The blood-lusting fury of October 7 and its aftermath have turned our world upside down.
False parades as true. Murder as resistance. Face-covering cowards as principled protesters. As the immoral accuse the moral.
Last week, the United States vetoed a resolution in the Security Council that would have compelled Israel to cease firing at Hamas. In response, the Hamas leadership branded the United States “unethical and inhumane” and unconcerned for human rights.
For the past many weeks in the downtowns of cities across the world, anti-Israel demonstrators have brandished signs and posters accusing Israel of committing genocide while shouting for the complete liberation of Palestine “from the river to the sea”.
Ideologically oriented journalists, academics and many of their students, having lost their voices and their consciences when the Syrian regime, ISIS, the Taliban, the mullahs of Iran and other unkind rulers slaughtered their own people, nevertheless point to photos of the heart-wrenching displacement of Gazans as proof of crimes against humanity.
Right and wrong have been inverted. And we must call it out and fight against it whenever and however we can.
Three men who lived (and died) in the last century can help us do so. We must learn that they were, who they were and what they taught. And we must understand that what they taught flowed from a foundational belief in the values that derive from Jewish thought and philosophy. None was “religious” but all were proudly Jewish.
Five days after the 75th anniversary of the proclamation of the International Declaration of Human Rights and adoption by the United Nations, on December 10, 1948, is an appropriate time to recall these men.
Hersch Lauterpacht, a British Jew, was a human rights activist and extraordinary scholar and jurist of international law. It was he who devised and brought the notion of “crimes against humanity” into the canon of justiciable international law.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, introduced the term “genocide” and was instrumental in bringing the Convention on Genocide into the canon of jusiticiable international law.
Lauterpacht and Lemkin were contemporaries. They were born in eastern Europe and were shaped by the ideals shattering last century of the last millennium. Coincidentally, both men studied for a time in Lviv. The story of the intersection of their lives was poignantly depicted in an excellent book by Phillipe Sands published in 2016 called East West Street.
René Samuel Cassin, a French Jew, was the principal – though not the only – author of the International Declaration of Human Rights. His colleagues on the project, including Canadian jurist John Humphrey, acknowledged that the declaration “was primarily the engineering feat of René Cassin.” A veteran of World War I, Cassin fought all his life in the trenches of the struggle on behalf of the intrinsic worth and dignity of all mankind. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968 for his lifelong efforts.
Lauterpacht, Lemkin and Cassin born on the same continent and outraged by the same forces of evil and brutality, strove with all their intellect and their might to prevent such evil from ever rising again. For a brief moment after World War II, the civilized world agreed there was a role for the rule of law in protecting all humanity. The Nuremberg trials incorporated the notion of Crimes Against Humanity. The Genocide Convention was the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948. And on the very next day, on December 10, 1948, the 58-member General Assembly of the United Nations passed the International Declaration of Human Rights. (There were eight abstentions and two no-shows.)
Alas, as recent and other events have sorrowfully proven, there should be no illusions about the true enforcement of human rights in international law. Despots, tyrants and terrorists pay no heed to rules other than the rule by power that secures total control over their own peoples.
None of these three great jurists were naïve about the world in which they lived or about the true reach of the legal standards they helped create to try to protect all individuals around the world. They believed in the ideal and in the humanitarian implications that spring from the belief that “all human beings are created in the image of God.”
Just like Lauterpacht, Lemkin and Cassin, we too should try to hold onto the ideal that our laws must affirm the dignity of all human life as the guiding value of our actions. The first words of the Declaration are: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Is this not the ideal way of life also taught by our Sages and reaffirmed throughout the generations in the texts of Jewish education?
In awarding the prize to Cassin in 1968, the Nobel Prize committee pointed out that “it was on just such a cold December day as this, exactly twenty years ago…a small light was lit and the moral commandments contained in the Declaration, like those written on the tablets of Moses, will in the years to come play a forceful role in reforming the conscience of man and his understanding of what is right and wrong.”
It is a good thing at this time of year to speak of small lights illuminating a large darkness. For after all, who, more than we, understands the deeper meaning of this imagery?
We must not be paralysed by the thuggish protesters who chant their lies against Israel and who abuse the historic legal principles given to the world by Lauterpacht, Lemkin and Cassin. We must find our courage and fight, as appropriate, for a society that is built upon the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.
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Am Yisrael Chai. The People of Israel lives and will always.
Shabbat shalom
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)
December 15, 2023
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 