HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH accepted a sizable donation from a Saudi billionaire shortly after its researchers documented labor abuses at one of the man’s companies, a potential violation of the rights group’s own fundraising guidance. Human Rights Watch recently returned the gift from Saudi real estate magnate Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber, which came with the caveat that it could not be used to support the group’s LGBT advocacy in the Middle East and North Africa. The controversial donation is at the center of a contentious internal debate about the judgment and leadership of Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth. After The Intercept began…

US. President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, released on January 28, marks the effective end of the Oslo era of Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking. It makes no reference to international law or to a mutually binding commitment to international resolutions aimed at ending the conflict. It ignores the commitments made by both sides under existing agreements, and it builds on none of the progress made by American, Israeli, and Palestinian negotiators over the past 20 years. Instead, it proposes a real estate transaction: Israel receives a large chunk of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, and the Palestinians receive financial compensation; their…

As the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China's Hubei province continues and new cases of the disease increase globally, 1  there is pressure on historians to show the value of history for policy. How can the past assist in the real-time management of the crisis? What insights can be gleaned from the ongoing epidemic for future disease preparedness and prevention? Lurking in the background of these interrogatives is a more or less explicit accusation: why haven't past lessons been learned? The gist of some commentaries seems to be: “there is almost nothing surprising about this pandemic”. 2  The…

The relationship of character to politics was much in the news last year, as two candidates of – shall we say? – questionable character sought to lead us. Whether the character of our leaders truly matters is a question as old as the idea of self-government, chewed over by nearly every political chin-puller since Plato. It’s not hard to see why. Once somebody got the bright idea that ordinary people (however defined) should be able to choose who their leaders are, the next question immediately arose: “How do we know who to choose?” Plato’s answer was that rulers should be…

Why we can’t beat our addiction to war ddressing the graduating cadets at West Point in May 1942, General George C. Marshall, then the Army chief of staff, reduced the nation’s purpose in the global war it had recently joined to a single emphatic sentence. “We are determined,” he remarked, “that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other.” At the time Marshall spoke, mere months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. forces had sustained a…