Jewish Currents Gave Omar Shakir the Hero's Exit He Didn’t Deserve
Inside HRW's venture capital board, Israeli tech investments, and the liberal media ecosystem that obscures imperialism at work.
This piece was written by Cody O’Rourke and Ameed Faleh
Omar Shakir’s resignation from Human Rights Watch made headlines. Jewish Currents, where Shakir serves on the advisory board, published the most detailed account — a narrative of principled dissent against cowardly leadership. But the story being told about his departure is doing more work than it appears. It locates the crisis at HRW in the decisions of specific executives — Philippe Bolopion, Bruno Stagno Ugarte, Tom Porteous — rather than in the institutional architecture that produced those decisions. It rehabilitates HRW, by implication: if the problem is that good people left, then the solution is to get good people back in, rather than asking whether the institution can be reformed at all. And it avoids the financial ecosystem entirely — the board composition, the donor networks, the overlapping funding streams that connect HRW, Jewish Currents, and the broader liberal solidarity landscape.
Palestinian civil society was already here. In August 2024, over twenty Palestinian organizations called on people of conscience worldwide to reconsider their relations with HRW after its October 7th report — a report published while Shakir still led the Israel-Palestine team. In the words of the BDS National Committee’s assessment, HRW “chose to abstract the actions of the oppressed from the context of oppression in the service of Israel’s colonial domination.” The suppression of the right of return report confirmed the pattern. It didn’t create it.
This piece attempts something different. Rather than retelling the story of who blocked what report and when, we examine the organizational leadership, financial connections, and institutional incentives that make these outcomes predictable. The question isn’t whether HRW failed Omar Shakir. It’s what HRW’s structure tells solidarity movements about how to interface with human rights organizations embedded in the political economy of neoliberalism, and whether the liberal human rights industry, as currently constituted, is capable of serving Palestinian liberation at all.
Human Rights Watch did not begin as a universal human rights monitor. It began in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, founded by Robert Bernstein, a zionist, and Aryeh Neier, with the explicit purpose of monitoring compliance by the Soviet bloc with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. It was an anti-communist project, tracking “abuses” in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania while working alongside dissident groups like the Moscow Helsinki Group and Charter 77. It would make sense that the direction of HRW would be steered by former NATO commanders, CIA analysts, State Department officials who defended rendition, and corporate lobbyists for mining and banking giants — the architects and enablers of the very abuses a human rights organization should be confronting.
Americas Watch was created in 1981, ostensibly to demonstrate that the organization’s gaze extended beyond the Soviet bloc. But the timing is instructive. The US was then waging covert wars against leftist movements across Central America — backing death squads in El Salvador; funding the Contras in Nicaragua; supporting a genocidal counterinsurgency in Guatemala — all in defense of its long-standing treatment of Latin America as a sphere of unchallenged dominance. In Guatemala alone, the army and its paramilitary units systematically attacked over 600 villages under General Ríos Montt, whom Reagan praised as “a man of great personal integrity” even as declassified cables confirmed US knowledge of the massacres. It expanded the organization’s geographic scope without disturbing its ideological orientation. Africa Watch and Asia Watch followed, and by 1988, the components had merged into what is now Human Rights Watch - an institution that had grown outward from Cold War anti-communism and zionist institutional leadership, acquiring regional coverage like a portfolio acquiring assets, without ever confronting the foundational politics that shaped it.
