Amnesty International Joins the Anti-Israel Jackals

By Elliott Abrams

Wednesday, February 02, 2022

 

All over the world, from China to Russia and Iran to Venezuela, men and women lie in foul prison cells for the “crime” of peacefully protesting oppression. In 1961, well-meaning people founded Amnesty International to advocate for the release of such patriots.

 

But Amnesty International (AI) has left that focus far behind, and has now produced a vicious attack on Israel that is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Soviet anti-Semitic and anti-Israel tracts from the height of the Cold War. AI’s report, Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity, is a shockingly dishonest document whose biases against the Jewish State leap off each of its 280 pages. Some young diplomat in the Israeli Foreign Ministry will no doubt go through it paragraph by paragraph, and assemble a pile of lies that reaches the Ministry’s roof. But for our purposes, a few examples will suffice.

 

If I said that World War II started when “conflict broke out in 1939” rather than saying that it started when the Nazis disassembled Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland, you’d say I was a Nazi propagandist and either a liar or an ignoramus. But that’s essentially what AI does in this document when it refers to “the 1947-49 conflict before and after the May 1948 declaration of the State of Israel,” stating that “thousands of Palestinians and Jews were killed and more than 800,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in the context of attacks on civilians.” That Israel accepted partition and the Arab states all then attacked it is of course unmentioned; to hear AI tell it, the “conflict” just happened, more or less like an earthquake or some other natural disaster. That Arab leaders urged Arabs to flee is also unmentioned, as is the desire of some to escape war and violence. No — everyone who left did so “in the context of attacks on civilians.”

 

Another good example is Gaza. Israel left the territory in 2005 — removing every single Israeli settler, every soldier, and every military base. Yet AI refers to it as “occupied” by Israel about a hundred times in this document. If keeping the border closed to prevent infiltration by terrorists constitutes “occupation” of Gaza, then Gaza is occupied by Egypt as well — but that is a point AI does not wish to make.

 

What about the terrible conditions under which AI says Israeli Arabs live? The report’s authors somehow manage to avoid mentioning that while Arabs are 20 percent of all Israelis, they are 35 percent of Israeli pharmacists. Already in 2015, 16 percent of all medical students in the country were Arab; at the Technion medical school, perhaps Israel’s most prestigious, Arabs comprised 38 percent of students by 2015, and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, they comprised 31 percent. Today, an Arab party is part of Israel’s governing coalition for the first time in the country’s history — hardly a sign of unbreakable apartheid and oppression.

 

Throughout this document, Israeli Arabs are referred to as “Palestinians.” Amnesty’s goal here is clear: It wishes to suggest that they are not really Israeli and are instead oppressed and treated as foreigners. According to Amnesty, Jews are Israelis; Arabs are “Palestinians.” But that is not what Israeli Arabs say: a 2020 poll by the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem reported “a dramatic rise in the share of Arab Israelis who define their primary identity as ‘Israeli,’ and a concomitant sharp decline in the share who self-identify as ‘Palestinian.’” Amnesty, of course, is not interested in anything that contradicts its party line. This “report” on Israel is 280 pages long. If you’re looking for the 280-page Amnesty report on China, or Iran, or Russia, don’t bother; only Israel gets this kind of treatment.

 

This document is laced with invective: It relies heavily on charges of “crimes against humanity,” “racism,” “apartheid,” “oppression,” and “domination.” All this is eerily redolent of the worst anti-Israel propaganda of the past. On April 1, 1983, Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ran a full front-page article titled “From the Soviet Leadership.” Here is what it said about Israel:

 

By its nature, Zionism concentrates ultra-nationalism, chauvinism and racial intolerance, excuse for territorial occupation and annexation, military opportunism, cult of political promiscuousness and irresponsibility, demagogy and ideological diversion, dirty tactics and perfidy.

 

Amnesty could use those lines as a summary of its report.

 

Amnesty’s own website explains how the organization began: “In 1961, British lawyer Peter Benenson was outraged when two Portuguese students were jailed just for raising a toast to freedom. He wrote an article in The Observer newspaper and launched a campaign that provoked an incredible response.” But it also explains that “after more than 50 years of groundbreaking achievements, Amnesty has been through a major transformation.” On that much, AI is right: It has been transformed into a propaganda arm of the global struggle against the Jewish State, which uses language taken from the Soviet playbook and holds Israel to standards no other country is asked to meet.