Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 57: When human rights NGOs fail, with Daniel Balson and Danielle Haas

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Human rights organizations help shape the world's understanding of conflicts, including the one between Israelis and Palestinians. Some of the biggest groups, especially Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are immensely influential in government, the media and civil society in Western countries. And for decades, their expertise, detailed reports and moral reputations made them agents of positive change.But signs are mounting that that's changing, and you don't have to be Israeli to notice it. They publish fewer professional reports, conduct fewer serious investigations, and have shifted their focus to partisan activism. They are often more quick to issue statements on climate issues or police violence in American cities or systemic racism or gender identity than the old bread-and-butter questions on which they built their reputations: international law, war and repressive regimes.And they have become partisan to the point of often failing that old fundamental mission. One startling example: Amnesty International continues to refuse to publish its report about the October 7 massacre over two years after the event. According to emails from some of the organization's top leaders, they are concerned that such a report about Hamas's egregious human rights abuses might help Israel make the case that Hamas are...well, serial and egregious human rights abusers.This goes beyond criticizing Israel, which any organization can and should do, to an inability to criticize Hamas.What happened? How did these organizations become so partisan and polarized, to the point that their original missions are no longer their top priority? How does the severing of ties with Israel's domestic human rights activists - Amnesty abruptly shut down its Israel chapter last year, even as those Israeli activists were stridently critiquing the war in Hebrew to Israelis - serve the cause of human rights or help Palestinians?We asked two former staffers at Amnesty and HRW, Daniel Balson and Danielle Haas, whether these organizations have lost their way; and if so, what caused it; and how the cause of human rights might be reclaimed from the political partisans who have steered it so far into the culture wars.This episode was sponsored by the Kleinman family of Manhattan, who asked to dedicate the episode to the memory of the 64 residents of Kibbutz Kfar Aza killed and the 19 kidnapped on October 7. The asked to add in their words: "After a recent visit to the kibbutz and spending time with one of the few remaining residents, we were overwhelmed by the devastation and meaningless loss of life. The destruction in the 'youth' section was particularly horrendous given the proximity to the Gaza border. On the other hand, we were impressed by stories of the bravery of the members of the community who tried to defend against the terrorists. We support the rebuilding of the kibbutz and those members of the kibbutz who decide to return and rebuild. We also pray for the return of the bodies of the hostages still being held in Gaza.”Thank you to the Kleinman family for their support and their dedication.If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and opinions, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a really interesting episode of Ask Haviv Anything. Thanks for being here. About a month ago, the free press published in what to me was an absolutely astonishing article. I don't follow the day-to-day workings of the International Human Rights NGO world. Amnesty International Human Rights Watch Doctors Without Borders. I generally don't think that they are predisposed to taking Israel's position on anything or liking Israel very much. fairly clear that they're convinced that Israel's a pretty evil actor in the world. But I had not actually understood the depth of the animus. And in this piece, written by Charles Lane and the free press,

he actually revealed something I had not been following, which is that Amnesty International was working on a report on the October 7 massacre. And it was still two years later, September 2025, working on that report. And it was having an awfully hard time publishing the report. And it turns out there was actually a fierce struggle within the organization, which is still going on

today against publishing the report. And that's absolutely fascinating because it turns out that a report by a human rights organization on the massacre of Israelis on October 7 contains some facts, some findings that are not very complementary to

Hamas, to the perpetrators of the massacre. And multiple heads of countries, of divisions within Amnesty International, were sending letters, signing petitions, pressuring the leadership of the organization not to release a report

that finds massive human rights abuses by the Hamas organization, not to release it because it would help the Israelis make the case against Hamas, make the case for continuing the war. Usman Hamid was as a section director for Indonesia, still is, as far as I know, literally

wrote in a letter, so cited in this article, the report could be used to divert attention from the current crisis, by which he means the crisis, the humanitarian crisis, the political crisis in Gaza, or justify ongoing genocide. It was astonishing here is that human rights watch managed, many other organizations managed, organizations that don't like Israel very much. Amnesty is torn from within. There is letters back and forth, pressure in different directions over the question of whether to acknowledge publicly a massive massacre by an organization whose own political program is genocidal. if we reveal that to the world, Amnesty is concerned, then the other side will continue a war.

It's another, you know, since then, that was about a month ago, late September, since then, I came across an article in Fox News, in which Alain de Stech, I'm definitely mispronouncing his name, apologies, who was a doctor with Medicines en Frontier, meaning doctors without borders in the 1980s,

and was the Secretary General. of Doctors Without Borders in the 1990s. And he told Fox News in an interview, I'll put all these links, by the way, in the show notes, that MSF worked with Hamas in Gaza and that it wouldn't have done so in the 90s, and that it wasn't the same organization that it was 15 years later,

and that that collaboration at the same time, MSF actually came out and publicly raged against the Gaza humanitarian. foundation for working with the Israelis to feed Gazans while MSF worked hand in hand on the ground with Hamas. That kind of partisanship, he said, was new, and it has become a biased, partial, and militant organization. That is a quote.

I asked Daniel Haas, a senior editor at Human Rights Watch from 2009 to 2023, who worked in New York, worked in Israel. She was based in the program office, which oversees all of Human Rights Watch's global and thematic work. She edited a wide range of publications, oversaw production of the organization's flagship annual book, which is the World Report on the state of human rights in the world, and is now a critic of Human Rights Watch. I asked her to join me, and together with Daniel Balson, who was advocacy director for Europe and Eurasia at Amnesty International USA from 2017 to 2012 to 2003, when he resigned in protest from Amnesty in the immediate aftermath of Hamas' October 7 attacks. He's based in Washington.

He was Amnesty's chief lobbyist for the region. He engaged Congress, the White House, talking about human rights crises, from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to the fall of Afghanistan, to the Taliban. And both Daniel and Danielle have a lot to say about these organizations that a growing number of data points that have come to my attention, and I'm not following this. This is making the mainstream press. These have become, I want to ask, I suspect, I believe I'm coming around to really believing, not just on the narrow issue of Israel, which I have some understanding of and have some views about and really believe that they've failed us, but everywhere, deeper than

just a specific conflict. They have become something partisan. They have become not what they were supposed to be. So I'm going to, we're going to get into that. I'm really glad that Daniel Daniel are here. We're going to crack that open. Before that, one minute of sponsor. I just want to say thank you to the Kleinman family of Manhattan, who asked us to dedicate this episode to the memory of the 64 residents of Kibbutz Kvah Azah, who were killed and the 19 members of the kibbutz who were kidnapped on October 7. They asked to add in their words this brief dedication. After a recent visit to the kibbutz and spending time with one of the few remaining residents. We were overwhelmed by the devastation and meaningless loss of life.

The destruction in the youth area was particularly horrendous. Given the proximity to the Gaza border, that was the area closest to Gaza. On the other hand, we were impressed by stories of the bravery of the members of the community who tried to defend against the terrorists. We support the rebuilding in the kibbutz and those members of the kibbutz that decide to return and rebuild, and pray for the return of the bodies of the hostages, still being held. in Gaza. Thank you so much

to the Kleinman family for that dedication. Daniel, how are you? Thank you for joining me. Thanks. Thank you so much for having me. Let's get into it.

I'm going to throw out the big question and then we'll dive into the details. The data points are mounting. These organizations take sides in conflicts. And I don't mean take sides, you know, always siding with,

I don't know what, whoever isn't violating human rights or are willing to critique whoever is violating human rights because it's about a human rights standard. We're seeing now in the October 7 reported amnesty and in 100 other things that we're going to get into, they're willing to cover for, they're willing to hide, they're willing to pretend not to see massive massacres

and human rights violations if it doesn't fit a larger political program. What happened? What happened to an NGO human rights world that you come from, you grew up and you care about, We've talked about this before this episode. What went wrong? Am I characterizing it fair? Have they really gone off the reservation that way?

Or what's going on there? Yeah, sure. Happy to share a couple of things. You know, I understand, especially from following the media, from speaking with friends who are in Israel, that Israelis don't much care about what Amnesty or Human Rights Watch says. There's a narrative and not altogether unfair. narrative that these are organizations that are always against Israel. They're going to be critical

of Israel no matter what Israel does. But they should care. And the reason they should care is because both amnesty and human rights watch as part of this human rights duopoly maintain a tremendous amount of power sway. Their reports, their outputs, their statements have massive consequences. These are organizations they have elite reporters on speed dial. These are organizations whose staffers meet with policymakers, members of Congress, the Senate, the White House, routinely. This was my job when I was at Amnesty International. That's how I know. They're also forming the future of American thought on these questions.

Amnesty specifically is a grassroots organization. There are hundreds of chapters of Amnesty International around the country in high schools and universities. I got my first taste of international affairs working as the treasurer for my high school's Amnesty International Club. So right now, there are thousands of American young people, teenagers, young adults who are writing their members of Congress, who are writing their senators, the executive branch, and demanding that the U.S. government take steps to isolate Israel, cut it off diplomatically, cut it off militarily, under the Amnesty International moniker and the Amnesty International brand. They're tremendously consequential.

Now, in terms of what happened, I think that there are a number of things that have happened with respect to Amnesty. First of all, we've been sort of privy to some of these riots, these violent uprisings on college campuses. episodes were Jews were intimidated, harassed. The people who are behind these demonstrations, they don't just disappear into the ether upon graduation. They get jobs. And one of the most prestigious places where a young activist might be able to land is Amnesty International. So some of these ideas, these perspectives, are functionally imported into. amnesty. Now, it's important to note that Amnesty International has changed. It changes quite a bit.

And that's because as an organization that's functionally subservient to the interests of its donor class, its volunteer grassroots base, it has to chase the most recent current thing that is driving popular attention. The people who fund and support amnesty are disproportionately highly progressive. They retirees and students who have time to dedicate to such things. So in practice, this means that when climate was sexy, Amnesty was a climate organization. I was there when they handed their ambassador of conscious award, their top honor to Greta Turnberg, back in her previous iteration. In the mid-2010s, it became a policing organization, because that's what was interesting. It then, at the start of the pandemic, morphed into a public

health organization. I remember very well sitting in on meetings of people scrambling and saying, what are we going to say about the pandemic? We don't have a written track record on this. And then in 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, it became a racial justice organization. So this is important because Amnesty, if you were to ask it, what is its chief mission? It would say, well, we are the guardian and the guarantor of international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict. So I promise that the Hague Convention say absolutely nothing about equitable distribution of PPE in a time of a pandemic. The Hague conventions do not also touch on carbon trading or fossil fuel emissions. But that doesn't matter.

That all fundamentally becomes subservient to chasing this next high and the next high of whatever's in the media and whatever is the main story. So of course when October 7th happened, Amnesty International became an anti-Israel organization. and I should say perhaps not became, but really accented that line of its thinking. Danielle, you spend many years in Human Rights Watch. Is that how it works at Human Rights Watch? Human Rights Watch has really been coming after Israel for a very long time. I have to say, every single person on this call, I think I'm saying something correct, please correct me if I'm wrong, thinks that Israel does a lot of things wrong

and has publicly criticized Israel over the years quite a bit. none of this is about whether it is legitimate to criticize or even whether we agree or disagree with the criticism, but with these internal mechanisms, these internal cultures where it isn't about what Israel is doing wrong anymore. It's about, as Daniel says, the narrative that they're latching on to, the politics, the fundraising, something in the culture has changed to the point where if you can't criticize Hamas, it's not about rights anymore. Daniel, is that true at Human Rights Watch as well? Yeah, I think it is.

And I think I would echo what Daniel says about the power of these organizations. It can't be underestimated. Put another way, I would say that maybe they're the organizations who most influence your life without you realizing it that you haven't thought about. Because they really are in your classrooms as your curriculum and as your teachers. And they are in the halls of power with the leaders of state. And they are in courtrooms as expert witnesses. They are in newsrooms as sources of information. So we tend to think of them as quite distinct entities,

but really they've got tentacle sounds, you know, not to be able to obsession, but they link to many, many other worlds in which they're also the promoters and accelerators and definers of some of what, the worst of what we're seeing today. So they become less watchdogs than mirrors, actually, than what's going on. architects as well. And I would agree with Daniel, too, that this has been a feature of what happened at Human Rights Watch. He said, I think the phrase he used was that they sort of began this process after October the 7th and accentuated.

That is what I would say, that this was already, this was no surprise their position that came on October 7th, 8th, because it had long been in the making. This didn't happen overnight by any stretch of the imagination. This was a process that happened over years. And sitting in these meetings past post-October 7th was a bit like, I felt like watching the horse be let out the gate finally, actually, rather than anything that was at all new. So you had long had the drumbeat of Israel as an apartheid state, and you had people who were key in the organization who literally didn't want to talk about hostages unless apartheid was mentioned, who, who pressed hard for people in other countries where they have media access to talk about apartheid. It felt more like the fruition of a plan than the beginning of one.

There was in Ha'arets very recently an op-ed by Yereev Mohar, who was one of the heads of Amnesty's Israel chapter. these are people who are, I think, in terms of Israeli political spectrum, on the far left, on the radical left, maybe even. And they really stand athwart Israeli society. They stand almost in opposition to nearly the totality of Israeli society at a time of a real political mobilization for a war that most Israelis understood as an existential war. The Israelis, on the news in the West, the war looks like it's basically contained in Gaza. It is not, to the Israeli mind, just Gaza. It is Iran. It is Hezbollah.

It is hundreds of thousands of missiles aimed at our cities. It is a genuinely massive existential threat being built out by genocidal enemies out to destroy us. And Amnesty's Israel chapter was standing there screaming. You can't misbehave in Gaza. You can't have air strikes that you don't check better. You can't. You know, there are things that are being done. terribly wrong in Gaza, screaming that to an Israeli society that was, frankly, having

trouble listening, and certainly in the immediate aftermath of October 7. And because Amnesty then came out last year with a determination that there was a genocide happening in Gaza, and the Israel chapter was not willing to sign on to that specific determination, which Amnesty claims it's not a political or religious or spiritual or dogmatic, but in fact, a legal determination. And because the Israel chapter, which actually, you know, if you're a member of the Israel chapter of amnesty, you've lost friends. Nobody who is a member of any amnesty office in Geneva or in New York is losing friends over it. Amnesty because they wouldn't say the word genocide, and they said everything else about what's happening in Gaza

that amnesty wanted, literally shut them down, literally cut them out. And this person, Yereev Mohar, who was kicked out of basically amnesty by with that Israel chapter being shut down. or kicked out of the system, publishes an op-ed now where he points out that Amnesty has nothing to say about Hamas coming out of the tunnels and just murdering all of its opposition in Gaza, not just collaborators with the Israelis, just people who randomly took to social media.

What is happening inside an organization that makes it unable to come out and say, maybe Hamas are bad guys? You know what? Maybe the Israelis are monsters, but how could you literally be incapable of saying Hamas? are bad guys. What is happening there? What is actually, what drove that kicking out of the Israelis? I should just say, I've met Yereve, he worked with my dad, my dad was chairman of rabbi's human rights for a while,

I have a little bit of a foot in the door of this activist leftist world inside Israel. It doesn't matter where my opinions are. I know these people. I respect these people. I'm astounded that Amnesty could throw overboard people who actually sacrifice for the cause, unlike any of the people who work at Amnesty, what is happening to this organization? I think there are a few, can I go? Sorry, I mean, there are a few things going on as to why that could happen.

One is that they are unregulated fiefdoms, these organizations. So despite saying that there is transparency in this due process, there was no due process that occurred in the shuttering of the Israel chapter whatsoever, nor did they have to answer to anyone when they did it. It was absolute

retribution, pure and simple, getting rid of people who they didn't want in the first place and getting rid of essentially a country they didn't want represented in their organization. So it goes to absolutely how they operate without any accountability. But also it goes to the fact that these organizations are essentially

civil religions. They have all the markings of a religion in point of fact. You know, they have their they have their ecumenical briefs in the form of reports. They have their leadership and their saints in the form of the people who established the movement, Peter Benison of Amnesty and Eleanor Roosevelt and so on. They have their jargon, they have their rituals and their processes, and as actual religion has declined, so human rights has filled that space.

And so when you speak out against a religion, you are excommunicated from the religion. And that is what happened to the Israel chapter of amnesty. And that these organizations that were founded based on exegesis and debate, if you look at the founding and the formation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they were going back and forth constantly about all sorts of things. What were rights? What were they applied to? It was built into the fabric of human rights to discuss it and argue it.

And actually what's happened, it's become dogmatic. it's become extreme and messianic, and therefore the head of Amnesty can get rid of an entire chapter of its organization. So I have two questions. One is, but nevertheless you're getting rid of you are weakening within Israeli society. The people advancing your cause within Israeli society.

Now maybe Amnesty thinks that all it needs to do to end the Gaza War or to change Israeli behavior is convince their best friends in New York that they go drinking beers with. Maybe that's what they're going to be, how they plan to end the Gaza War. But arguably, it would be more useful to engage Israelis on ending the Gaza War.

That arguably, what would cause you to kick the Israelis doing that work willing to carry your banner in a society slightly hostile to you because you're very hostile to them? They're the ones you throw under the bus? The prejudice, I hear what you're saying, Danielle, that is exactly what it feels like to me,

but it's concerning to hear, it from you from within who lived in this human rights watch world, who believed in it. But they don't care about these Israelis who want to carry their banner into Israeli society. That tells me they don't even care about Gazans, because it's not about actually ending the Ghazans' wars, about feeling good about themselves. Am I going too far? So that's, you know, exactly right. Because you're asking the exactly right question, why would Amnesty International Organization that's nominally committed to tackling abuses by the government of Israel terminate a chapter full of some of the government of Israel's loudest critics.

These are people who spent their career criticizing the occupation, the military's use of force, the Israeli government's treatment of civil society. And I'll admit, I was puzzled by this for quite some time as well. And I think the reason it's puzzling is because any advocacy strategy, look, I work in advocacy, in lobbying, in public affairs for a living. and anybody who's in this universe will tell you that any advocacy strategy for it to be successful needs to take into account the real concerns of its target. Even in situations of substance of disagreement, you want to understand your target's limitations,

their fears, their concerns, so you can help influence them and move them. So once you realize this, it becomes clear that Amnesty's closure of its Israel chapter was not some action it took out of the blue. It was merely the kind of coup de grace, the concluding final act of a long-term strategy, which has been to alienate virtually every single individual organization in the Israeli mainstream that is involved in the policymaking process. Amnesty has no supporters in Israel. It has nobody who will pick up its phone calls, engage it, listen to it, let alone implement its decisions. Why? Why is that good for Palestinians that Amnesty can't get an Israeli to pick up the phone?

It's not. Because the answer is that shaping Israeli policy is not the goal of Amnesty International. If it was, it would start having conversations about, you know, oh, why is the IDF using 10,000-pound bombs in Gaza not 5,000-pound bombs? Those have a smaller blast radius. There'll be less civilian damage. And that's a reasonable discussion to have. But that's not the discussion amnesty wants to have. It wants to have a discussion about words like apartheid. It wants to have a discussion about genocide, because the goal is not to actually shape outcomes in Gaza for Palestinians or military decision-making or how Israel structures its kill chain. That's not the exercise here. The goal is to win plotts, support, retweets, donations from a group of like-minded organizations

and clicks. That's the fundamental goal of its framing of its analysis, of its advocacy. It works in a certain social milieu, the people operating this social milieu. So it becomes this very bunker-like hive mentality. You know, you see this play out on the advocacy standpoint all the time. Just a year or two ago, Amnesty International USA's executive director was speaking in front of a group of democratic left-of-center women. And they were asking him questions about the apartheid report. And somebody asked him if he believes Israel should exist as a Jewish state. And he, not being Jewish, was sort of brazen enough to come out and say, well, listen, no, I think most Israelis would be far more comfortable living in a non-Jewish state.

Obviously, who is he to say something like this? This resulted in massive pushback. Every single sitting Democratic member of Congress wrote a letter condemning him. But the more interesting question is, like, well, why would you? would you say such a thing? And the reason you would say such a thing is because when 90% of your conversations are within this closed, like-minded bubble of intellectual allies, you sometimes crosswires and mistake one audience for the other. And when you say certain things that might work well in your WhatsApp group or your signal group to the broader public, that's incredibly

alienating. But at the end of the day, it doesn't impede the goal. And the goal is, amnesty's fundraising efforts and amnesty's coalition and relationship building efforts. I mean, I would say it was more than that. I think there are ideological missions of these organizations that they want to execute. And that is clear in some of the Middle East divisions of these organizations now. And they are not interested, as you say, in shaping or shifting Israeli society at all. And this was reflected in Human Rights Watch, but the fact that the head of, we research to do with Israel and Palestine is the same person and a BDS activist in his previous

life. So if you're really interested in influencing Israel, you certainly don't put a BDS activist in charge of Israel work just like you wouldn't put a settler in charge of Palestinian work. It's a real sort of, you know, FU in a way to Israel, and it's showing we actually have no intention of engaging you. It was also articulated openly that the strategy, you, you know, of the organisation was one of narrative change. And I found the staggering sitting in a meeting in 2000s that they were overtly saying, we are not interested in just being watchdogs.

We are not interested in just writing reports. We are actively interested in changing the narrative about Israel. We are going to shape the story about Israel. And this is a real feature of what's going on in these organizations. They are becoming activist entities. So while they say, I mean, still operate under banners of new traffic, They function very differently. I was also borne out with the fact that in July 2023,

Human Rights Watch joined forces with a Hollywood sort of talent agency in order to plant human rights related stories and information. And they did this quite openly. There was an article in The Guardian about it. Now, when you think about this happening in July 2023, and then there's October 7, 2023, and they've got this pipeline, a narrative pipeline, going to not only Hollywood, but influencers that you would recognize and things like this, then you are seeing a far different

kind of operation than one we've all come to think warmly in our hearts as being the human rights organizations of the old. Danielle, I want to, the two of you come from very different actual activities in these organizations. Daniel, you dealt at amnesty with advocacy and advocacy to politicians and government, but generally also advocacy, public advocacy. Danielle, you were part of the research,

part of the tracking, part of this traditional activity of human rights watches you're describing that they've tilted away from, editing the World Report. How does that work in practice? Does that actually, I have seen mainly because we wanted to do an episode on this here, so I went back to look. But I've over the years also generally been deeply unimpressed by their reports. So in 2024 at the end of last year, they came out with a report that said that Israel was carrying out a crime called extermination in Gaza. Extermination.

It's not even genocide. It's not even killing people. Genocide is of crime of intent. It's not that Israel wants them to die because they're Palestinians. It is, in fact, a crime of extermination. And when you read the report, it's all self-definitional. In other words, they'll literally quote, I don't know what, Galant saying, their animals, and they will cut the sentence before where he said Hamas,

and they'll cut the sentence after where he said Hamas, and they'll just stay with the animals quote. And then because it's a result is civilian deaths, then clearly it's a good. And you're like, wait, that wasn't an argument. You just laid out six feelings you're having. There's a legal question here. There's real events. These quotes that you're using to determine intent of genocide,

you actually have to position them in the context of their being said, or you're not making a legal case. I mean, either we are detailed and justice is in the tiniest of these details that contextualize and clarify and unsussing out these details. Now, if that's not what you're doing, that's not what you're doing. That's fine. You're screaming to the sky and to anyone who will listen, that the Israelis are doing terrible things in Gaza. Do it.

That's a legitimate activity of human beings in free countries. I'm for it. But don't pretend to have this vast research. My question to you, Danielle, is, is there serious research? Is it just the stuff that's advocacy and garbage and shallow and not serious, not legally, not intellectually? I don't read these reports and learn more. about what the IDF is doing than I already knew. There's no, they literally pull their information out of press reports and not even good press

reports, usually from very far left media. You were right at the nexus of the research. Is it just on Israel that they fall? Am I missing deep research? Because I'm not reading the right policy papers. Or is this how they talk about everything everywhere? Do these organizations actually do serious research as they claim? Well, I think they certainly have trainings in research.

They have standards, written policies and standards about research. But I think it's fair to say that it is incredibly variable. And it's also, when you say research, you turn, your mind tends to go to some form of academic process or some sort of rigor. They certainly use rigor in the terminology of their own work. Absolutely. It's not rigorous or in any way on the same sort of level as academic research. It is not, I'll tell you what it is and what it isn't. So what it is, it does have sort of.

of processes and it has an editing process in the organization and it has a sort of theoretically guidelines about methodology. But within those, there's no one really checking whether much of that is actually implemented. So you can get reports. I'll talk about the World Report. I'm sorry, just to clarify, you mean there are processes that you're supposed to follow in writing a report about Indonesia. Forgive me, Indonesia. I just pulled a random country. And there's nobody checking that anybody's doing it. You know what? I've been too polite until now. It's garbage.

You read a report from Human Rights Watch, and if you're someone who knows the material, you know that they pulled it out of tweets. You know that it's literally just their buddies telling them they use language that is, you know, uses words, as you say, like rigor.

But there's no there. I learn nothing from these reports. I want to know if my army is screwing up massively. I think the Israeli army in Gaza has, in several points, committed crimes. I'm absolutely convinced of it. I've seen the videos. I think the Israeli army at several points, or the Israeli government has made decisions that were wantonly cruel to Palestinians beyond what the war effort required. I put out, you know, podcast episodes about it. I am totally willing to hear that a war in the middle of a civilian population isn't being fought as it should

be fought. And I learn nothing new from these reports. I learn no new way of reasoning. I see no reason to reach their conclusions. They start from the conclusions and go backwards and fill in the gaps. And so is it all garbage? Am I wrong? What do you see from the inside? What kind of process do they even have?

Why should we take them seriously? It's not all garbage. And that's part of the problem. It's what's going on in these organizations is everyone is sort of sinking with their failures in certain areas. There is, of course, good research going on. And there are outlines as to how methodology is conducted.

I will say, for example, that research, pure research, the products for which these organizations are known, the big reports are dramatically decreasing and had dramatically decreased by the time I left. Essentially, I was hired because of the volume of reports. By the time I left, there were virtually no reports coming through the system that I was dealing with. I was dealing with other products.

Why not? What was the change? The change was an absolute shift towards social media. media towards op-eds and shorter, more whitey pieces. And that's significant in terms of methodology, because social media stuff didn't go through the legal process, the legal scrutiny that reports did. So reports would go through the most rigorous process, social media tweets the least.

And of course, that's where the volume is and the eyes are going. And there's a huge disparity in the rigor. There are certainly key players in these organizations, who know full well, they can get away with doing a hashtag and a implication on a tweet that sets off a genocide train or an Al-Ajali was bombed by Israel train that turns out not to be true without having to go through actual any process. So there are huge holes in the methodology of what goes on. And there are huge holes in the research, but also the editing process.

And I would quickly give us an example. So when you talked about the World Report, this is the World Report. It was often used to proper computers and hold open doors, but the idea was that it was a real resource. And I would just say that this involved hundreds of people in the organisation, multiple lines of editing. And the Israel chapter, for example, would go through around eight different layers of editing,

including the head of the organisation. It was the only chapter seen by the head of the organisation. And yet, when I got it, and this was the last year I got it in 2022, There were still errors of actual inaccuracies and some of these misleading half statements that you said. And when I reviewed it, like I reviewed every single chapter of this book, every single page, it was the only chapter where I received vitriol from the author and excuses made for the editing process. So I was told, well, one person was on sabbatical and this person had an overloaded schedule.

And so there was actually no thanks for catching errors at the very end of a process, but more like, well, why would she do that was the implication? And in fact, it also implied that I was doing something in particular with this chapter. So in short, what I would say is it's a process that is incredibly prone and vulnerable to being distorted and manipulated because by the end, there was virtually no product that went out of the door 100% checked from beginning. to end a report by the final round of editors. And furthermore, I would say there were known cases of fabrication that continue to circulate without being corrected today.

For example? For example, they know exactly. Multiple layers in the organization are well aware of the products by a particular person that have remained in the public domain, uncorrected, without any sign. from the organization that there's a problem because they didn't want to acknowledge it and compromise the integrity of the work. Can you tell us who it is?

Do you have any... No, but they know full well. And so do so many people. It's like an open secret. But if you bring it out, then you are the person who's outside the fold who's somehow not loyal. And I would say that I'm not loyal

to an organization that doesn't stick to its principles. I'm loyal to the principles. And so many people are stuck in organizations not knowing what to do because they're being silenced. These organizations are not fulfilling their mandates, but if they speak out, they're passed as sort of, you know, the disgruntled employees, as was I. Which I found to start, I couldn't believe it when they actually called me a disgruntled employee because I thought it was such a caricature. It was almost staggering. And to their great disgrace, of course, much research has shown that people who do speak out are in fact,

not driven by disgruntlement at all, but actually a moral, moral conscience. Daniel, to what Danielle just said, I just had a dust-up on Twitter, forgive me, on X, excuse me, over Zoranamadani explaining to people back in September of 2023 that the NYPD is violent and brutal, and its boots were laced by the IDF because it trains, co-trains, shares intelligence, has an office in Israel. By the way, it does in Qatar and Jordan and Singapore and Mexico and Colombia and whatever. I don't know if that's a good use of NYPD funding, but if they're training with dictatorships, with secret polices that disappear people, what I was fascinating to me was a lot of that discourse among progressives about NYPD training and generally American police training with with Israel came out as you said

during the police, right, the Ferguson situation story and George Floyd and that whole explosion of police violence, the black experience, that whole world, racial justice. And Amnesty ran with it, tagged along with it.

And in 2016, it put out this report that was very influential that kind of sparked this conversation among progressives that Zoro and Mamdani was responding to a couple of years ago. And it was a report about how the NYPD is not only training with the Israelis, but learning violence as a means of oppression from its collaboration with the IDF. You heard it here first, folks. The American police had to learn from the Israelis to be violent. And then I

went looking for it for this conversation to ask you about it. And I discovered something that really surprised me. It's not a report. It's a blog post. There's no serious report. There are no footnotes. There's no serious grappling with the point that the NYPD maybe shouldn't train with Israel because, ew, yuck, Israel, but it's perfectly okay for it to train with Qatar, where it is actually illegal to be pregnant while unmarried. Where it is actually illegal to critique either Islam or the Emir, where it is illegal to leave Islam. And on and on and on.

They train with Jordan. There's an office in Jordan. of the NYPD. And Jordan has a secret police, a muhaabara, that arrest people without any recourse to habeas corpus or any other rights. And so it's just, Danielle just said this about human rights watch. It is increasingly not about research. Increasingly we're seeing just, you know, tweets, long-form tweets in the case of this blog post from 2016. Is that also amnesty? Did you see that in amnesty reporting and how amnesty handles situations and questions? This is an enormously influential blog post.

Yeah, I think, look, with respect certainly to how amnesty does its work and how amnesty treats this question of Israel, I think it's important for folks to think about two things. First of all, what specifically is wrong about amnesty's approach, but also what an organization is, With respect to the questions of anti-Semitism, people often think about violence, aggression, open and overt prejudice. And yes, some of those things existed at amnesty. You know, I remember very well a non-Jewish colleague who had a Jewish spouse. He worked on the Middle East, and he was repeatedly interrogated about his spouse's surname, which to several volunteer member leaders, was believed to be, I don't know, slightly too Semitic for their

liking. But really, that's not the dominant trend. What matters most for an organization like amnesty, for any organization, it's not just its output, but the fact that the organization is the sum, the manifestation of tens of thousands of decisions that are made. What do I mean by that? You know, questions like how are resources allocated? What's said? What's not said? What are the rules, what are the exceptions, who gets to decide, who's assigned to do the work, what gets pitched to governments, to donors, to the grassroots base, right? So it's in the answers to these questions for an organization far long before it releases a report or a tweet that it starts to go wayward. Let me just share a couple of examples. So in 2019, a gunman in Jersey,

city walked into a kosher store and shot, I believe, killed one or two people. But there are several people killed. There are several people injured. And one might think that this would be something that amnesty would jump on. This was a time when the organization was preoccupied with a question of gun violence. It was a gun violence issue. It was preoccupied with a question of minority rights. Here you have a minority being targeted expressly because of their identity.

But they said nothing. Why? Was it because the victims were Jews? Probably, that's part of it, but also because the perpetrator in this case couldn't be neatly categorized as a member of the right wing, right? Or another question. What are the rules and the exceptions? So on social media, amnesty has a policy. You can't say anything on social media that directly contradicts the organization's prerogatives. This is normal, it's fine.

It's something that all organizations do. If you work for General Electric, you can't go online and start spouting off about how light bulbs are bad. and that's completely understandable. But there are exceptions to this rule. So those exceptions often form around Israel. In 2022, I believe there was an attack, a terrorist attack on Dizengov Street in Tel Aviv, a Palestinian gunman walked up to a cafe, opened fire. He killed three Israelis, I believe six were injured.

And this attack was roundly condemned across the world, including by Mahmoud Abbas. One person who didn't condemn this attack was a board member. of Amnesty International USA. She took to social media and started sharing incitement to violence, implicit celebration of the attack. One of the tweets that she shared said that the Palestinians have declared it clearly, this land is our land. The occupation has no choice but to leave, hashtag Tel Aviv operation.

Another tweet that she had shared later was a cartoon of a hand, shaped like the land of Israel, Gaza, West Bank, and was flicking away a star of David. She also shared that there's nothing called Israel. It is just Palestine territory. So you have a board member of a human rights organization who is constantly sharing incitement, eliminationist rhetoric. They work for a human rights organization. Just a couple of short brief examples more.

You know, who suffering matters, right? Is this person still on the board? Correct. They are. And this person is a fan of violence. It's a fan of political violence against civilians in certain context if they happen to agree with the cause, with the larger cause. So during this time, a group of Jewish staffers came together and we pushed back internally. I was included in that group.

I wasn't the only one there. But we raised our concerns with the senior most leadership. I'm sorry. I can't get over this. And were there non-Jews in this group of Jewish staffers? I'm not sure. I don't want to speak out of turn. Basically a group of Jewish staffers. So you had to be a Jew at Amnesty to notice that this person supported the killing of civilians if the cause was right.

Were there people at Amnesty who were not Jews? In other words, there was another reason. The Jews were targeted in both of the attacks you described, that he was either silent on or that an Amnesty Board member was thrilled about. We didn't receive widespread support. from the employment body at the organization. I think that's a fair way to describe it. We were able to secure a meeting with the executive director, with the entire C-suite, where we laid out these concerns.

We said, look, what is this organization becoming? You have a human rights organization who's a member of whose board is cheering for human rights violations. This is simply unhinged. You know, and the response we got was outrageous. I mean, the response, first of all, with portraying the board member as a victim. That is a result of this kind of documentation of her tweets.

She was facing threats and abuse. During a subsequent hearing, the discussion internally, the executive director implied that the board member stated that she couldn't be anti-Semitic because she was of Arab descent and therefore herself a Semite. This is a common trope that's used. I mean, these are not serious discourses. You know, and I think you're picking on something that's important,

which is that sometimes the responses to these questions are so laughable in the extreme. You know, on the 100th anniversary of October 7th, Amnesty was going to do a statement. And one of my former colleagues said, listen, if you're going to do a statement, you should at least mention the hostages in Gaza when you talk about suffering in Gaza. And the response that she received from another one of her colleagues was, listen, when we say suffering in Gaza, we mean all the people who are in Gaza. Of course the hostages are necessarily included, right? I mean, this is laughable.

This is simply not serious. And did they actually mention the hostages, or were the hostages not mentioned in the final? I don't believe the final product in the document that I'm thinking of mentioned the hostages. But this is what's going on. It is so overt now. The disdain for Jewish staff who have anything to say or any critique to make. In huge contrast, I might add to. the self-flagellation and genuflection that went on post George Floyd and post, you know, Asian hate, and after Me Too, they couldn't get themselves to new policies faster.

I mean, I was just watching it like a train. There was another policy, another policy. And then there were like meetings where everyone was supposed to examine their internal bias. And yet we have two years of documented outrageous public output, never more. mind what Jewish staff are enduring within these organizations, which is all sorts of subversion and vitriolic treatment, overt and subtle, and they can't be bothered to do a thing. And they literally basically laugh in your face if you bring stuff on. Our time is running out, even though I feel like each single individual's story I want to dig into.

Danielle, you have spoken out about these organizations. Daniel, I think this is your very first time publicly critiquing amnesty. Is that right? I was quoted, I believe, in a few articles before, but I think this is the first long-form discussion I'm having on the subject. Do you, either of you still believe in human rights NGOs? Do you think they're repairable? Do you think they should be repaired?

Do you think they should deal with human rights rather than particular political platforms, you know, the thing about Jews is to me maybe the most damning and not because I think it's anti-Semitic per se, but because that shows me that the rot comes from these progressive hierarchies of legitimized victimhood. So it's whether you're white or not white, whether you are powerful or not powerful, whether you deserve to have your story. examined or don't deserve it and should shut up because, you know, you have privilege. That progressive academic, sort of saturating academia, that kind of progressive hierarchy of legitimacy is what you're describing, took over these places.

And so it's just this total failure. They don't produce legal analyses of crimes and rights and problems. They just don't even try. They don't even bother. They basically rely on nobody ever reading the report and noticing there's nothing in them. They basically rely on everybody's brains, have been hardwired by social media, to only want social media. And so they never have to go deeper than that and are allowed to just exist in this in-between space, essentially writing on the respectability they earned in a previous generation when they would do the hard work and could be trusted to do the hard work.

Can they be fixed? Should they be fixed? Do we even need them? anymore? Or are they just part of the infrastructure of this kind of collapse into some of the worst ideas that are now percolating through the American sense-making elites? I mean, we need human rights. Start there. We need human rights. Whether we need these legacy organizations to be their bearers is another question. In fact, they've proven over and over again that they're increasingly not. And getting away from the specificity of the research,

And there is good research and there are legal eyes on some of this stuff. The problem writ large is that they are departing from universalism and basic principles that pin down the human rights movement that apply to all people, no matter where they are, no matter of their background. So going back to what I was saying earlier, why I don't think these organizations are that redeemable is because they haven't shown any indication they care less about the state they're in. In fact, they've constantly rejected, deflected, and any response to this will probably be, again, to say, you know, something ad hominem about Daniel or me, or, but what you'll never hear from them is, wow, that's interesting, let's look into that, and we could have something here. And if we do have an investigation, we will make those findings public, and we will follow up in a year or two, because, you know, they have done things, and then nothing ever changes.

So personally, I feel that they have themselves indicated they're not interested in changing, and therefore the solution is to establish new grassroots organizations, much like they were in their day, very humble organizations based on a letter writing campaign, that was amnesty, and based on monitoring groups of the Helsinki Act, that was Human Rights Watch, and let the growth begin anew with critically journalists and the public and policy members. putting their eyes on these organizations for once and treating them like any other source, rather than treating them like they are the oracles themselves that are beyond reproach and investigation.

Yeah, I think that this is all right. You know, why is an organization like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch powerful? It's not because they have an airborne division. They can't enforce their will on anybody. They don't have untold millions. they're not, you know, they're relatively well-resourced for an NGO, but they're not Berkshire Hathaway. They're not Invidia.

They have no democratic legitimacy. Nobody elected them to anything in a popular election. They're powerful because of the perceived view that they have moral suasion, right? If people think they are impartial arbiters of human rights, they will continue to have influence. If they don't think that they have these impartial views, they won't have. influence. So I think the first step is to continue having conversations like this. The conversations need to be louder, they need to be more frequent, they need to rope in new and diverse audiences, but they're vitally important. I also think that these

organizations won't change until they're forced to change. I think that's an important point as well. There's a number of ways that that can happen. So they derive a lot of their power from their relationship with the government, right? Every Every time I at Amnesty would meet with a senator, a member of Congress or somebody from the White House, that would go into a quarterly report where the organization would brag to its donors about how much access it has. Why should the government meet with them any government, right, when they're purely a political project? That's one question. We need to start calling them what they are. So during the prior administration, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo embarked on this effort to label them as anti-Semitic.

organizations. This ultimately didn't come to fruition, but now's maybe a time to rekindle that discussion. I think that is a worthwhile and useful project. We should call things what they are before we engage with them. And then I think sunlight is great transparency. Congress had hearings about anti-Semitism in universities, elite tier one universities like MIT, Columbia, Harvard. Those hearings led to massive change at these organizations. They literally personnel change. It's worthwhile to have some of these conversations in public with the NGO sector. As I mentioned, their arguments simply don't hold up to scrutiny.

As soon as they face even a little bit of pushback, they collapse. Reframing these organizations is critical because we keep inheriting their own frameworks, and therefore we perpetuate for them their own sense of themselves. they are not human rights organizations so much as they are human rights businesses. And I think that's an accurate description that they couldn't even argue with. And it gives a far more, far clearer understanding to a public audience of what they are in that they have financial consideration and ideological pressures and operational considerations. And they just simply need to be honest about this.

They can't operate in Gaza without operating under Hamas. And they are not honest about that. When you read a product, it reflects consideration of operational constraints. Organizations like MSF, Amnesty, and so on, were operating in these past two years under constraints that they acknowledged internally. So, for example, when it came to correcting stuff about Al-Aghli, they didn't do it. It was said internally because they were afraid the Hamas, it would upset Hamas. And this is crucial.

So there are businesses with all sorts of considerations and their business is human rights. I have to say that what you just said, Danielle, a moment ago about there need to be new organizations, grassroots organizations, organizations that refocus away from whatever might be the particular progressive political project of the moment, climate, police, violence, social, racial justice, and then Gaza, and not actually a focus on

international law, international human rights. A shift back is something that's going to have to take new organizations. One of the really interesting things is internally in Israel, we, I think, have seen a similar process. We used to have these enormous and powerful and influential and important human rights organizations like Bitsselam. And they no longer, they're bigger than they've ever been, but they're also much, much less influential than they've ever been.

Prime ministers used to worry about what Bitsleum says about what's happening in the West Bank. No Prime Minister has worried about what Bitslem says in 20 years. And it roughly corresponds to essentially Bitsleum's pivot to foreign donors. And Bitsalom is now almost entirely a foreign funded organization. And its voice is a voice of the donors. By the way, this is not even an accusation. Every fundraising organization ultimately retools itself. It sees as its constituency, as its audience, the donor.

That's the lifeblood. That's the resource. and so we've seen, you know, Bitselen for a long time, I critique them for this, and I think that got them to change it a few years back, but I don't think they changed it for very long. They would put out their statements, their press releases, their comments, their reports in English, before they put them out in Hebrew. They were so utterly focused outside of Israel

that they just as an organization, as a culture, completely lost Israeli society and lost all interest in Israeli society because they attached to the political project, the political discourse, and the political culture of progressives. So in miniature, within Israeli society, you saw something similar happen. And what's interesting is now to watch the kind of process that you're suggesting maybe necessary internationally.

I don't know that it'll happen internationally because nobody actually needs human rights organizations in America. It's like it's not, okay, until amnesty mentioned police violence, nobody knew about it. Like nobody actually needs amnesty for it. Here, in a place with war, in a place with military rule, in a place where these questions are real and immediate and everybody's kids serve in a military

that has to grapple with them, we do need them. And one of the interesting things has been that with the loss of the usefulness of the old organizations, because they've all become basically stooges of the Norwegian government and the most radical progressive parts of it, I apologize, Norway.

I don't know if you're literally the one. You're one of the donors, but maybe you're not the worst of them. We now have all of these British-Israelite, Israeli covenant, which is the initiative for national security and human rights by former generals and deputy heads of the Mossad

and Yereev Mohar, who did not know he was going to come up six times today. There are these human rights organizations, these reconciliation organizations, the Israelis and Palestinians going out into the West Bank to help protect Palestinian farmers from some extremist Israeli violence. There is a whole new ecosystem born

that is local, locally funded, local volunteers, not international, and really genuinely focused on rights, without playing political games. So we have that happening because we actually need these people. And amnesty and human rights watch, I don't know who replaces them. Do you think there's a chance of that happening outside of Israel, outside of particular conflict area where these people do come to the fore? Do you think there's going to be a better human rights movement?

You said there should be. I agree. It's already happening in Israel on the ground. Do you think there can be in the West? Do you think it's going to happen? I don't think these organizations are going anywhere, but I think they're increasingly being seen for what they are. They will increasingly be understood as particular kinds of organizations

that take up and attract particular people and are engaged in particular activist missions. And I think that's appropriate. They should be seen for what they are and they should own what they are. The confusion is currently that they're claiming to be something other than they're not, and that's universal and all that stuff. So, and I do think they're needed in America.

Human rights organizations are needed everywhere. No culture is immune from human rights. uses. So they're needed, but organizations that can't stick to their own missions are doing nobody of favor. I will also just add that it's incredibly difficult to speak out at this time against human rights organizations because they deliberately conflate criticism of them with criticism of human rights. This is a very sensitive time when there are really bad actors clamping down on human rights organizations in other parts of the world. And they sort of unfortunately have used this as a loophole to get away with no scrutiny whatsoever.

There is a difference between people who believe in human rights and who know these organizations, criticizing them, and bad dictator actors who are trying to clamp them down for political reasons. And one of the other things we have to start doing is stopping, allowing them to create one big ball of confusion, so people are too intimidated to speak out. I've heard that many times. People say, well, I don't want to be misunderstood. Well, you know what? They're going to deliberately misinterpret you anyway.

Daniel, last words? I'm not by my nature an optimistic person, but I do think in this case there are reasons to be optimistic. First of all, of course, the human rights giants, these human rights businesses, as Danielle called them, have become politicized.

Everything in America has become politicized. But as that happens, it creates a massive gap that people who are interested can fill. Look, we're seeing some of the same things play out on other sides of the civil society sector in the U.S. with the ACLU. This is an American behemoth with a long and storied history of defending civil liberties that has become functionally politicized and as such has become sort of an annex of the progressive movement. But this in turn has opened up space that other

organizations have begun to fill. In this case, the organization is called fire that has come out and has taken a very serious and stringent view of free speech and civil liberties violations, both on the left and the right. I can absolutely see a universe where such a thing happens with respect to international human rights. There's appetite for it, there's space for it, and I think we're going to be seeing change. I don't know how it will happen. I don't know when it will happen. But I think for the sake of just the most vulnerable people who are victims of human rights abuse,

we needed to happen soon. These discussions are actually beginning to happen. There are discussions that we're involved in, you know, within a week or so, and they're happening in Washington. And there's definitely a new energy, I think, that's coming after two years of saying, all right, the dust is settling. We're getting a grip on what's going on. And now let's start thinking about Human Rights 2.0.

The test for me of whether this is a new human rights discourse and not just old political discourse that, you know, hates me is whether they want to talk to me as an Israeli, whether they come to me and say, hey, you, you need to change what you're doing, here's what you're doing wrong, and that's stuff that I can take to my people and say, hey, we need to look at this, we might be doing this wrong. And when they're interested in changing the reality

rather than just their own morality plays, then that will be, that will have happened. Thank you so much. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me. This was eye-opening for me. I come away with it very frustrated, but we're hopeful. You're hopeful.

And if you're hopeful and you've seen it all from the inside fall apart, I don't have the right not to be hopeful. Thanks for joining me. Thank you so much, Haville.