How Amnesty International Became Its Own Repressive Regime

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, January 07, 2025

 

Amnesty International is free to operate in Israel, but Amnesty Israel isn’t free to operate within Amnesty International.

 

That is the important takeaway from the news that the anti-Zionist NGO is suspending its Israel branch for the crime of disagreeing with management.

 

Even when groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch begin operating in good faith, they inevitably fall into a trap they have set for themselves: Dictatorial and authoritarian regimes don’t let them operate in their countries, but democracies do. So “human rights” organizations end up focusing their reporting on places with far fewer human-rights violations, skewing the entire concept of humanitarian law and ultimately serving as little more than dictatorships’ organs of Sovietesque whataboutism.

 

Democracies end up looking bad because they’re free. And the leaders of these supposed humanitarian organizations end up serving as the willing shields of repression.

 

So it is, ironically enough, with Amnesty itself. It has officially become the thing it was founded to expose.

 

The background to this current kerfuffle is recent and deceptively simple.

 

In early December, Amnesty International produced a report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The report was an unmitigated disaster for Amnesty: It was leaked because employees were embarrassed by its lack of scholarship. The report admitted that Amnesty was changing the definition of genocide in order to apply it to Israel, and Amnesty’s Israel branch—the organization’s researchers on the ground—publicly disputed its conclusions and revealed that they had not even been consulted on the report that was all about Israel.

 

Amnesty International has responded by suspending Amnesty Israel.

 

Which is to say, the supposed “human rights” organization now operates on authoritarian principles.

 

I would say this is a case of Amnesty becoming what it hates, but it’s not clear to me that Amnesty ever actually hated authoritarianism or repression.

 

In explaining its decision to suppress dissent, Amnesty unintentionally admitted its critics were right, though the communications team clearly thought it was making a different point when it released this statement:

 

“AI Israel has sought to publicly discredit Amnesty’s human rights research and positions. Its efforts to publicly undermine the findings and recommendations of Amnesty’s 2022 report on Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians and, more recently, Amnesty’s 2024 report on Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, have been deeply prejudicial to Amnesty’s human rights mission, threatening our credibility, integrity and operational coherence.”

 

“Operational coherence” means Amnesty intends for its leader’s voice to be its only voice, and that the company line must be toed at all times. “Threatening our credibility” means Amnesty Israel has exposed the fact that Amnesty International has bypassed its country-specific researchers so that their expertise won’t interfere with the predetermined conclusion handed down from on high.

 

As the Jerusalem Post noted, Amnesty Israel’s previous chapter chair resigned in November because he was unsuccessful in his attempts to bring the Israel chapter to heel. Amnesty International has an essentially colonialist posture toward its chapters, seeking to rule them rather than manage them and use their existence as a rubber stamp. That outgoing chair wrote an astonishingly forthright confirmation of this: Amnesty Israel, he said, “is just another place for Israeli Jews to express themselves.”

 

God forbid Israeli Jews be permitted to talk about Israel!

 

The point of Amnesty having an Israel chapter, then, is to silence Israeli Jews in the global conversation about human rights.

 

Now, there’s an easy solution to Amnesty International’s desire to cover Israel solely from a Palestinian perspective: It could simply move its operation to Gaza. In doing so, it would no doubt uncover lots of human-rights abuses, because Gaza is governed by one of the world’s most violent, repressive regimes. One might go so far as to say that Hamas’s rule in Gaza perfectly fits Amnesty’s purported raison d’etre.

 

Unfortunately, it turns out, Amnesty’s purported animating principle is just for show. It would be difficult for Amnesty to freely operate in Gaza precisely because of Hamas’s authoritarianism, anyway. Just as it is difficult for Amnesty Israel to freely operate under the thumb of Amnesty International’s tinpot totalitarian rule.