“As people committed to human rights and humanitarianism, we felt what’s going on in these organizations is incredibly dangerous,” Danielle Haas, the Executive Director of EiGHT and former senior editor at Human Rights Watch, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
Haas spoke to the Post about the lack of accountability in NGOs, the pervasiveness of antisemitism, and the way in which the media venerates human rights groups as infallible beacons of morality.
EiGHT is a privately funded, politically independent, non-profit initiative based in Geneva. It was founded by professionals with direct experience across major international NGOs, who, after the October 7 massacre, “found the reaction of organizations to be very troubling.”
After Haas left Human Rights Watch in November 2023, after 14 years, she started connecting with other people in the organization she had not had contact with before, and they began to share experiences.
“What I had taken to be personal experiences in the organization, I suddenly realized were actually shared by other people. That these were not individual problems but rather systemic ones,” she told the Post.
Haas put everyone together in a WhatsApp group, and they collectively decided to share their experiences.
“As people committed to human rights and humanitarianism, we felt what’s going on in these organizations is incredibly dangerous. Dangerous because these organizations are embedded in the fabric of decision-making within modern society, and they are woven into our academic structures, and our legal structures, and media, and they are treated as infallible, and truth itself, and we knew for a fact that there are issues that require scrutiny, like any other industry,” she told the Post.
“These human rights and humanitarian groups are really the ground zero for the world we’re living in today, because out of them came, for example, the label of apartheid.
“Human Rights Watch was the first large American human rights organization to come out with this in 2021, followed by Amnesty in 2022. So they are the formulators, they are the legitimizers, and they are the propagators of concepts of apartheid and genocide that we’re all living with today. They have given them legitimacy.”
EiGHT just launched Insiders Speak, a report by over 70 staff from human rights and humanitarian organizations (including Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Greenpeace) revealing antisemitism, methodological failures and retaliation.
The 63-page submission represents the first independent and extensive account of how the human rights and humanitarian NGO sector has failed to uphold the values it exists to promote, drawn primarily from the first-hand experiences of professionals from within it.
Among the key findings of the report are that antisemitism is tolerated within human rights NGOs, and there is retaliation against those who dissent. The report also reveals a pervasive lack of accountability, amounting to structural accountability failures rather than isolated incidents.
Systemic antisemitic pollution of international NGO spaces
“Jewish employees raised concerns openly at first. Then less often. Then not at all. In time, they were all gone.” – NGO staffer from international NGO.
The submission draws on first-hand accounts from more than 70 professionals within the human rights, humanitarian, development, and environmental NGO sector, as well as a review of internal documents, communications, and secondary sources, including media reporting and academic literature.
All the professionals whose experiences are reflected in the report are either still working in their NGOs, remain in the sector, or left within the last four years. A significant proportion have left since October 7, 2023.
One of the persistent challenges addressed in the report is that there is a lack of consensus on defining antisemitism, which delays or avoids addressing conduct that is clearly unacceptable.
The submission therefore does not confine itself to definitions, and instead focuses on observable culture and behavior that targets or negatively affects Jewish and Israeli staff, colleagues perceived as sympathetic to their concerns, or individuals raising concerns about work related to Israel-Palestine.
The report says that a key feature of antisemitism in the human rights and humanitarian sphere is that it is barely acknowledged and often coded.
One employee of a global environmental NGO said: “In my circles, the issue is not individual cases of antisemitism or open Jew-hatred. The issue is a kind of systemic pollution of international NGO spaces and transnational federations with the constant demonization of Israel, the total acquittal of Palestinian leadership, and the adoption of anti-Israel language, like genocide, intifada, settler-colonialism, etc.”
Many staffers described environments in which antisemitism was reframed as political disagreement and deflected into debates about Israel and Zionism, rather than recognized as a distinct form of discrimination.
Many said they did not know of any instance in which complaints relating to antisemitism had led to substantial organizational reflection, independent investigation or structural reform in the ways seen during the times of #MeToo or Black Lives Matter.
One contributor said the conversation never becomes “What happened, and why did this employee experience it as antisemitic?” Instead, it immediately becomes: “But what is antisemitism really? What about Zionism? What about Gaza?”
“You end up circling the drain of definitions while nothing is actually investigated.”
The report then explores the patterns of managerial inaction, minimization, and indifference in relation to concerns about antisemitism.
Some people described being retaliated against for speaking out, including roles being “eliminated” – only to reappear not long after.
Contributors also noted that organizations with multi-million-dollar budgets and established media relationships can absorb criticism, reframe it, and flood the zone in ways individual critics cannot match.
A long-time employee of a global human rights NGO with operations in Australia described the culture that evolved over more than a decade: “Staff repeated slogans as if they were insights.
Post-colonial theory swept through institutions: the ‘Global South’ was romanticized, ‘decolonizing’ rhetoric became compulsory, and priorities were shaped less by field realities than by internal status games, fundraising incentives, and political fashion.
“Much of this felt hollow, slogans without substance. But these slogans gained power because disagreement became socially risky. Over time, a workplace dedicated to truth-telling developed an atmosphere of fear and conformity.”
In one global NGO, documented behavior submitted to managers in 2025 included staff publicly referring to a “Jewish establishment” and stating the organization “should just let Israelis die.”
When Haas left Human Rights Watch, she raised concerns in an internal exit email regarding her observations of bias in Israel-related work and behavior that violated protocols. Human Rights Watch responded by only vaguely and without proof stating that the organization applies “the same standards of rigor and dedication to our work on Israel-Palestine as we do to other conflict areas.”
A senior manager referred to Haas on Israeli radio as an “embittered ex-employee.”
Many NGOs operate ‘behind closed walls,’ leading to lack of accountability
Haas explained to the Post that these organizations function “very much behind closed walls” and are not particularly accountable to anyone.
“We felt an enormous responsibility to contribute our experiences because we believe that public trust should be earned, and that these organizations have not shown any signs of the past three years of being at the least bit interested in any of the concerns brought to them internally by all the correct processes, and so it is time for external accountability.”
Haas opined that the media does not pay significant attention to human rights organizations or humanitarian groups, as they “tend to accept them at their word,” and so EiGHT’s initiative is unique in that it is bringing together so many insiders across myriad organizations.
Haas acknowledged that there have been scandals involving human rights NGOs in the past, such as the sexual abuse claims against Oxfam in Haiti or against MSF in Chad. However, she said that issues related to Israel-Palestine work, or to the experiences of Jews within these organizations, or to people who have spoken out on behalf of Jews, “100% have been treated differently.”
“Many of us who were there over extended periods of time, were there over the Me Too movement, Black Lives Matter, saw our organizations respond very differently to expressions of sensitivity, or discomfort, or lived experiences of colleagues that then got heard, that got processed together, that got respected. When MSF staff came out with allegations of racism, that was taken seriously, when two Amnesty employees committed suicide, they set up an inquiry, and repeatedly, what we’ve seen is not only a lack of interest, when it comes to anything to do with Jewish staff or Israel-Palestine issues, but in fact, dismissal, gaslighting, retaliation, and practices that have been absolutely in stark contrast to how other complaints have been handled.”
When human rights and humanitarian scandals are covered in media, Haas said it is usually treated like isolated incidents that are anomalies, “that are ruptures in the basic overall good functioning of these organizations,” and then the organizations set up an internal inquiry and promise reforms which no one ever follows up on.
“What I think has never been done is for an external third party to stand back and connect the dots and say these are not at all isolated, there is a connecting thread between all of these issues dating back years, if not decades at this point, and that is lack of accountability,” she told the Post.
“If you have organizations that essentially run themselves, that are not questioned, you are going to get scandals as a matter of course, and they are not exceptions, they are the drumbeat of these organizations, and it’s high time that human rights organizations and humanitarian organizations are understood realistically as an industry, and any industry requires regulation, and we should not see organizations and entities and individuals as the personification of morality.”
Haas also said that requesting transparency and accountability from these NGOs should not be seen as an outlandish request.
“Does it not stand to reason that an industry that speaks about transparency and accountability on a daily basis should want to be an exemplar of transparency and accountability? And I think that should be the first red flag: why is there resistance to this?”
For her own part, Haas was not surprised by the rise in antisemitism after October 7.
“I had this on my radar for years,” she told the Post. “And that’s perhaps why I didn’t take too much time in speaking out, because it felt to me that October the 7 was more like a starting gun, that they were ready to go. People were no longer afraid to say overtly what they had tiptoed around before.”
“The reality is there has never been meaningful scrutiny of these organizations. There has never even been a meaningful journalistic investigation into the sector. And so how can human rights or humanitarian organizations say that there is no problem with their methodology or antisemitism or internal cultures if they don’t set up inquiries into it?”
“We’re doing this in the interest of human rights and humanitarianism. The minute you give an organization, an industry, a person the freedom to operate exactly as they want to do, is the minute you invite corruption.”
Read the full report here.