Former head of HRW denied Harvard fellowship over ‘anti-Israel bias’

The Harvard Kennedy School in the United States rescinded a fellowship offer to the former head of Human Rights Watch (HRW) over the well-respected organisation’s criticism of Israeli government policies, US magazine The Nation has reported.

Kenneth Roth, who spent nearly three decades as the executive director of HRW before announcing his retirement in April, was offered to join as senior fellow by the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, a centre he said he had been involved in since its founding in 1999.

While the approval of the Harvard Kennedy School dean, Douglas Elmendorf, should have been a formality, the prominent human rights advocate was informed after a video conversation in July that his fellowship offer had been withdrawn.Elmendorf allegedly cited an “anti-Israel bias” and Roth’s tweets on Israel, which he said were of particular concern.

In an article published on Friday by The Nation, Roth, who is Jewish and says he was drawn to the human rights cause by his father’s experience living in Nazi Germany, described the incident as “crazy” and said Elmendorf had “no backbone whatsoever”.

The US magazine reported that the Carr Center is among the smallest and poorest of the school’s subdivisions, with an eight-person staff and 32 fellows, and sits uncomfortably among other institutes at the Kennedy School that deal with defence policy, military strategy, and intelligence gathering.

Among them is the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “A look at its activities can help explain why Roth was deemed too hot to handle,” Michael Massing wrote in his piece for The Nation.

The centre counts former CIA Director David Petraeus among a long list of former intelligence brass taking part in its highest-profile initiatives. Among the 16 members of the Dean’s Executive Board is also Idan Ofer, son of Israeli shipping magnate Sammy Ofer, and his wife Batia.After being vetoed by Harvard, Roth accepted a visiting fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.

The New York Times dubbed Roth the “godfather” of human rights in an article that noted how he had been “an unrelenting irritant to authoritarian governments, exposing human rights abuses with documented research reports that have become the group’s specialty”. – Al Jazeera