{"title":"Three days in December: Jewish human rights between the United Nations and the middle east in 1948","authors":"James Loeffler","doi":"10.1017/S1740022821000322","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n The twin birth of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Genocide Convention in 1948 have received enormous scholarly attention in recent years. Yet historians have largely ignored how these legal projects intersected with that year’s war in Israel/Palestine. In this article, I push these two stories back into a single frame by examining the year-long efforts of one early human rights organization, the World Jewish Congress, to advance rights-claims on behalf of Middle Eastern Jewish communities imperiled by the regional repercussions of the war. The WJC’s record of activities affords us a direct window into contemporaneous activist understandings of the ties between the Holocaust and the Nakba, human rights and genocide, and international law and politics. More broadly, it reveals the intrinsic limits of early human rights advocacy in an emerging global system exclusively structured around nation states.","PeriodicalId":46192,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7000,"publicationDate":"2021-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Global History","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022821000322","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The twin birth of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Genocide Convention in 1948 have received enormous scholarly attention in recent years. Yet historians have largely ignored how these legal projects intersected with that year’s war in Israel/Palestine. In this article, I push these two stories back into a single frame by examining the year-long efforts of one early human rights organization, the World Jewish Congress, to advance rights-claims on behalf of Middle Eastern Jewish communities imperiled by the regional repercussions of the war. The WJC’s record of activities affords us a direct window into contemporaneous activist understandings of the ties between the Holocaust and the Nakba, human rights and genocide, and international law and politics. More broadly, it reveals the intrinsic limits of early human rights advocacy in an emerging global system exclusively structured around nation states.
期刊介绍:
Journal of Global History addresses the main problems of global change over time, together with the diverse histories of globalization. It also examines counter-currents to globalization, including those that have structured other spatial units. The journal seeks to transcend the dichotomy between "the West and the rest", straddle traditional regional boundaries, relate material to cultural and political history, and overcome thematic fragmentation in historiography. The journal also acts as a forum for interdisciplinary conversations across a wide variety of social and natural sciences. Published for London School of Economics and Political Science