How do human rights NGOs negotiate tensions between employees’ ethical-activist motivations and emotions, and the professionalized standards of strict organizational bureaucracy? Are the guiding logics of human rights NGOs in-effect more concerned with bureaucracy—perceived as necessary for organizations to raise funds, gain positive reputations, and sustain communications with state branches—than with human rights? This talk is based on 24-months of fieldwork in four prominent Israeli anti-occupation NGOs, that rely on Palestinians’ witness testimonies as their main source of data. The ethnography details how human rights work is an ill-fitting re-scaling of bureaucracy that NGOs cannot perform successfully. The human rights professionalization ethos of “streamlining” a temporal logic of bureaucracy, produces the opposite results: workers grow gradually distant from the temporalities of Palestinian witnesses’ experiences of violence. This distance accrues along with other temporal schisms into employee burn-out and organizational frustration, stemming from the inability of human rights to respond to violent injustice within an adequate temporal-framework of urgency.