For millennia, the celebration of the Exodus from Egypt, from slavery to freedom, has been a pillar of Jewish history and values. We teach our children about the “bread of affliction” (matza) and the bitter herbs, and we end the Seder with a song longing for our return to Jerusalem as a free people.
But the commitment does not end here – freedom and human rights are universal values, and Jews have often been at the forefront of these struggles. As many declared, “None of us is truly free until everyone is free.” This was reflected in the central roles Jews played in the creation of the modern human rights movement, forged in the shadow of the Holocaust. They built strong institutions tasked with implementing these principles.
But now these institutions and their leaders have betrayed the moral force behind their creation. Instead of fighting for freedom, they stand for and reinforce the slavery of hate and demonization, directed at Israel – the nation-state of the Jewish people.
A collective response to immorality
In tracing this treachery, we begin with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, presented as a collective response to the immorality that led to the destruction of European Jewry.
René Cassin, the Jewish jurist from France and a principal drafter, had a deeply personal understanding of this process. In parallel, Raphael Lemkin (who coined the term “genocide”) was a principal author of the Genocide Convention. For both, these universal moral frameworks were the vital elements in a world where another Holocaust would be unthinkable.
To implement these norms, the United Nations established the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and, in 2006, renamed the Commission on Human Rights the Human Rights Council (HRC).
Both were hijacked and turned into platforms for attacks on Israel, led by the antisemites in Moscow and the Arab League, culminating in the 1975 resolution labeling Zionism as racism.
And with the creation of a Special Rapporteur for Palestine, some of the world’s most virulent antisemites, such as Francesca Albanese, had a platform to turn René Cassin’s moral principles into lethal weapons against the Jewish people.
Recognizing the UN’s limits, several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were created to campaign for freedom behind the Iron Curtain and in military dictatorships. Here as well, Jews stepped forward.
Peter Benenson (born Solomon) was a journalist from a prominent Jewish (and active Zionist) family in Britain. He founded Amnesty International after reading about Portuguese students punished for a toast to freedom, and initiated campaigns on behalf of “prisoners of conscience, regardless of where they were held.” Benenson devoted his life to the cause of freedom and turned Amnesty into a political superpower, setting the human rights agendas of governments, journalists, and academics who claimed to embrace these values.
Some 15 years later, an American Jew – Robert L. Bernstein, the head of Random House publishers, returned from a trip to the Soviet Union, where he met dissidents (some Jewish, others not) that the Kremlin sought to silence. He was inspired to build Helsinki Watch to publicly and systematically report on Soviet compliance (or non-compliance) with the human rights components of the US-Soviet detente known as the Helsinki Accords.
Bernstein understood that while Moscow intended to ignore these dimensions, they could be countered by rigorous, fact-based reporting that would mobilize international pressure. The organization expanded into Human Rights Watch (HRW), with a mandate to report on the actions of closed governments and societies that prevented their citizens from exercising their rights as free human beings.
The third example is Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), also founded in the 1970s, in response to the humanitarian crisis that was triggered by a bitter civil war in Biafra. For Bernard Kouchner, a French Jew, and his colleagues, témoignage – “bearing witness” and responding to suffering – was embraced as a universal moral duty, particularly for doctors. Kouchner’s organization immediately gained support (particularly from Jewish doctors) around the world, combining emergency medical care with condemnations of the atrocities committed in war, regardless of which side committed them.
All achieved important moral victories, but when the founders of all three institutions retired, their legacy and moral principles were abandoned and crudely violated.
The new leaders were anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israel ideologues for whom the rhetoric of human rights was a convenient political weapon. They went from false claims against Israel of “war crimes” to the poisonous accusation of “genocide” – a heinous form of Holocaust inversion that makes a mockery of Lemkin and the 1948 Genocide Convention.
This betrayal was not ignored; indeed, its most vocal opposition came from none other than Bernstein. In 2009, he began to denounce the organization he created – Human Rights Watch – and its leader Kenneth Roth, for turning Israel into a pariah state, and declaring that they had lost sight of the original mission.
Similarly, Benenson opposed attempts to politicize Amnesty by taking an anti-Israel position after the 1967 war. When he became less active, however, the organization's new leaders did exactly that.
Kouchner, too, is a supporter of Zionism and of Israel’s legitimacy, promoting a negotiated two-state solution, and the opposite of MSF’s demonization campaign under the genocide blood libel.
The hostile takeover of the principles of freedom and human rights, and the institutions that claim to embody them, has done tremendous damage, not only to the Jewish people but also to the moral values themselves. By targeting the Jewish state with false accusations, wrapped in tropes of age-old antisemitism, the NGOs and UN agencies have forfeited all legitimacy.
The countless generations who recite the Passover story every year view freedom and human rights as core Jewish values. Even in the darkest shadow of the Holocaust, René Cassin, Raphael Lemkin, Peter Benenson, Bernard Kouchner, and Robert L. Bernstein refused to give up on these moral principles.
Their contributions have been betrayed by those who claim to follow their path, and this violation must end.
The writer is the founder and president of NGO Monitor and a professor emeritus of political studies at Bar-Ilan University.