After two decades working inside a human rights organization, I was lucky to have the opportunity to take this past year to reflect, both on my own work and on that of the human rights community as a whole.
In the intense pace of human rights advocacy in Israel-Palestine, organizations have little time to step back from their daily operations and reflect on their accomplishments. The reflection that does take place is invariably self-critical. We excel at identifying problems and working to fix them. So when evaluating our own work, we also tend to focus on what is wrong. Even when we make gains, we are quick to point out why it’s not good enough.
I chose to do exactly the opposite: to identify human rights achievements and see what we can learn from them.
