Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights

Launch of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights

Keynote speech

When Tony Klug first suggested that I might give this talk, I doubted my fitness for the role for several reasons: I am not active in, and am hardly known by the organized Jewish community; I am Jewish, but not in an involved or professional way; and although I have spent much of my life working for values that I think of as Jewish, I certainly donít regard Judaism as having a monopoly of them. Further, while I have no doubt about the right to existence of the State of Israel, I have serious misgivings about some Israeli policies and the apparent reluctance in the Jewish diaspora to challenge them. Since all these disclaimers brought only nods and smiles from the founder members of the group to whom I expressed them, the penny eventually dropped and I concluded that I might in fact find a haven in the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights. So here I am.

As Iíve said, I am not exactly a familiar figure on the Jewish scene, so before I get onto human rights and themes of particular relevance to JFJHR, perhaps youíd like to know a bit about me and how I got into the human rights business. (My wife says keep this bit short, so Iíll try.)

I was born into the substantial Jewish community in Leeds, and a career in human rights was certainly not the result of family encouragement (though had my mother lived that long, she would have been proud). A few years ago, on a visit to Leeds, I came across a distant relative who owns a few jewellery stores. After Iíd explained what Iíd been doing with my life, he lamented, in the kindest possible way, that if only Iíd put my mind to it, I could have been a really successful businessman. When I started working for Amnesty International in 1973, my family looked anxious, and avoided telling their friends what I was doing. (Four years later, when news broke that Amnesty International had won the Nobel Peace Prize, one of my aunts called to congratulate me: ëso you were on to a good thing after all, Nigel?!í)

What was it that turned me away from the paths that my family would have preferred? Possibly, looking back, a subliminal sense that the world is an unsafe place and needs seeing to. My motherís family, the Kantorowitzes, settled in Leeds in the first decade of the twentieth century, as refugees from greater Russia. My father, Hans Israel Rosenfeld, was an even more recent refugee, coming to England as a teenager in 1938, with his 11-year-old sister Ruth who was pulled out of Nazi Germany by the Kindertransport, obliged to leave their parents, and much of the rest of the family, to die in one extermination camp or another. The following year, Hans married my mother, Rachel, fathered me and joined the British army. The War Office changed his name to John Peter Rodley, which is the name on his gravestone at the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Arnhem, the Netherlands, where he was killed in the famous parachute drop of 1944. So I was brought up by my mother and the Kantorowitzes in Leeds. It was a mainstream, nominally orthodox family which went to United Hebrew Congregations shuls and, like the rest of the community, got on with business to sustain the living while they mourned the Jewish dead. 

At 13, I was sent to Clifton College, the only English public school to have a Jewish house (Polackís). I was back there a few months ago for its 125th anniversary and was startled to come across my young self smiling out from a photograph of the house boxing team, something I had nearly forgotten. A decidedly more vivid memory of my first years at the school is that, being small and Yorkshire-accented, I was the victim of bullyingómainly psychologicalófrom the more sophisticated Jewish boys (but not, by the way, from the gentiles). By the time I left school, Iíd learned how to sound non-regional, and could deliver a confident right hook, which is the sort of grounding public schools are well-equipped to give you.

I returned to Leeds to study law at Universityóalthough I use the word ëstudyí loosely, since I spent most of my time on extra-curricular activities, from Rag Chairman to Treasurer of the Student Unionóthe nearest I ever got to business, I suppose. Nevertheless, I muddled through law studies, my interest picking up a bit when international law turned up on the syllabus, but not really quickening until we got to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and I realized that there were other ways of dealing with injustices than the right hook.

On graduating in 1963, I went to Israel for a few weeks on a kibbutz and a visit to my aunt Ruth, that child who had escaped Germany with my father, who grew up in a foster home in Leeds and emigrated to Israel in 1948 with her new husband, Aaron, another German refugee. By the time of my visit they had founded a new tribe, with three sons whose later history would sound like a contrivance were it to appear in fiction: Raanan, the eldest, became an air force pilot (shot down over the Suez canal in 1973, and for a while a POW of the Egyptians, who saved his life),  the next son, Jonathan, is now a rabbi on the West Bank and the free-spirited third, Gideon, a former professional footballer who now works with special needs children in California.

On that first trip to Israel I also learned what it was like to be in a country where being a Jew was irrelevant, and there was no need to be alert to suspicion, hostility, or resentmentóor to feel the need to be an ambassador for my race. You donít have to be aware of your cultural identity if youíre in the majority. (The picture was no doubt different for Israeli Arabs.) A few years later, when the Six Day War broke out during my honeymoon trip to Paris, my wife (Lyn) and I scrapped our other plans and went to Tel Aviv instead. So although the kibbutz failed entirely to inspire me with enthusiasm for chicken farming, and I live in Colchester rather than Jerusalem, I do have substantial ties to Israel. 

Not long after the first trip to Israel, my career in international law got started in New York, for postgraduate studies, then as an Assistant Professor of Law in Canada, followed by a stint at the UN, then a lecturer post at the Graduate Faculty of New Yorkís New School for Social Research, founded mainly by Jewish refugees from Hitlerís Europe. It produces a well-respected social sciences journal called Social Research, to which in 1971 I contributed an early article, on the UN and Human Rights in the Middle East. In it, I criticized the UNís double standards in singling Israel out for special treatment (at that time only South Africa and Israel were deemed suitable as objects of human rights investigation) not least because it permitted Israeli diplomacy to divert attention from the issue of Israelís responsibility for collective punishments, house destruction and torture. 

Since then I have always railed against double standards, whether those of the UN towards Israel or those of Jews towards Palestinians. The other formative influence on my young adulthood, still in north America, was the Vietnam War, for when I looked at its origins, the parallels with the crimes prosecuted at Nuremberg were irresistible: the mendacity of the justifications for the war, the repression by the South Vietnamese government, the lavish display of extraordinarily destructive poweróall of it said that if Nuremberg was right, this war was wrong. Indeed, the best book written on the war was entitled Nuremberg and Vietnam, written by former US Nuremberg prosecutor General Telford Taylor, who had given a lecture on ëGuilt and Responsibility in the Third Reichí, which I attended when I was studying for my masters degree at Columbia University. I could not be against Nazi German aggression, Nazi German war crimes and Nazi German crimes against humanity and then turn away from American aggression, American war crimes and US-sponsored South Vietnamese government crimes against humanity. Never able, it seems, to pursue law studies, or even law teaching, without extra-curricular activities, I spent much of my time as an anti-Vietnam war activist.

All this, then, was the background from which I found my way to Amnesty International, an organization that permitted me to combine the work of a professional international lawyer with cause-oriented activism. As I reflect on 17 years with Amnesty International and another 13 years of various kinds of hands-on human rights work, mainly with the United Nations, I begin to think that the most important skill I have developed is that of dispassion or impartiality. At Amnesty International in those days impartiality was structured into the fabric of the organization at all levels, but most vividly at the level of the adoption group. The typical group would work for the release of three prisoners of conscience, one from the West (typically a communist dissenter), one from the East (typically a non-communist dissenter) and one from the ëthird worldí.

The handmaiden of impartiality is scepticism. Once you start looking at problems on a global basis, you begin to listen to what all politicians or power-wielders, or power-brokers, or power-seekers say with a critical ear. You begin to realize that power itself can be dangerous, that those who wield it or want it can be dangerous, whatever the cause for which the power is maintained or sought. And what are these causes? You can count them on the fingers of one hand and still have a finger to spare: they are political ideology; religion; nationalism; and racial, ethnic, tribal or clan solidarity.

None of these causes is intrinsically evil. Many politicians may be committed to helping produce a decent society. The causes can be harnessed for good. But they also lend themselves to be mobilized for evil. It is not hard to think of perversions of the causes that have disfigured the world over the last 100 years. The Marxist ideology of liberating the masses from capitalist oppression brought us the terrors of Stalinism and Maoism. Religious fanaticism has given us the obscurantists of Iran, Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda. Nationalism produced Germanyís Nazi regime and the attempted extermination of the Jews and Gypsies. Ethno-tribalism has left us the central African cauldron, the most searing example of which has (for me) been the Rwandan Hutu genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis.

Of course, my categories of causes are not mutually exclusive. Chinese communism has always known how to play the nationalist card and indeed, after the delegitimation of the ruling partyís ideology in the wake of the violent suppression of the student led democracy movement in Tien An Men Square in 1989, nationalism, coupled with economic progress and the need for order, has been the main incantatory resource of the current Chinese leadership. And we all recall how Soviet anti-Zionism could play to traditional Russian antisemitism.

Religion too can cross the categories. While not yet tainted with anything on the scale of the examples Iíve just given, the recrudescence of Hindu nationalism in India has produced some disturbing incidents; and just next door is Pakistan, created out of India to respond to local Muslim nationalism. And, just as religion and ideology exploit nationalism, so nationalism can exploit religion, ideology and ethnic solidarityóthe epitome of that model being the  German nationalism generated by Germanyís First World War defeat that harnessed national socialist ideology and racial supremacist doctrine to create, in the heart of the western world, the man-made bubonic plague of Nazism.

As Jews we may be prone to special awareness of the permeability of the categories of causes.  Consider the non-believing Jewónot concerned with religion, by definition, but still a part of the tribe because of the effect of early learned religious culture, and still obliged, by the Holocaust, to recognize that when it comes to genocide, the murderers wonít care whether you are observant or not. Add the Zionist dimension and we too have a mix of what for us are facets of our identity in all its richness and historic resonance. It is also a cluster of causes that the unscrupulous can manipulate to negative ends.

I donít purport to be able to explain what precisely in all these causes can lead to mass murder, torture and destruction, but I have learned that there is one necessary condition, and that is the identification of an enemy. Jews and gypsies are anathematized into sub-humans; landholders, even smallholders, become class enemies; communists (or now terrorists), are enemies of humanity and so fair game. For the Prophet, Jews and Christians were the ëpeople of the Bookí, but for the fanatics who invoke his religion of peace to pursue their goals, Jews and Christians are the enemies of Islam. (Odd how things change: it was the Islamic Ottoman empire that provided a refuge for Jews when the Christians called us Christ-killers.) Meanwhile, in the eternal tit-for-tat, Islamist terrorism is exploited to foment Islamophobia. And, lingering after less than a decade, we still have the Catholic, Kenyarwandan-speaking Hutus metamorphosing Catholic, Kenyarwandan-speaking Tutsis into cockroaches, and subjecting them to a ëlow-tech holocaustí. Find the enemy, demonize them and you are on your way to political support for your project.

Another ingredient will help pave the way: the sense of victimhood. The loss of territory and the economic straitjacket imposed on the Germans after the First World War permitted the Nazis to exploit a German sense of having been victimized. The perceived political and economic dominance of the Tutsis did the same for the Hutus, and for fanatical Islamists the symbol of the victimization of Muslim Arabs is the creation and then territorial expansion of Israel.

I am not saying that every wrong, perceived or real, done to a community, a class, a minority or a majority must result in the deployment of an all-embracing political rhetoric, based on the victimhood of the speaker and listeners and the demonic qualities of the perceived victimizer. That way lies perpetual conflict, but we know that even severe conflicts can be and have been settledóthink of South Africa for a positive outcome. What I am pointing to are the elements that can conduce to conflict and repression, usually for the achievement of political power.

You may find that what I am saying is little more than Readersí Digest sociology, and this may be soóbut for me it is the fruit of observation, and what worries me is that it can surface very easily and very unpredictably. In my last mission as UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, I visited a constitutional democracy in Latin America that had, not so long ago, been under a military government that had pursued its aims primarily by wholesale detention and torture of perceived political opponents. By the time of my visit there in 2000, there wasnít a political prisoner to be seen, but the police station holding cells, the remand centres and the prisons were still fullósometimes to a level that the RSPCA would not tolerate for animals. They were full of an underclass of largely poor, largely black denizens of shanty towns, who had had confessions tortured out of them. You are probably already thinking about what could be done to improve a social system that creates this phenomenon and improve law enforcement that deals with it. The writer of one local newspaper article had a much more radical approach. ëThey are sub-humaní (infra-humano, untermenschlich) he wrote; ëthey should be exterminated.í

Over the years, I have visited twenty-odd countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America on human rights missions for Amnesty International or the United Nations. But missions have not been the whole of the work. Reading, analysing and suggesting action on a range of human rights violations in many more countries all over the world has been my staple line of work. So has going to international conferences and working for stronger international legal and institutional defences against human rights violations. For it is clear that there is no ëquick fixí. Justice and human rights are only ever projects in the making, and in the defending. They are never fully achieved: backsliding is possible; progress is not assured. The work of writing letters for individual victims, or challenging unjust laws and structures, or conducting inquiries and issuing reports, or lobbying the violators and those with influence over themóall this must continue because it will be needed. But with all the human rights and social justice organizations we have, acting in this country and around the worldówhy should I be looking for another one and, more specifically, a Jewish one?

Basically, I think the traditional Jewish connection with things relating to justice and human rights deserves institutionalization. I am no Jewish historian or scholar, but you donít have to be to feel the connections: from the biblical Book of Exodus to Leon Urisís novel of the same name, freedom from group and individual oppression, from restriction and exile, are themes that seem to come with first consciousness. Then there are the Ten Commandments, which come close to articulating the duty side of human rights. 

At the centre of it all is the recognition of individual human dignity. That recognition was unforgettably encapsulated, for me, by something Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said just after the Six-Day War. From believing itself under threat of strangulation, Israel, in less than a week, had removed that threat and taken East Jerusalem, the west bank of the Jordan, the Golan Heights and Sinai, all with surprisingly little loss of life. Any government of any country that had just pulled off such a spectacular military victory could have been expected to indulge in, if not triumphalism, at least a certain self-satisfaction. Yet what was Eshkolís message? He invoked the Rabbinic saying, that: ëif you destroy one life it is as if you have destroyed the whole world. If you save one life it is as if you have saved the whole world.í And nothing indicated that he was referring only to Israeli casualties.

I realize of course that mainstream Jewish NGOs have been involved with human rights issues. When I was at Amnesty International, one of my jobs was to work with the NGOs at the UN and the Council of Europe. Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Consultative Council of Jewish Organizations played active, distinguished roles in these endeavours. But usually such joint activities centred around the defence and promotion of Jewish NGO rights at the intergovernmental body or around general topics such as the abolition of torture or of the death penalty or the recognition of conscientious objection. Specific country or case work was not usually the subject matter of these joint endeavours. When the Jewish NGOs themselves spoke on particular human rights situations these would usually involve Jewsóprimarily on the receiving end of manifestations of antisemitism. What excites me about the JFJHR is that it will not only be concerned with Jewish victims, but with any victims. It will be concerned not only with human rights violations and injustices suffered by Jews but also with human rights violations and injustices suffered at the hands of Jews. It will be concerned about the human rights of everyone in our society, not just the Jews. 

In so doing it will act as a counterweight to the ethos according to which, as Tony Lerman has put it, Jewish sufferingópast, present and futureóalways takes precedence. This is an ethos promoted by the current Israeli leadership even more avidly than previous administrations. Take the case of the politically clumsy, but legally sustainable indictment issued by a Belgian judge, of Ariel Sharon for war crimes, primarily in relation to Sabra and Chatila. It was understandable that the Israeli government reacted against the Belgian government, but when Sharonís Likud rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the indictment ëa blood libelí what kind of value system, what kind of political philosophy was he articulating? To call that indictment of Sharon a blood libel is to demean the significance of the original blood libel against the Jews. It is of a piece with the invocation of the Holocaust to justify any crime or atrocity that the government of Israel considers to be in its interests. It is of a piece with the labelling of Jewish critics, including Zionist critics of Israel as Jewish ëself-hatersí. And, of course, it is of a piece with the routine labelling of non-Jewish critics of Israeli practices as antisemitic. All of this desecrates Judaism and the historic suffering of the Jewish people.

And thatís just the problem of the rhetoric. What about the crimes and atrocities themselves? And I donít just mean Sabra and Chatila, in respect of which the Israeli government did institute a commission of inquiry that brought the facts of Israeli involvement to light, even if it flinched at identifying legal responsibility as clearly as moral and political responsibility. I mean also the colonization through the settlement policy of large parts of occupied Palestinian territory that is unlawful and oppressive; and the building of security barriers that effectively imprison whole communities, which is also unlawful and oppressive. The frequent torture of Arab terrorist suspects, first with the complaisance of the High Court, and then in circumvention of its landmark 1998 rulingóis unlawful and oppressive.

What have the mainstream Jewish organizations had to say about these practices and that rhetoric that defames those who challenge the practices? Not a lot, as far as I know, other than from time to time defending the government. Such a posture amounts at least to collusion in the notion that all Jews support the practicesóeven when many Israelis do notóand further, it makes the attempts of Jews to challenge the practices seem like disloyalty verging on treason.

JFJHR will provide a haven for those who believe that they owe it to the values they have inherited to speak out against these things. And it couldnít have come at a more propitious time. We are now living in a world where the ëwar on terrorismí is being invoked by many governments not only to justify excesses in the name of legitimate resistance to the purveyors of ruthless atrocities, but also to justify actions that preserve them in power, however illegitimate they are, and however legitimate resistance against them. (In parenthesis, let me say that I do not consider the Israeli government to be illegitimate in any way; on the contrary, it probably has more legitimacy, among the Jewish Israeli population, than any other government in the region. But be assured the Palestinians in the occupied territories have no reason morally, politically or legally to consider Israeli rule over them legitimate.)

Now recall the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi on 18 October 2001. This was a reprehensible act, not justified by the fact that he led a political partyóMoledetóthat advocated the ëtransferí of Palestinians from the occupied territories, nor that he had himself apparently referred to illegal Palestinian workers in Israel as ëliceí and a ëcancerí. An Israeli spokesman on BBC or CNN (I canít remember which, but I saw it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears), referred to Zeeviís murder as ëIsraelís Twin Towersí, likening the murder of a Jewish minister with a racist, populist line to that great atrocity of just a few weeks earlier. I should like to think that an official spokesperson for some organized sector of mainstream Jewry raised objections to such a travesty, but I am aware of no such thing. I should expect JFJHR to be a forum where such matters can be discussed and the abuses, rhetorical and real, denounced.

Beyond the problems of the Middle East, JFJHR will also, I understand, be a venue for airing problems relating to antisemitism and racism in general. As a member of the Board of Trustees of the Stephen Roth Institute on Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, I know how important it is to be aware ofóalbeit not to overstateóthe reality of widespread antisemitism. Whether it is a question of the desecration of Jewish cemeteries in the West, or the dramatizing of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion on Egyptian television, there is a problem out there that needs to be understood and resisted. On this, however, I would not expect JFJHR to be at odds with mainstream Jewish organizations in this country or elsewhere, but rather to have a complementary voice, including being watchful against overstating what are antisemitic acts and statements, and against unscrupulous invocation of antisemitism for political ends. 

Similarly, I would not expect JFJHR to be at odds with mainstream organizations on the matter of racism, but I suspect that JFJHR will give greater priority to racism against non-Jews than other Jewish organizations. I also expect it to be less amenable to the argument that we shouldnít, as Jews, address human rights issues in countries where Jewish minorities feel vulnerable when not aligned with the rulers of their lands. I am thinking of the pressures put on Jews to keep silent about the torture, murder and forced disappearance of people by the tens of thousands in Argentina in the 1970s, even when Jews were among the victims, and sometimes treated worse for being Jewishóremember the torture of Jacobo Timmerman. Such pressures were maintained even when a rabbi in Argentina (Marshall Meyer) had the courage to speak out. JFJHR will not, I am sure, turn a blind eye.

It will be especially important for JFJHR to be attentive to any anti-Muslim or anti-Islam manifestations. our security services seem to think that Islamist terrorism has more atrocities planned for us, perhaps in this country, and extreme right wing factions in this country can be expected to try to exploit this by way of anti-Muslim agitation, itself a way of pursuing a racist agenda against people of brown skin. We shall have to be alert to this. I am sure JFJHR will also be sensitive to another aspect of racism that mainstream organizations may overlook, and that is Jewish racism towards non-Jews.

More broadly still, the most prevalent type of racism in this country today, as in most of western Europe, is that reserved for immigrants from countries whose people are deemed different, usually darker-skinned, from the indigenous British population. There are occasional race-related riots, and the freak electoral successes of BNP candidates. The police may not be as alert as they should be to the suffering of victims of crime when they are from ethnic minorities, and may not approach the investigation of such crimes with the seriousness they give when the victims are of the majority community.

A particularly serious problem is the anti-immigrant rhetoric, stirred up by a disgraceful, populist press, and pandered to by the two mainstream political parties, which compete to devise ever more draconian practices to deter would-be immigrants and asylum seekers from coming to our already hard to reach shores. Even clients of the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, of which I am a Trustee, are being denied social security, and the right to work to pay for food and lodging, and so are being forced onto the streets. What ghastly re-traumatization is our government inflicting, and on how many people, in the name of protecting our population from contamination by aliens who are different from us? And its not much satisfaction that this activity is no longer presided over by the son of Jewish refugees. For an organized Jewish voice to consider and speak out on this issue will add a new and valuable dimension to the debate. It will also be a mitzvah.

So these and similar issues will be taken up by this bouncing newcomer to the world of Jewish and human rights NGOs. JFJHR is an NGO that believes the values of the tribe to be as important as the tribe itself; indeed, having been recognized as universal values, they are more important than the tribe. The tribe is a partóan important partóof the world, but it is its individual members who are the world. It is thus that, in the words of the press release accompanying this launch, ëthe new body aims to reach out to Jews across the political and religious divides who might otherwise feel isolated in their views, offering them a distinctive environment in which to listen, reflect and exchange opinion.í

That is its constituency. Its focus will be a concern with the world; its interlocutors will be other minority groups, human rights and refugee organizations, and others, as well as the larger British polity through the usual channels for influencing public opinion. It is a worthy ambition. I pay tribute to its founders, and I wish it success. I look forward to meeting all those who, like myself, can expect to find a home in the JFJHR.