Omar Shakir, then a US citizen representing New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Israel and the Palestinian territories, stands next to Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW, while speaking before departing Israel at Ben-Gurion International Airport, near Tel Aviv, Nov. 25, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Ammar Awad.

Sometimes, members of a non-governmental organization raise an anti-Israel argument so extreme that it confounds the group’s own leadership. That happened earlier this month, when Human Rights Watch (HRW) shelved a report produced by its internal staff.

Two members of HRW’s “Israel/Palestine” team resigned when the NGO’s executive director and his colleagues rejected the far-reaching thesis of the team’s report, titled “Our Souls Are in the Houses We Left Behind.”

HRW’s former executive director was so disturbed by the report that he called the anti-Israel analysis “indefensible.” The officers paused the publication, despite the advice of their legal department, a protest letter signed by 200 employees, and the group’s past sweeping accusations of Israeli genocide and apartheid.

The Our Souls report essentially told the following tale: Israel ethnically cleansed Palestinians from Mandatory Palestine in the 1947-1948 Arab-Israeli War. The Palestinian refugees acquired a “right of return” to their pre-war homes through the 1948 UN General Assembly Resolution 194(III). By refusing to repatriate the refugees, Israel deprived them of their right of return. That illegal deprivation continues to this day. And the ongoing nature of the malfeasance constitutes a “crime against humanity” under the 1998 Rome Statute.

Every step in the Our Souls legal journey is groundless.

There was no policy of ethnic cleansing of Arabs in the Arab-Israeli War. The overwhelming majority of Arabs who relocated during the Arab-initiated war did so due to wartime dangers, not ethnic cleansing. Although Zionist commanders displaced some Arabs by force of military order, those were lawful acts of self-defense against the Arab invasion. By contrast, the Arab invaders who displaced Jews during the war had no justification of self-defense. After the war, the world community adopted the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. The treaty prohibited “forcible transfers and deportations” but preserved the right of self-defense and said nothing about ethnic cleansing.

Most Arabs who left their homes during the Arab-Israeli War did not leave Mandatory Palestine and therefore did not become refugees. They were “internally displaced persons” not subject to any legally binding protection. Among the two populations — refugees and internally displaced persons — few are still alive.

The post-war UN relief agency created to serve Palestinians labeled them and their descendants “refugees.” But that self-styled moniker lacked any legal significance under the global refugee treaty, called the 1951 Refugee Convention. The uprooted Palestinians and their descendants enjoyed no higher legal status than the uprooted Jews and their offspring. And no other refugee group in the history of the world has had a “right of return” that extends generations.

UN Resolution 194(III) did not create any refugee right of return. The document was a non-binding compromise proposal, which the Arab states violently rejected because they refused to “live at peace” with Israel. For years after the war ended, Arab terrorists continued to infiltrate Israel and attack civilians. Any Palestinian wish for “return” today is subject to negotiation of the “refugee” issue in the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords of the 1990s. Meanwhile, Israel already has millions of Arab citizens and permanent residents.

Where there is no right of return or deprivation of any related right, there can be no ongoing “crime against humanity.” Such a crime is defined a “widespread or systemic attack” comparable to murder, enslavement or torture. It applies to atrocities like Hamas’ October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel but not disputes over refugee rights.

The Our Souls concoction of grievances ignores overriding international norms. By letting approximately 6.4 million Palestinians “return” to Israel, a country of only 10 million, the report would demographically abolish the Jewish state in violation of UN Charter Article 2, which prohibits any threat to “the political independence” of a state. The proposed population transfer would also violate Israel’s sovereign powers of immigration, property ownership, and national security. Moreover, the scheme would breach the “refugee” provision of the Oslo Accords. And finally, the implicit denial of Israel’s right to exist would be antisemitic, according to the internationally recognized “IHRA” definition of antisemitism.

The Our Souls scandal was not HRW’s first implosion over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2009, the organization’s own founder wrote a scathing condemnation of the NGO’s discriminatory animus towards Israel. In 2023, an HRW senior editor resigned, saying the group’s anti-Israel bias “shattered professionalism.”

Other NGOs have faced similar upheavals. Four members of the board of Amnesty International Israel resigned when the parent organization declared that Israel committed genocide in the Gaza war. The CEO of Oxfam Great Britain, a vocal critic of Israel, recently resigned and sued the charity, claiming it had improperly accused Israel of genocide and maintained a “toxic antisemitic culture.”

NGOs like HRW, Amnesty International, and Oxfam have no judicial authority or superior legal wisdom. They are interest groups posing as neutral arbiters of law. As they keep spreading their extreme anti-Israel indoctrination, their hostility spirals to delusional extremes. No wonder they sometimes antagonize each other.

Joel M. Margolis is the legal commentator of the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. He is the author of The Israeli-Palestinian Legal War.

Walter Benjamin’s life, to use the kind of metaphor he was so fond of, was not unlike the Parisian arcades, those covered retail passages that he loved so much.

He was born into a world with the finer things on display. He marveled at his mother’s jewelry, the cut-glass champagne glasses and carafe stoppers in the shape of animals and gnomes in their Berlin home. But his passage through life as an adult was seldom easy, and existed in tension with those glittering objects in their vitrines.

An omnivore par excellence, as a young man Benjamin announced his intent to be the “foremost critic of German literature,” but ended up spending much time translating works from French to German, musing on Marxist concepts and generally resisting any easy classification in ideology or literary genre.

“Adhering to any doctrine awakened in him some kind of allergy,” said Peter E. Gordon, the Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard. “I think it’s at those moments that his real originality shines through.”

Gordon’s illuminating new book for the Jewish Lives series, Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver, is a portrait of a thinker who couldn’t conform. In keeping with his subject’s unconventional spirit, and his unique sense of cyclical time in which tragedies repeat, Gordon begins at the end.

As Benjamin navigated the Pyrenees, escaping from Vichy France and into Spain, he took a lethal dose of morphine. Gordon winds back the clock from that moment, and ends the narrative right on the cusp of his journey through the mountains.

“I thought on Benjamin’s idea that history should not be written by the victors,” Gordon said in a phone interview. “And that means not permitting the fascists to have the last word, as if his death were the end of his influence.”

Indeed, one could say Benjamin’s death was only the beginning of the legacy.

I spoke with Gordon about Benjamin’s life, work and why he may not be an entirely appropriate fit for the Jewish Lives series. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

PJ Grisar: You have a little uncertainty about whether Benjamin fits comfortably into a series like this. How does he fit the bill and in what ways do you think he might fall short of it? 

Peter E. Gordon: He escapes almost any traditional categories that are available to us. People have trouble figuring out, was he a critic primarily? Was he a philosopher? Was he a Marxist? Was he an historian? Moving away from academic disciplines, he exhibits the same resistance to being placed within any distinctive tradition. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to directly answer the question of whether he belongs to some kind of canon of Jewish thought or Jewish philosophy.

He’s always operating at the margins or just outside the boundaries of any settled doctrine or tradition. Bertolt Brecht couldn’t figure out if Benjamin was really a Marxist and had some suspicions that Benjamin’s Judaism was distorting his Marxist insights. And then on the other hand,  people like [Benjamin’s close friend, Kabbalist scholar] Gershom Scholem vigorously argued that Benjamin’s best insights were, in fact, ones that belong to Jewish tradition, but he warned Benjamin that he was distorting those Jewish insights because of his Marxism.

So Benjamin was being pulled and pushed in various directions by the people who were closest to him intellectually. But they all saw, I think, that he couldn’t easily be corralled fully within their fold.

It does seem like he did have a tendency, depending on who he’s associating with, to adopt some of those ideas. As you said, he buys into them to a point before making it his own. What do you think of that impulse?

There might be a temptation to see him almost as a chameleon who adapted to the interests of the friends who were near him, but he also frustrated those friends because of his own instincts, and some of those instincts he once described as nihilistic. There was a fierce debate over Benjamin’s legacy, going back to the first edition of his correspondence and writing, published cooperatively by Adorno and Scholem after Benjamin’s death. The more militant Marxists at the time were furious and felt that Scholem and Adorno had falsified Benjamin’s legacy and weren’t honoring its true Marxist credentials. I rather doubt it had true Marxist credentials.

One of the things I say at the end of the book is that there’s a key principle in Marxism that Benjamin’s own Jewish themes seem to contradict. Benjamin describes an intrusion into history from a place that comes from the outside, and he calls that the Messianic. Any moment in history could be the gateway through which the Messiah might enter. And Marxism has a commitment that whatever changes might occur in history, those changes emerge from the immanent contradictions in history itself, not from a place outside history.

So Benjamin’s allusion to a Messiah who enters into history through some kind of gate, as if from the outside, is very hard to square with Marxism. And so there you find him operating with what you could call a syncretism of Judaism and Marxism. But even those two might not be really sufficient to capture everything that’s going on. He was really fascinated by Christian theology as well.

I didn’t know that he struggled so much in his lifetime that he didn’t have a professorship. He had to scrape by to make a living. Because the way the book is structured, we leave him in the Pyrenees so we don’t really see his afterlife. How did he become a well-known thinker? Was it the efforts of Adorno and Arendt after he died? 

The peripatetic quality of his thinking, that it crossed so many boundaries has made him available for a great many people with different sorts of commitments, and also for the great community of humanists who share with him a sense of boundary-crossing in their disciplines. The rise of cultural studies in the Anglophone world since 1945 owes a great deal to Benjamin, and perhaps to Benjamin more than anyone else.

That practice of cultural studies is all about drawing the unlikely connection, say, between literature and economics, between history and theology and so forth. And that’s a risky but very original practice. Benjamin’s one of the great avatars for people who wish to pursue that practice. His study of the Parisian arcades is maybe the best example of that, because he’s trying to figure out, how does 19th century Paris contain all of these conflicting energies that are evident in architecture, like the passage itself, but also in its social movements, and in its poetry and he tries to bring all these together in what he called constellations of culture and society.

I saw your recent piece in the New York Review of Books, writing about historical analogies and how it’s an imperative to invoke the memory of Jewish persecution when discussing ICE raids or Gaza. Because Benjamin was a refugee, and he insisted that historical crises recurred as a rule, I’m wondering if he was on your mind when you were writing that?

I’ve been very close to immigrants in my life. My own family were immigrants and refugees to the United States from Nazi Germany on one side and from pogroms on the other side. That experience is always very much on my mind. I would hope it would be on everybody’s mind, regardless of identity or history.

Benjamin says “the amazement that things like this are still happening is not philosophical.” And I very much agree with that. I know no polity is blessed with immunity from the worst things. Benjamin himself was a victim of fascism. He died in a moment of despair, thinking that there was no way for him to survive, and taking his own life which he thought was better than the alternative. Tragically, he was mistaken, but it was an entirely plausible inference, given the situation that he saw around him.

And the U.S. at the time beckoned as a refuge for many people fleeing fascism, whether on account of their ethno-religious origins or their politics. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re that country anymore.

The post Why Walter Benjamin was all things to all people appeared first on The Forward.

Not a bad send-off for a commoner whose family’s religion still prevented them from holding political office or attending Oxford or Cambridge up until the second half of the century.

This was the reason why the young Disraeli was baptized in the Church of England. His father, a prominent literary scribbler, thought this would ease his son’s way in society. Little did he know how far and fast this would happen.

Starting in his early twenties, Disraeli began to write wildly romantic (and self-promoting) novels, several of which star a brilliant and, predictably, mysterious hero named Sidonia, who prides himself, as did his (possibly mistakenly) creator, on his Sephardic ancestry. Disraeli uses Sidonia to turn the era’s racial prejudices inside out, having him wax on the brilliance of his race’s civilization while the ancestors of the British aristocracy were still mucking about as “Baltic pirates” and “tattooed savages.”

Similarly, when the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell made an antisemitic slur against the twenty-something Disraeli, the latter — in a fashion worthy of Sidonia — declared “Yes, I am a Jew. And when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.” He then challenged O’Connell to a duel, which was happily quashed by the police.

With the same alchemical genius that transmuted the alleged dross of Jewishness into the gold of racial superiority, Disraeli launched his political career, making his way to become leader, rather remarkably, of the Tory conservatives rather than the liberal Whigs. He persuaded his party’s mostly well-born and dull-witted members to embrace both political reform — the Torys pushed through the Second Reform Bill of 1867, which dramatically extended voting rights — and progressive social and economic reforms during his second term as prime minister.

But Disraeli’s most remarkable achievement was not a matter of political or social reform but of monarchical reinvention. It was, quite literally, spectacular and starred the woman now known as the “widow of Windsor.” Following the premature death of her beloved Prince Albert, the stricken Victoria withdrew from public life and turned inward. Grieving and always garbed in black, she ignored her ceremonial duties, often seeking refuge in distant Scotland at her Balmoral estate.

In an echo of the British Crown’s current crisis, republican voices in Parliament began to question the immense sums spent on the monarchy while those on the street began to ridicule the queen. On a sign pinned to the gate at Buckingham Palace, one wag had written: “These premises to be let or sold, the late occupant having retired from business.” For the British public, it felt increasingly as if they were paying a lifelong subscription to a show that had permanently closed.

As a result, when Disraeli reached “the top of the greasy pole” upon becoming prime minister in 1868, his overriding concern was to cultivate his ties with the sovereign. As he confided to the poet Mathew Arnold, “everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”

The newly arrived prime minister was as good as his word. As he wrote in his first message to the queen, “Mr. Disraeli with his humble duty to Your Majesty. He ventures to express his sense of Your Majesty’s most gracious kindness to him and of the high honour which Your Majesty has been graciously pleased to confer on him. He can offer only devotion.”

Swept off her feet by such declarations of devotion, Victoria described her new prime minister as “her kind, good, considerate friend.” She allowed her friend unprecedented privileges, such as front row seats for him and his wife for the wedding of the Prince of Wales, and even more shockingly, the permission to sit during their frequent private audiences, though he insisted on standing.

Disraeli continued to lay it on thick over the course of their relationship. “If your Majesty is ill,” he wrote in the third person during a political crisis, “he is sure he will himself break down. All, really, depends upon your Majesty.”

“He lives for Her,” he continued, “works only for Her, and without Her all is lost.”

Okay, even “thick” fails to describe Disraeli’s flattery. But here is the vital point: his conversations and correspondence with Victoria, while over-the-top, were also sincere. He was impressed by her character and her capacity to represent the nation. The future of Great Britain, he believed, depended on a vibrant and visible monarchy, one in which Victoria would of course play the starring role.

Deeply moved by Disraeli’s attention, the queen was drawn out of her shell of mourning. “After the long gloom of her bereavement,” Lytton Strachey wrote in his biography of Victoria, “she expanded to the rays of Disraeli’s devotion like a flower in the sun.” Gradually, this expansion was not just private and emotional, but also political and ceremonial.

In fact, Disraeli did not distinguish between the two. The imperial and spectacle were one and the same. In 1876, this conviction led him, with the Queen’s delighted complicity, to push a bill through Parliament that bestowed upon Victoria the title of Empress of India. Rather than pause her ceremonial ambitions in the years following Disraeli’s death, Victoria doubled down on her mentor’s playbook. She orchestrated her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and then years later, her Diamond Jubilee.

With these earlier spectacles in mind, Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter continued the tradition, with stunning success, not just with the first two jubilees, but adding, shortly before her death, the Platinum Jubilee in 2022. And yet, that triumph was soon followed by Elizabeth’s death and the diminishment if not death of the monarchy, in part thanks to Andrew’s abhorrent antics.

“A man’s fate,” Disraeli once remarked, “is his own temper.” But now, the fate of the very monarchy Disraeli helped build hangs in the balance — a turn of events that perhaps even he could not solve.

The post Benjamin Disraeli once saved Britain’s monarchy — the current one may be beyond repair appeared first on The Forward.