7 - “Good Words Have Become the Servants of Evil Masters”

Summary

This chapter examines how the onset of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after 1967 impacted Jewish internationalism. Soviet and Arab diplomats created biased UN committees to investigate Israeli human rights abuses in the territories and waged wars of delegitimization against Israel throughout international organizations. By the time the UN declared Zionism was a form of racial discrimination in 1975, Jewish internationalists dismissed the forum as a new progenitor of antisemitism and a poisoned partner for international human rights. This politicization finally forced them to begin thinking about what human rights beyond law and institutions might look like. But even they tried to broaden their activity beyond the UN, they found the Palestinian question dogged them everywhere they turned. Finally, the chapter argues that while Israel was central to politicized processes within the UN, it was irrelevant and marginal to the expansion of human rights outside international forums in the 1970s. Jewish professionals cared about Israel’s human rights record, but most human rights activists did not – at least not until the First Intifada in 1987 began to cement Israel as the chief enemy of the human rights movement, long after Jews had left its vanguard.