As the cultural and political left has come to dominate the human-rights community, young staffers with passionate ideological commitments have helped rewrite the agendas of the best-known organizations.
Critical theories of social justice, built on binaries that categorize Palestinians as oppressed and Israel as the oppressor, now dominate many conversations about the Jewish state, which a constellation of groups casts as uniquely illegitimate—a regressive, racist ethnic “Western” state in an Arab sea.
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Human-rights groups fairly argue that disagreeing with Israel’s actions and policies is not anti-Semitic, but they have become more and more averse even to considering Israel’s side.
“There’s clearly a leftist perspective that would like to do away with Israel,” the longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth told me. Roth led the group for decades
before stepping down in 2022 and maintained that his former employer did not share this perspective. Some other former employees of the group disagreed. “The trend is to substitute ideology and personal belief for the principles of the human-rights movement,” Danielle Haas, who
left her job as a senior editor at Human Rights Watch, told me.
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Roy Yellin is a longtime left-wing human-rights activist in Israel who has worked closely with the big international groups in Europe and the United States over the years. “Human-rights organizations earned their prestige because they described reality as it was,” he said. “But too often now I’ve seen lots of colleagues in the international community who I thought of as partners who are in complete denial about what Hamas did in Israel.”
Within human-rights organizations, anger toward Israel has been simmering for decades, particularly as the country’s politics have shifted rightward and its settlements have expanded in the West Bank. On October 7, the divide within the human-rights movement over Israel began to seem unbridgeable, in particular to many Jewish employees. That morning, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters viciously attacked Israel, slaughtering civilians before retreating back into Gaza, where they gathered their armaments and hid in tunnels,
using the dense civilian population aboveground as human shields.
Hospitals, schools, and universities—all became hiding spots for Hamas militants.
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Over the past six months, I’ve reviewed internal emails and hundreds of social-media posts by leaders of prominent human-rights organizations. I’ve also spoken with more than two dozen Jewish employees of these groups, nearly all of whom described a pervasive and growing estrangement from the organizations where they had worked, in some cases, for decades. None of these staffers would pass for an apologist for Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Their politics are left of center and many are deeply critical of Israel’s invasion and of actions that they categorize as war crimes. But, they said, talk of taking a nuanced view of the conflict drew contempt from colleagues and supervisors.
These Jewish employees argued internally that Israel had waged a brutal war,
but also that Israelis were badly scarred by the slaughter of October 7 and that Hamas had committed terrible war crimes and acts of terrorism. Yet to take these positions was to risk being labeled as a propagandist for a settler-colonialist regime. Many of these employees are particularly galled by the frequent claim that Israel is a white-supremacist state. More than half of Israeli Jews are descendants of those who lived in Arab countries, Iran, and Ethiopia; a great many others have ancestors who were driven from Europe by the Nazis.
A former top executive with a well-known human-rights organization noted the frustration inherent in trying to draw evenhanded distinctions that were once elementary in the human-rights world.
“Hamas has an obligation under international law not to use human shields and to distinguish between military and civilian targets,” this person, who asked not to be identified to avoid further alienating former colleagues, said. “But if you bring this up internally, it’s framed as a distraction, an Israeli talking point.”
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Balson turned to X and saw that his colleague Rasha Abdul-Rahim, then the director of technical services for Amnesty, had claimed that although she was distressed by reports of Palestinian fighters dancing on Israeli bodies, Palestinians had suffered worse for decades. She
added:
“To be truly anti racist and decolonial is to recognise that resistance against oppression is sometimes ugly.”
That night Balson wrote his resignation letter. Amnesty International’s time-honored approach, he wrote to his supervisors, was to decode the motivations, anxieties, and limitations of a nation and its leaders, even when those are disagreeable. None of that seemed to apply to Israel. Amnesty’s approach, he wrote, “has shown such disdain for Israelis’ existential fears that it seems deliberately calculated to repel rather than attract and persuade.”
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Michael Goldfarb, a former longtime communications director for Doctors Without Borders, had worked in desolate and dangerous corners of the world. But his patience for his former employer eventually reached an end. He posted last year on the Souk, writing of his frustration with the “blatantly hate filled and, yes, anti-Semitic responses” within the organization to the anonymous Souk statement. “Fear of retaliation, silencing, and ostracism grips many MSF colleagues,” he wrote, using the French abbreviation for Doctors Without Borders, “who nonetheless courageously endorsed the publication of the post.” (Goldfarb declined my request for further comment.)
As if to underline his statement about organizational intolerance, Doctors Without Borders employees let loose on the Souk, going after Goldfarb and all those who signed the statement. “I leave you with your hatred, your racism and your victimization (We’re used to it!),” one rank-and-file staffer wrote. Another employee, Olivier Falhun, of the press office in Paris, responded to the dissenters, “At the risk of offending your principles-based catechism, I can’t resist sharing with you a self-evident solution … ‘We’ll have to give the land back. It’s as simple as that.’”
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I asked two Doctors Without Borders employees who had worked in East Jerusalem and Gaza about such claims. These staffers frowned.
The presence of Hamas gunmen in that hospital and in others was an open secret. “You knew Hamas was there; I went to meetings where this was made very clear,” the staffer, who asked for anonymity out of a desire to continue to work in the human-rights field, told me. “Doors were hidden. There were units you did not get into, that had armed guards at the door.”
Months after that Israeli operation at Al-Shifa, Hamas’s subterfuge was exposed—as was the willful ignorance of Doctors Without Borders. A
New York Times investigation strongly suggested that Hamas used Al-Shifa for cover and to store weapons. U.S. spy agencies went further, saying that Hamas
used Al-Shifa as a command center and that it held hostages there. That would be a war crime.
Last June, Doctors Without Borders accused Israel of killing one of its staff physiotherapists, Fadi Al-Wadiya, as he biked to work. Organization officials portrayed this as a war crime, an innocent family man slaughtered. An official statement
said, “There is no justification for this; it is unacceptable.”
Doctors Without Borders posted a photo of Al-Wadiya’s fractured bicycle. Word circulated that he had been a fighter with Islamic Jihad, a radical group that allied with Hamas on October 7. The organization vigorously denied this.
Then the Israeli army released photos of Al-Wadiya, who it said was a rocket specialist, wearing an Islamic Jihad uniform. Doctors Without Borders ultimately conceded that it was “deeply concerned by these allegations” and said it would “never knowingly employ” a fighter.
A staffer involved in hiring for Doctors Without Borders spoke of great organizational pressure to expand hiring in Gaza. “We were told not to check backgrounds,” this employee told me, adding that one office in Gaza had two known Hamas militants. “Our Arab staff was greatly concerned because to be in the same room with operatives put all at risk.”
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After leaving Amnesty, Dan Balson has found himself adrift. He has begun, with reluctance and disappointment, to wonder about the assumptions of so many in the human-rights movement. “Within Amnesty, the phrase ‘Criticism of Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism’ has taken on a kind of mystical significance,” he told me. “It is repeated frequently and forcefully, in private and in public. Amnesty’s leadership appears to believe that, if said with the proper zeal and elocution, the phrase will magically ward off deeper scrutiny.”
Yellin, the left-wing Israeli activist who has collaborated with major international groups, is even more disillusioned. “They think if they just scream ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ maybe we will go back to Europe.”
He exhaled. “Some days I feel like I’ve just been a useful idiot.”