Herman Schwartz visited Israel for the first time in his life in 1983, in his early fifties. He tried to plug into the human rights scene—and found there was none. Schwartz went home to American University Washington College of Law, where he’s a professor, and founded what became the Herman Schwartz Israel Human Rights Fellowship. Each year, with support from the New Israel Fund charity, he takes two bright young Israeli lawyers, one Jew and one Arab, trains them at an iconic American NGO, grounds them in the Warren Court’s greatest hits at the law school, and then sets them loose in Israel.
“It never ceases to amaze me,” says inaugural fellow Joshua Schoffman, who served as Israel’s deputy attorney general for 15 years. “One American professor who had never been here more or less singlehandedly transformed the Israeli human rights world. The change in five or 10 years was revolutionary.” Muhammad Dahleh, a leading Israeli Supreme Court advocate and a 1991 fellow, agrees. “I cannot imagine the human rights sphere in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories without the role played by the graduates of the program,” he writes, quickly adding that the deterioration of Palestinian human rights undermines their achievement.
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