Human Rights Watch, this sort of choice of technologies, if you will, gets reduced to an optics, to a numbers game. Some will say there are "too many" reports on Israel from HRW; or that there are "not enough" reports on Iran. Or that the reports on other Arabic states are "too thin" and the reports on Israel "too fat". This goes nowhere, as some Islamic states simply won't let NGOs function or foreigners enter freely to get such reports.
There is a certain Zen in human rights work, of course. If you could go into a country like Uzbekistan and function normally, collecting data, talking to victims and NGOs, drawing up reports, and having serious meetings with government officials with them, you might begin to start asking yourself whether you were needed. Certainly your portfolio of issues would have to become much more complex, advocating not just the release of imprisoned human rights monitors and trying to remotely pick up scraps of news from their threatened relatives, but working with experts both in and out of government on certain specific issues, i.e. how to stop tuberculosis in the prisons.
I find that human rights groups themselves seldom know how to work themselves out of a job, and tend either to become the opposition parties they always wished to be, or to be silenced or coopted by governments. This is a matter of judgement, however: Andrei Sakharov, for example, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, believed after he was released from exile and many of the prisoners of conscience were released, that it was time to work constructively with Gorbachev and make postive proposals rather than to continue denouncing communist practices. Others thought he was too accommodationist.
From extensive conversations with those in and around Human Rights Watch over the years, I don't see this organization as changing anything about how they approach Israel, despite Bernstein's efforts to get them to redirect their considerable resources and influence in ways that would feel more balanced.
That's because they do not see the job of enforcing universality as a political choice about methodology, but believe all three methods I've outlined have to be run full tilt at all times -- pressure on the U.S. as a surrogate to pressure Israel; pressure on Israel because it is democratic and could change; documenting of facts together with local NGOs as if there were no competent local NGOs or no government interlocutor. And given that funders are happy with this set of choices, that's all that matters. Whatever blogosphere scandals emerge; whatever few resignations might occur; whatever quiet misgivings, the issues will continue to be framed as Beinart has described, as "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment" in upholding liberal human rights values and not "the failure to pick the right management tool" for credible human rights work. Addressing Israel on human rights will continued to be seen as a project internally to the Jewish community, for liberals to persuade conservatives that they feel are promoting ideas antithetical to human rights, and for conservatives to keep trying in vain to get liberals to be more true to fairness in the application of universality. Indeed, HRW staff will continue to feel victimized by what they will inevitably see as an encroaching politicized community and insist on their right to chose whatever method they feel works best. I think we as outsiders who consider ourselves liberals, too, can only say: "OK, but you are not the last word on application of universality; you have merely made your own political decision to use Method No. 2."
Don't like these methods? Make your own group, find your own funders. Good luck! No other large, resourced, multipurpose international human rights group will appear; what's more likely to happen is that concerned liberals will work on ensuring that Obama does not get a second term. The dialogue about how liberalism should be applied is still worth having, however, for every organization. Ultimately, universality should at some point prompt you to go not to surrogates, not to those who yield more under targeted pressure, but to where the graver violations are. Universality, like equal opportunity, a key American liberal philosophy, shouldn't forcibly generate equal outcomes -- human rights reports equal in focus and length -- but should generate a sense of justice and fairness. If universal standards are indeed fairly and impartially applied, there will indeed be some countries that have a far worse record than others, and are rightly compared -- and ranked -- in systems such as those devised by Freedom House to rate political and civil liberties.
The task of universality is not to withhold its application to some countries that seem "better" or "able to take care of themselves"; the task is, however, to apply universality fairly so that they are not the only ones bearing the brunt of the universalist mission, merely because others deny universality completely, and deny even basic access to the local and international actors trying to apply it.
I can't possibly take on all the issues addressed by Beinart with any competence, but I do want to flag one that is particularly emotional and potential tendentious: child malnutrition. Nothing gets the NGO and local UN official anger riling more than children going unfed, because there is always the sense that the world has enough food riches, even with the global economic crisis, to make sure that this doesn't occur. Nothing gets people more furious than the concept that enemy combatants would deliberately harm the other side's children as a tool of war. And no issue is more propagandized and trumpeted by the media as proof positive of the wickedness of a side in a war.
Yet even in this magnetized field of high emotions, one has to get the facts. Here's the problem: some NGOs are saying, based on some recent studies, that there is malnutrition among Palestinian children. No high UN official is affirming this. That's because reports indicate that there is sufficient food supply in Gaza -- that "you can get anything through the tunnel" -- but it is *expensive*. That means some families aren't getting enough; that means you can look to a variety of actors to blame -- the Hamas government, which functions poorly and unfairly; the Israeli government which appears to act in good faith but has significant shortfalls (judged by some to be intentional); the international community, which has elements of it biased against either party in this war, and can suit the facts to fit their biases.
One can try to get the facts better -- but each new call for another round of fact-finding yields more politicized results, and those actually in a position to say something definitive are chilled into silence by not wishing to be mangled in the politics. The situation is bad enough without exaggeration or misrepresentation, but given the many active forces around this issue, ranging from well-intentioned and good-willed international NGOs to the remnants of the Soviet intelligence propaganda apparatus among old clients like Cuba, we are not going to solve the questions of the Middle East through the lens of this issue alone.
I feel rather in despair from Beinart's piece, although in writing it, he was likely hoping to triumph with new influxes of undecided Jewish liberals joining the liberal wings of the Jewish community organizations. I'm rather in despair because I don't see the problem as Zionists leaving their liberalism at the door when it comes to Israel -- that is, that problem self-discredits, if you will, and is all too easily shown up, if organizations are not true to liberal principles. Nor do I resonate with the problem of liberals leaving their Zionism at the door, either, mainly because I believe that their liberalism, if it really does genuinely affirm universality and justice, ought to do right by Israel in the end. Both leave universality and particularity at the door precisely as a compensatory measure to what they see as the other's lack.
Rather, I'm more concerned about the liberals leaving their liberalism at the door when they address the issue of Palestinian terrorism. This is emblematic of a greater dislocation and disarray in addressing violence in general, as was exposed in the case of AI's gender advisor, but it's also about the shrinking of the liberal mind in the face of the awfulness of illiberalism represented by the extremist Islamic states and movements. It's a framework challenge, as the springs and dynamics of these movements lie outside the universality mindset entirely. Only Paul Berman or Lee Harris seem to take on these problems substantively; I hope Beinart isn't lost to this urgent cause -- when he writes a statement like this, claiming it's a problem of lack of lived experience, rather than a fundamental need to repudiate violence and not relativize it:
Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Amnesty International has all but abandoned its non-violent "prisoner of conscience" mode of campaigning, moving increasingly to thematic issues very far flung from its original mandate such as poverty and abortion rights, and no longer popularizing cases of the POCs that languish still in Eurasia and Asia, for example. Yet AI was able to rally around a Palestinian POC this week.
Beinart, appealing to universality, appealing to Jewish goodness and conscience, asks this:
For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling
every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a
Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their
home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for
Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a
permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the
students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands.
What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to
speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America’s
Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz’s focus group had been told
that their generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish
history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?
All good, all necessary and right in this local specificity, but in an American context, all without a mindfulness of the three methods of human rights work and what works, and without attention to the minefield of how the UN and the international community are now approaching these issues far above the heads of these well-meaning students -- who in any case, can't get over to Gaza to protest Hamas lobbing rockets at Israel.
o Ban Ki-Moon goes to Israel, and denounces the building of new settlements in Jerusalem. He does not speak of Palestinian violence; he has no public criticism of Hamas whatsoever. We know he's capable of public human rights criticism even with difficult clients -- his recent trip to Central Asia surprised even UN cynics in his call on governments to abide by their commitments. Can't Hamas? The SG makes these calls with the universalist expectation that democratic Israel could succumb to such international concerns. Can't Hamas?
o Obama administration officials put pressure on Israel about the settlements; but the pressure to stop violence of Palestinian demonstrators or Hamas rockets, with equal force and passion, appears to be missing.
o The EU places pressure on Israel over the settlements -- the belief is that you can do this effectively with a democratic state with liberal values that could change on a matter like this causing human suffering. Yet the EU pressure on Hamas or the wider Arab world is invisible, if exists at all.
And if we are going to go to universities, what is Beinart to do about this sort of heckling of the Israeli ambassador by militant Muslim students, who staged and executed planned disruptions of a meeting forcing it ultimately to close. There are not shortage, fortunately, of good-willed Jewish liberal students willing to emphathize with the other side in the U.S.; there are no shortage of Jewish students in Israel willing to document and fight for the case of one individual family -- which should always be the focus of any human rights struggle, as making individuals abstract leads away from the human rights ethic.
Yet what to do about Muslim students shouting down pro-Israeli speakers at University of California/Irvine, and other settings, stopping any debate at all? What to do about the absence of anything remotely like a counterpart to liberal Jewish students on territory governed by Hamas, where dissenters might be seen as collaborationists and jailed or shot?
What Beinart seems to counsel us is to just keep being good liberals in the teeth of this illiberal wind, in spite of the obvious disparities and the sheer inability to gain access to the closed Arab states and document thoroughly their tyranny.
I expect this debate will worsen before it resolves, but one thing is certain: it is not a debate that is merely the property of the American Jewish Establishment, liberal or conservative, nor the property of sequestered human rights organization deliberations.
Comments