The National Lawyers Guild was established in 1937 as a counter to the American Bar Association, which was then fighting the New Deal, excluding black lawyers from membership, and opposing the labor movement. The original guild strongly supported Israel’s struggle for independence. The guild accomplished much good on the domestic front and had an excellent record of providing legal assistance to the civil rights, labor, and antiwar movements. In the early 1970s, at the height of the antiwar movement, the guild began to be taken over by younger, more militant lawyers from the New Left.32 Law students and other “legal workers” were admitted, strengthening the hold of the young radicals but reducing the percentage of actual lawyers in the guild to less than half.
In a highly publicized speech delivered on October 19, 197333 (just after Israel had barely survived a surprise military attack from Egypt and Syria) the Reverend Daniel Berrigan described Israel as “a criminal Jewish community” that had committed “crimes against humanity,” had “created slaves,” and had espoused a “racist ideology” reminiscent of the Nazis, aimed at proving its “racial superiority to the people it has crushed.” Recall that this was before Israel allowed civilian settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and before the Israeli right began to win elections. It was an attack not against Israeli policies, but rather against the very concept of Israel as the nation-state for the Jewish people. Berrigan also chastised “the Jewish people” around the world for giving “their acquiescence or their support to the Nixon ethos” that had led to the death, maiming, and displacement of “some six million Southeast Asians.” Berrigan referred to the iconic figure of six million as “one of those peculiar facts which we called free floating.”34 The truth was that “Jewish people” were among the leaders of the anti-war movement and voted disproportionately against President Nixon, but Berrigan ignored these facts in his anti-Semitic diatribe against “the Jewish people” and the Jewish nation.
Reaction to Berrigan’s polemic was swift and sharp, especially among lawyers who had represented left-wing causes and individuals. Battle lines were quickly drawn. Some, like William Kunstler, supported Berrigan. Others—among them lawyers who had represented Berrigan and Kunstler—were appalled at Berrigan’s anti-Jewish screed. Berrigan became the guru of the National Lawyers Guild, which soon agreed to commit “the resources of the organization to continuing and expanding our internal political education on the Palestinian question.”35 (They expressed no interest in the “Cuban Question,” the “Tibet Question,” or the “Soviet dissidents question.”)
As part of this educational process, the guild sent a delegation to the Middle East, which was funded by the Palestine Liberation Organization. The grateful delegation showed its appreciation by beginning its fact-finding mission in PLO camps and, according to one member of the delegation, limiting its interviews almost exclusively to PLO-approved Palestinians and Israeli anti-Zionists. The resulting report contained few surprises: It caricatured Israel as a repressive totalitarian society. Nowhere in its 127 pages was there any discussion of the PLO terrorism that plagued the civilian population of Israel and the West Bank. Indeed, the single mention of terrorism in the report was a reference to “acts of terrorism” by Israeli authorities against the peaceful Arab occupants of the West Bank.
The resulting one-sided “report” became a litmus test: “Basically … you had a situation where a bunch of Third World types wanted to ensure that the Jews in the guild—and the Jews were almost certainly a majority—would be forced to eat crow, to choose sides.”36
I decided to devise a litmus test of my own to challenge the bona fides of the guild’s claim that it was still a neutral human rights organization. I requested that the guild send an observer to the Soviet trial of Anatoly Sharansky. The national vice president of the guild told me that he doubted the guild would be willing to send an observer to a Soviet trial, since the “reality” of the situation is that a considerable number of the guild members approved of the Soviet Union and would not want to criticize a Soviet judicial proceeding:
The problem is that we do not approach matters such as this purely from a human-rights perspective. We regard it as well from the standpoint of the importance of focusing attention on human-rights violations in a particular country. With respect to the U.S.S.R., we have not had discussion or come to any decision about the appropriateness of focusing on human-rights issues there.
In my article I put the choice to the guild:
If the guild decides to continue its foray into international politics, it will have to make a choice: either to perpetuate its double standard on human rights, which will surely alienate much of its support here at home for its domestic programs; or to report honestly on human rights throughout the world, which will surely alienate the PLO and the Soviet Union.37
The guild decided to abandon any pretense of reporting neutrally on human rights. And as a result, it lost all its credibility as a human rights organization.
Nor was the guild alone. Other organizations that were founded on the principles of neutral human rights, such as Human Rights Watch,38 the Carter Center, and Amnesty International,39 were hijacked by radical ideologues who focused disproportionate attention on imperfect democracies at the expense of victims of far more serious human rights abuses by tyrannical regimes.
In my view, the worst offender in this inversion of “human rights” and “human wrongs” has been the UN. When my mentor Arthur Goldberg was appointed as United States ambassador to the UN in 1965, he asked me to help him in an informal capacity as an advisor on human rights and matters of international law.
I worked closely with him on a number of such issues, meeting with him regularly in New York. In 1967, following Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, Goldberg asked me to consult with him on the drafting of Security Council Resolution 242, which sought to provide a framework for peace in that troubled part of the world. The resolution, which was carefully crafted in diplomatic language, called for Israel to return “territories” (not all territories or even the territories captured in the defensive war) in exchange for recognition by the Arab state and secure borders.40 This formulation was intended to allow Israel to make border adjustments it deemed necessary to its security.41 Israel accepted 242, but the Arab nations held a conference in Khartoum, where they issued their three infamous “no’s.” “No peace. No negotiation. No recognition.”42 Israel’s UN representative, Abba Eban, quipped that “[this was] the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.”43
From that point on, the UN (most particularly the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, UNESCO, and several other agencies) began its downhill spiral away from neutrality and toward becoming an organization focused almost exclusively on the imperfections of democracies such as the United States and Israel, while ignoring genocides and repressions by nondemocratic nations.
While Pol Pot was murdering millions, the UN did nothing. Its major bodies refused even to condemn the genocide until after the killing was over and millions lay dead. The General Assembly did not mention Cambodia in a single resolution until November 1979—nearly a year after the genocide’s end.44 Even then the resolution was framed in terms of sovereignty and did not mention specific human rights violations, let alone genocide.45
Just a few months after the Cambodian atrocities began, the General Assembly adopted the most infamous resolution in its history, resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”46 Seventy-two countries voted in favor, including, ironically, Cambodia. Thirty-five voted against and thirty-two abstained. This and other similar actions by the General Assembly led Abba Eban to proclaim that if Algeria offered a resolution than the earth was flat and Israel flattened it, it would pass 164 to 13, with 26 abstentions.47 The United States representative to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, fumed, saying that “the United States rises to declare before the General Ass
embly of the United Nations and before the world that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”48
The result of this resolution was that “Zionists” were blacklisted and banned from speaking at several colleges and universities that had “anti-racist” speaking policies. In a world where genocide, slavery, disappearances, torture, systematic rape, murder of dissidents, and other grave violations of human rights were being routinely perpetrated by its member nations, Zionism and Israel became the number one enemy of the UN, with more resolutions condemning Israel than all the other member nations combined.
The Zionism-racism resolution was ultimately rescinded in 1991 by a vote of the General Assembly,49 but it continued to animate UN actions, especially by the “Human Rights Council” of the UN (previously known as the UN Commission on Human Rights). In 2001, the council convened the first of several “Durban Conferences” against “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”50 Its primary focus was on Israel. It ignored racial genocides, slavery, and other obvious manifestations of racism and discrimination. The final preparatory session was held in Tehran. Israeli and Jewish NGOs were excluded.
According to Irwin Cotler, who attended the Durban Conference, the air was filled with hate speech, such as “too bad the Holocaust was not completed.” The conference became a “festival of hate such that we had not experienced anywhere at any time before.” To Cotler, it was “the most dangerous form of anti-Semitism that we are witnessing in the 21st Century.”51 And all of this was done under the aegis of the UN.52
The late congressman Tom Lantos, from California, observed:
Whenever the word “Holocaust” was read during the plenary review of the combined text, one of the Islamic delegates—usually Egypt—intervened to change “Holocaust” to “holocausts.” Adding insult to injury, the same delegates requested that the phrase “and the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population in historic Palestine” be inserted after the appearance of “holocausts.”53
A second “Durban Conference” was held in Geneva in 2009. Although the United States, Canada, Italy, and several other countries boycotted what it had become clear by this time would be another hate conference, I decided to travel to Geneva in an effort to restore the human rights agenda to its proper priorities, or if that wasn’t possible, to expose the UN Human Rights Council for what it had become—an enemy of neutral and universal human rights. It would be an uphill fight because the primary speaker invited to address the second Durban Conference was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying president of Iran.
I worked with several genuine human rights organizations in an effort to shame the Human Rights Council into broadening its agenda to include the genocides in Africa and other serious human rights abuses around the globe. We brought real victims of human rights abuses from Rwanda, Darfur, and other locations where genocides had been ignored by the UN. We conducted a parallel human rights conference in which we took testimony from these victims and witnesses, to whom the UN had refused to listen. I also delivered an address on the inversion of “human rights” and “human wrongs.”
I was staying in the same hotel as Ahmadinejad. My wife and I were having a drink in the lobby bar when Ahmadinejad and his entourage paraded through the lobby. He looked at us and smiled. I approached one of his handlers, introduced myself, and told him that I challenged the president to a debate about the Holocaust. His handler asked, “Where, at Harvard?” Ahmadinejad had previously spoken at Columbia University, and I suspected that he might have welcomed an invitation from Harvard. I replied, “No, the debate should be at Auschwitz; that’s where the evidence is.” He said he would communicate my offer to the president, who, he told me, was on the way to a press conference. I went and tried to ask Ahmadinejad directly whether he would debate me at Auschwitz. I was immediately hauled off by the Swiss police, removed from the hotel, and told I would not be allowed to return “for security reasons.” I insisted that “security reasons” did not justify protecting the president from a hostile question. They told me that my belongings would be removed from my room and my key changed. I immediately called someone I knew in the Obama administration, who phoned the U.S. consulate in Geneva, and I was allowed back into the hotel with an apology. The photograph of me being forcibly removed from the hotel was flashed around the world, with the following caption:
Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz is led away after declaring he planned to challenge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about his views on the Holocaust and Israel minutes before the meeting between Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz and the Iranian president in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 19, 2009.54
The next day, Ahmadinejad was scheduled to give his address. We were not allowed into the chamber but were told to go to a special room where we could watch and listen to his talk. We assembled and watched as Ahmadinejad was greeted with applause by many of the delegates. When he began to speak, we discovered that his words, delivered in Farsi, were not being translated to our room, but only to the assembly chamber. So I led a march into the chamber. Several delegations were absent, and we took their seats. As soon as Ahmadinejad denied the Holocaust, which he did near the beginning of his speech, I stood up and shouted “Shame!” and walked out, passing directly in front of his lectern. Many others walked out as well, including several European delegations. Ahmadinejad’s talk was a fiasco, and was so reported by the media. He had made a fool of himself—with our help.
The following year, the Durban Conference on human rights was convened in New York. Once again, we convened parallel conferences. In my address, I made the following point:
One important reason why there is no peace in the Middle East can be summarized tragically in two letters, UN. That building dedicated in theory to peace has facilitated terrorism, stood idly by genocide, given a platform to Holocaust deniers, and disincentivized the Palestinians from negotiating a reasonable two-state solution.…
How dare states such as Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Iran, Bahrain, Syria, Belarus, and other tyrannies too numerous to mention … lecture Israel about human rights? How dare states such as Turkey, that have attacked their own Kurdish minorities and Armenian minorities, and Russia, which has attacked its own Chechnyan minority … lecture Israel about peace?
Is there no sense of shame …? Has the word “hypocrisy” lost all meaning …? Does no one recognize the need for a single, neutral standard of human rights? Have human rights now become the permanent weapon of choice for those who practice human wrongs? For shame. For shame.55
THE WORST FIRST
If an organization—governmental or nongovernmental—is to remain true to a genuine commitment to universal and neutral human rights, it must prioritize the use of its resources. “The worst first” must be its governing criteria. The “worst” has two major components.
First and foremost is the nature and scope of the human wrongs: genocide, mass murder, widespread torture and mutilation of dissidents, rape as a policy, slavery, genuine apartheid, pervasive sexism,56 and other comparable abuses. Second is the inability of victims to secure relief from their own judiciary, from human rights groups, from the media, and from other domestic sources. Failure to prioritize is a sure sign of bias and lack of neutrality. Today’s UN and most “human rights” NGOs fail this test.57
My defense of Western democracies, and most particularly Israel, against deliberately exaggerated charges regarding human rights led to an offer that presented me with an existential challenge to my dual identity as an American and a Jew. In 2010, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, urged me to accept the position of Israel’s ambassador to the UN. He told me that in order to serve in that capacity, I would have to become an Israeli citizen, though I could also retain my American citizenship. I realized immediately that I could not accept the offer, despite the reality that I would have enjoyed the job immensely. The idea of standing up against the hypocrisy an
d double standard of the UN appealed to me. But I am an American, not an Israeli. For me to switch sides—even to a nation that is so close an ally to my own nation—would raise the specter of dual loyalty that has been directed at Jews since biblical times, when they lived as minorities in the lands of Egypt and Persia.58
After much discussion, I persuaded Netanyahu that if I accepted the position, it might be good for me, but it would not be good for American Jews or for Israel. So I declined, after promising the prime minister that I would be available, as an international lawyer and an American, to help defend Israel against unjust charges brought by international bodies such as the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and various UN agencies. But because I am a private citizen, I can also continue to criticize Israel’s human rights record when criticism based on a single universal standard is warranted by its actions.
Taking the Stand Page 56
