FOREIGN AFFAIRS (What is it & Why it's IMPORTANT?)

April 24, 2018

FOREIGN AFFAIRS (What is it & Why it's IMPORTANT?)

SOME FOUNDING FATHERS OF HUMAN RIGHTS WERE ZIONISTS

aspiration for a Jewish homeland” to “an unprecedented Holocaust” in Europe—thereby forgetting two millennia of Jewish longing for the restoration of Zion and more than a century of Zionist political activity.

Actually, those many decades of Zionist activity may themselves reflect too narrow a view of modern Jewish political history. So, at any rate, argues the historian James Loeffler in his new book Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. Zionism, Loeffler reminds us, was but one proposed answer to the “Jewish Question.” Among the other imagined solutions for safeguarding Jewish communities in the early decades of the 20th century were international Communism, Bundism, territorial or political autonomy in places other than the land of Israel, and—to get closer to Loeffler’s own subject here—the movement for human rights and, especially, minority group rights. Proponents of this last cause believed that Jews could survive and indeed thrive as a national or religious minority in Europe if only their fundamental rights were respected.

The strugglebetween Zionist and non- or anti-Zionist forces in the pre-state era is a familiar tale. But Loeffler tells a different tale: as it turns out, some of the key founders of the international human rights movement, and some key theorists of the role of human rights in international law, were also Zionists. Their search for ways to protect their coreligionists led them to consider nationalism, domestic human rights law, international law—and Zionism. In other words, they did not see Zionism as an either-or proposition:

Jewish nation-building in the homeland went hand in hand with the fight for minority rights abroad. Building a Jewish country would not invalidate Jewish minority status abroad, but rather safeguard it.

And there is another common misconception that Loeffler aims to clear up—namely, that modern human rights law was itself mainly a post-World War II development, or a reaction to the Nazi genocide. Instead, Loeffler writes, it began decades earlier “in the living shtetls of Eastern Europe,” and it began as “a specifically Jewish pursuit of minority rights in the ravaged borderlands of post-World War I Europe.”

In his book, Loeffler proceeds to trace in detail the “deep interdependence of human rights and nationalism”—including especially Zionism—“that is so often overlooked in accounts of the [interwar] period”: a linkage that not only is “often overlooked” but in today’s climate of widespread liberalanti-Zionism might well strike many readers as an outright contradiction in terms. To recover “this unknown history,” Loeffler focuses on the intersecting lives of five remarkable men. This biographical approach embroils him in telling two stories: first, the role played by Zionist Jews in the birth of the international human rights movement; second, inevitably but contrarily, the eventual angry divorce between that movement and the state of Israel. Both are stories well worth telling, but the telling forces Loeffler onto sometimes discomfiting paths.

Who werethe five men?

*Hersch Lauterpacht, born near Lvov in 1897, joined Zionist youth groups as a young man, moved to London where in 1924 he helped found the World Union of Jewish Students, and attended the opening of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925. Characteristically mixing Zionist and international legal activity, he wrote “influential drafts of both the International Bill of Rights and Israel’s declaration of independence.”

Lauterpacht became a highly distinguished professor at Cambridge University, where the Lauterpacht Center for International Law is named for him, and toward the end of his life was appointed a judge on the International Court of Justice in the Hague—a long journey indeed from his shtetl origins. Athough perhaps not long enough: in one of the many personal stories that enliven this book, Loeffler informs us that when in 1947 it was proposed that Lauterpacht represent the United Kingdom on the new UN Commission on Human Rights, the chief legal adviser in the foreign office opined:

Professor Lauterpacht, although a distinguished and industrious international lawyer, is, when all is said and done, a Jew fairly recently come from Vienna. Emphatically, I think that the representative of Her Majesty’s Government on human rights must be a very English Englishman imbued throughout his life and hereditary to the real meaning of human rights as we understand them in this country.

At that point Lauterpacht had lived in the UK for 23 years and been naturalized for fifteen. Still, “when all [was] said and done,” he didn’t get the job.

*Jacob Blaustein, born in Baltimore in 1892 as the son of a penniless Lithuanian immigrant, became a very rich American oilman, president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), a major Democratic-party donor, and, for most of his life, an anti-Zionist though a qualified supporter of Israel once it came into existence. Blaustein “believed Jews needed to define themselves as an apolitical religious faith rather than as a quarrelsome national minority”—a view that would inform the AJC’s strong backing of the civil-rights movement and the demand for an end to racial and ethnic discrimination in America. Indeed, the whole Jewish role in history, in Blaustein’s eyes, was to struggle for civil rights and religious freedom, and nothing more.

*Peter Benenson, born Peter Solomon in 1922 to a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family, became the founder of Amnesty International. His grandfather, who migrated to England from Russia, had been a friend and supporter of Alexander Kerensky (leader of a non-Marxist Russian party and briefly head of the Provisional Government in 1917 before having to flee the Bolsheviks). His mother Flora was a well-known Zionist activist in London who in 1920 founded the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) and, Loeffler notes, became the exiled Kerensky’s lover.

Benenson himself, who ran unsuccessfully for parliament four times, found his true vocation when he came to see the need for “a global grassroots movement based only on the power of public opinion” rather than on laws or governments. As for his change of name, which he effectuated while serving in the army, he attributed it to anti-Semitism: “Being Solomon was such a burden that it was not worth fighting for.” Later, as Judaism itself seemed a burden, he converted to Catholicism.

Loeffler argues convincingly that Benenson’s spiritual and political lives were closely entwined. Amnesty, “an idea born of the flight from Jewish politics and the cold war into a purer realm of Catholic religious universalism,” was itself a quasi-religious activity:

The path of sanctity, [Benenson] began to think, would come through a new kind of universal human rights organization: a religious group with no ties to any church implementing a global justice campaign that dispensed with law as an international movement that transcended politics.

The last two subjects of Loeffler’s book are less well known:

*Maurice Perlzweig was born in Galicia and raised in London, where he became a famous liberal rabbi. A staunch Zionist whose “academic bona fides, personal charisma, and staunch religious progressivism endeared him to the Anglo-Jewish grandees” despite his Zionism, he later engaged in many diplomatic activities and “worked closely with the UN’s top human rights officials on the drafting and diplomacy of the [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] and the Genocide Convention.”

*Jacob Robinson, born in Russia in 1889, was a leader of the movement for minority rights in Europe. After delivering the keynote speech at the 1925 meeting of the Congress of European National Minorities, Robinson was named to the executive committee of the 1927 International Conference for the Rights of Jewish Minorities; the latter organization was renamed in 1932 as the World Jewish Congress. In these various capacities, Robinson led many efforts—always futile—to persuade the League of Nations to intervene when Jews and other minorities were being persecuted. As he himself would put it, the principle of reciprocal obligation—“I protect your minority, you protect my minority”—always seemed to degenerate into “I hit my Jews, you hit your Jews.”

Coming to the United States in 1940, Robinson worked at the World Jewish Congress, leading its new research institute for contemporary Jewish affairs. After the war, as a living embodiment of the idea that human rights and Zionism were two sides of the same battle to protect Jews, he “shuttled,” Loeffler writes, “between roles as Israel’s top lawyer at the UN and as the first legal adviser to the nascent UN Commission on Human Rights.” In the 1960s, he served on the prosecution team at the Eichmann trial; outraged by Hannah Arendt’s subsequent book on the trial,Eichmann in Jerusalem, he published a devastatingly thorough critique of its many errors and falsehoods, And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight.

Ministry_of_Foreign_Affairs_(Poland)

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite statistic (composite index) of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which are used to rank countries into four tiers ofhuman development. A country scores higher HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and theGDP per capita is higher. The HDI was developed by Pakistani economistMahbub ul Haq for the UNDP.^[1]^[2]

The 2010 Human Development Reportintroduced an Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). While the simple HDI remains useful, it stated that "the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting forinequality)", and "the HDI can be viewed as an index of 'potential' human development (or the maximum IHDI that could be achieved if there were no inequality)".

The index is based on the human development approach, developed by Ul Haq, often framed in terms of whether people are able to "be" and "do"desirable things in life. Examples include—Beings: well fed, sheltered, healthy; Doings: work, education, voting, participating in community life. It must also be noted that the freedom of choice is central—someone choosing to be hungry (e.g. during a religious fast) is quite different to someone who is hungry because they cannot afford to buy food.^[3]

Origins

Dimensions and calculation

2016 Human Development Index

2015 Human Development Index

2014 Human Development Index

Past top countries

Geographical coverage

Country/region specific HDI lists

Criticism

References

External links

POLISH GOVERNMENT IN EXILE

JACEK CZAPUTOWICZ

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF THE "HAPPINESS INDEX?" ME EITHER, UNTIL NOW!

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite statistic (composite index) of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which are used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A country scores higher HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and the GDP per capita is higher. The HDI was developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq for the UNDP.^[1]^[2]

The 2010 Human Development Report introduced an Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). While the simple HDI remains useful, it stated that "the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for inequality)", and "the HDI can be viewed as an index of 'potential' human development (or the maximum IHDI that could be achieved if there were no inequality)".

The index is based on the human development approach, developed by Ul Haq, often framed in terms of whether people are able to "be" and "do" desirable things in life. Examples include—Beings: well fed, sheltered, healthy; Doings: work, education, voting, participating in community life. It must also be noted that the freedom of choice is central—someone choosing to be hungry (e.g. during a religious fast) is quite different to someone who is hungry because they cannot afford to buy food.^[3]

Origins

Dimensions and calculation

2016 Human Development Index

2015 Human Development Index

2014 Human Development Index

Past top countries

Geographical coverage

Country/region specific HDI lists

CriticismEdit

HDI vs. ecological footprint

The Human Development Index has been criticized on a number of grounds, including alleged lack of consideration of technological development or contributions to the human civilization, focusing exclusively on national performance and ranking, lack of attention to development from a global perspective, measurement error of the underlying statistics, and on the UNDP's changes in formula which can lead to severe misclassification in the categorisation of 'low', 'medium', 'high' or 'very high' human development countries.^[25]

Sources of data errorEdit

Economists Hendrik Wolff, Howard Chong and Maximilian Auffhammer discuss the HDI from the perspective of data error in the underlying health, education and income statistics used to construct the HDI. They identified three sources of data error which are due to (i) data updating, (ii) formula revisions and (iii) thresholds to classify a country's development status and conclude that 11%, 21% and 34% of all countries can be interpreted as currently misclassified in the development bins due to the three sources of data error, respectively. The authors suggest that the United Nations should discontinue the practice of classifying countries into development bins because: the cut-off values seem arbitrary, can provide incentives for strategic behavior in reporting official statistics, and have the potential to misguide politicians, investors, charity donors and the public who use the HDI at large.^[25]

In 2010, the UNDP reacted to the criticism and updated the thresholds to classify nations as low, medium, and high human development countries. In a comment to The Economist in early January 2011, the Human Development Report Office responded^[26] to a 6 January 2011 article in the magazine^[27]which discusses the Wolff et al. paper. The Human Development Report Office states that they undertook a systematic revision of the methods used for the calculation of the HDI, and that the new methodology directly addresses the critique by Wolff et al. in that it generates a system for continuously updating the human-development categories whenever formula or data revisions take place.

In 2013, Salvatore Monni and Alessandro Spaventa emphasized that in the debate of GDP versus HDI, it is often forgotten that these are both external indicators that prioritize different benchmarks upon which the quantification of societal welfare can be predicated. The larger question is whether it is possible to shift the focus of policy from a battle between competing paradigms to a mechanism for eliciting information on well-being directly from the population.^[28]

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