Key Takeaways:
- For three decades, Kenneth Roth helped turn the language of human rights into a political weapon aimed disproportionately at Israel.
- His response to the Ceuta crisis revealed a deeper obsession: even events unrelated to Israel were recast as the work of the Jewish state.
- When human rights become a political weapon, real abuses are obscured, genuine tyrannies escape scrutiny, and old forms of Jew-hate gain new legitimacy.
On 1 August 2026, days after tens of thousands of Moroccan men stormed across the border into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, Kenneth Roth logged on to X and told the world that Israel was to blame.
He did not say it outright. He rarely does. He asked a question instead. “Why would Israel want its ally Morocco to control Ceuta as opposed to its critic Spain?” Then he answered it. Ceuta, he explained, sits on the Strait of Gibraltar. Spain controls both sides of that strait. The strait is only eight miles across. “If Iran can control the Strait of Hormuz,” he went on, “Spain could easily control the Strait of Gibraltar and potentially block Israeli access to the Atlantic.”
Let’s take a look at what had actually happened in Ceuta. Over the space of a few days, around 60,000 people breached the border of the small Spanish enclave on the northern coast of Morocco. That is more than half the population of the entire city, and most of them were young men. Spain sent in the army. Dozens died in the crush at the fence and in the water. It was the storming of a European border, and it followed a well-worn pattern: Morocco has long used the movement of people across that frontier as a lever to punish Madrid whenever the two governments fall out. There was no Israeli hand in it, and there was no Israeli interest in it. The New York Times article Roth held up as his evidence does not mention Israel a single time.
None of that mattered to him. A European border had just been overrun, and the first place Kenneth Roth’s mind went was to the Jew. That Israel engineered a border breach of 60,000 people in which dozens died. That it did so to hand Morocco a strait whose opposite shore is controlled not by Spain but by the United Kingdom. That a NATO and EU member would then blockade international waters in breach of every treaty it has signed. And that the victim of this elaborate plot would be Israeli cargo ships, which pass through the Strait of Gibraltar today without the slightest difficulty. UN Watch reviewed the claim and called it “pure Israel Derangement Syndrome untethered from any evidence.”
But look again at the architecture of what he did, because we have seen it before. A mass of people surges across a border into Europe, and a hidden Jewish hand is said to be steering it for secret ends. That is the Great Replacement: the conspiracy theory that a shadowy elite is engineering migration in order to remake the West, and that behind that elite, as always, stand the Jews. It is the idea that titled the Christchurch killer’s manifesto and drove the gunman who murdered worshippers in their synagogue in Pittsburgh. It has always belonged to the far right. And yet here it was, in the summer of 2026, coming from one of the most celebrated figures of the international left. Strip the politics away and the two are the same: mass migration into Europe, and a secret Jewish hand behind it. The far right aims that conspiracy at Jews to frighten white Europeans. Roth aimed it at the Jewish state. But it is the same conspiracy, and it is the same Jew at the center of it. That is the horseshoe closing. And it tells you something Kenneth Roth would never admit: his problem was never the right or the left. It was always the Jews.
And this is the man who ran Human Rights Watch for nearly three decades.
A Political Tool
From 1993 to 2022, Kenneth Roth did not just work at Human Rights Watch. He was Human Rights Watch. Under him, it grew into a global power with a budget in the hundreds of millions, an organization whose word could move parliaments and set the moral vocabulary the rest of the world would then use.
And here is what makes it dangerous. Kenneth Roth is not a figure on the fringe. He is the establishment. He was the respectable center of the human rights world, invited to testify before governments, quoted in every serious newspaper, given a stage by the most prestigious universities on earth. When a man like that spends three decades teaching the world to see Israel as the great villain of the age, that idea does not stay on the fringe. It becomes the common sense of the age. That is precisely what has happened.
You do not have to take our word for it. Take the word of the man who built the organization in the first place.
Robert Bernstein founded Human Rights Watch in 1978 and chaired it for two decades. In 2009, he did something almost unheard of. He took to the op-ed page of the New York Times to denounce his own creation. Under the headline “Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast,” Bernstein wrote that the organization he had built to monitor closed, authoritarian societies had condemned “far more” abuses in democratic Israel than in the dictatorships surrounding it, the “authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records” whose victims had no free press and no vote to protect them. Worse, he said, HRW had begun to “cast aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.”
That distinction was the entire point of the organization. Bernstein built HRW to shine a light into the places where people could not speak for themselves, because in an open society, a free press and an independent judiciary already do that work. To aim the organization’s heaviest fire at the one democracy in the region, while the real tyrannies were handled gently, was to turn his moral logic on its head.
Bernstein was no reactionary. He was a lifelong liberal who had spent his career defending dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, at a time when it was neither fashionable nor safe. When a man like that stands up and says the institution he founded has lost its way, it is not an attack. It is a warning. Roth’s HRW brushed it aside and carried on.
Human Rights For Sale
If the Bernstein affair exposed distorted priorities, another exposed something worse: a willingness to sell those priorities for cash.
In May 2009, Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of HRW’s Middle East division, and Hassan Elmasry, a board member, attended a private fundraising dinner in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia is not a country with a proud human rights record. It is an absolute monarchy that executes dissidents and denies women their basic autonomy. And what did the representatives of Human Rights Watch hold up to this audience as a reason to give? Their record against Israel. According to reporting on the event, Whitson told the room that “pro-Israel pressure groups in the U.S., the European Union and the United Nations have strongly resisted” HRW’s work. Elmasry told attendees that the organization’s work on Israel and Gaza had “depleted HRW’s budget,” and asked the Saudis to help fund more of it.
Read that again. Officials of the world’s leading human rights organization traveled to one of the world’s most repressive states and advertised their campaigning against Israel as the reason to open a checkbook. Whatever HRW said afterward about also raising Saudi abuses that evening, the pitch had been made and the logic was clear. Attacking Israel was good for business. There were people in the Gulf who would pay for more of it. Human rights was not the cause being funded. It was the brand.
There is a word for taking the language of the powerless and using it to raise money by flattering the hatreds of the powerful. That word is not advocacy. It is exploitation, and its victims are the very people the organization claimed to speak for.
When It Becomes Jew-Hate
In July 2021, antisemitic incidents surged across Britain during that summer’s fighting in Gaza. Jews were harassed in the street. A convoy was filmed driving through London screaming threats of rape against Jewish women. And Kenneth Roth offered his unwanted analysis. “Antisemitism is always wrong,” he wrote, “and it long preceded the creation of Israel, but the surge in UK antisemitic incidents during the recent Gaza conflict gives the lie to those who pretend that the Israeli government’s conduct doesn’t affect antisemitism.”
In the very sentence in which he condemned antisemitism, he placed its cause not with the antisemites but with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. He told Jews being attacked on the streets of London that the real reason lay in the conduct of a foreign government. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League called it “plainly false and offensive,” and he was right. Blaming Israel for violence against Jews, rather than the people committing that violence, is not human rights advocacy. It is the oldest move there is, wearing new clothes: whatever happens to the Jews, the Jews brought it on themselves.
This was not a slip. Under Roth, HRW branded Israel an “apartheid” state, reaching for the single most incendiary word available and fixing it to a country whose Arab citizens vote and sit as judges on its own supreme court. The word was not chosen because it was accurate. It was chosen because it was powerful. Like so much of what Roth did, it was a political act wearing the costume of a legal finding.
Which brings us back to Ceuta.
Roth left Human Rights Watch in 2022. He no longer has its budget or its name behind him. And that is precisely why the Ceuta tweet matters so much. For thirty years, his defenders insisted that HRW’s fixation on Israel was simply where the evidence led, that the volume of criticism reflected the volume of abuse, nothing more. The Ceuta tweet destroys that defense from the inside.
Here was a man, stripped of every institutional restraint, handed a story that had nothing whatsoever to do with Israel, and he manufactured an Israeli villain out of thin air, on a map he had not even read correctly. The conclusion came first. The evidence was to be invented afterward. That is not what following the evidence looks like. It is what an obsession looks like. And now we can see that the obsession was never really the organization’s. It was his.
This is one of the oldest features of Jew-hate, and I have spent years writing about it. It does not always arrive in a brown shirt. It adapts. It takes the language a society holds sacred and turns that language against us. Once it borrowed the language of the Church, and Jews were the killers of God. Today it has learned to borrow the language of human rights, and Jews are the killers of children and the enemies of justice. The costume changes. The accusation does not. And Kenneth Roth has been one of its most fluent translators.
Nor does it stay contained. Roth’s theory did not stay in his replies. Analysts documented how the Ceuta crisis was spun into a global antisemitic conspiracy within seventy-two hours, and Roth handed that conspiracy the credibility of a name that Princeton and Yale still invite to lecture on human rights. This is how it works. This is how Jew-hate is laundered: not by thugs in the street, but by respectable men with blue checkmarks and university affiliations, men who would be genuinely offended to be called antisemites even as they write the antisemites’ script for them.
What it Costs
The language of human rights is important. Real people in real dictatorships depend on it: the dissidents and the prisoners, the people in exactly the closed societies Robert Bernstein built his organization to defend. When words like “apartheid” and “genocide” are picked up and swung as weapons in a political fight, they are drained of their meaning, and the world’s genuine tyrants are handed a gift: the ability to wave away every accusation as just more politics. A movement that cries wolf at a democracy while the wolves run free everywhere else does not protect human rights. It discredits them.
And there is a cost closer to home. Every time a figure of Roth’s stature dresses up an old hatred in the language of justice, that hatred is given fresh permission. It is made respectable. Ordinary Jews, in London and Paris and on American campuses, are the ones who then live with the consequences, because the man with the human rights credentials has told the world that when Jews are targeted, Jews are somehow the authors of their own misfortune. That is not the protection of a vulnerable people. It is a license for their persecution.
Ultimately, that is Kenneth Roth’s legacy. Not one tweet about a Spanish enclave, but thirty years of proof that the most powerful institution in human rights could be turned into a weapon: for politics, for money, and above all for a fixation with the Jewish state that has outlived his own career. His defenders will call the Ceuta tweet an aberration. It is not. It is the clearest thing he has ever written. It is who he has always been, said plainly at last, and published while the dead were still being counted on a beach that had nothing to do with the Jews.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
