Amnesty International UK waited until after Holocaust Remembrance Day to publish its latest report on Israel — which depends on ignoring that history and Palestinian efforts to repeat it.
Expect the media to be all over it, since Amnesty is, for the first time, officially accusing Israel of “apartheid” (joining Human Rights Watch, which made the same obscene jump last year).
Anti-Zionist activists and politicians love using the word to smear Israel’s citizenship laws and national-security policies — to delegitimize the Jewish state by equating it with South Africa’s old racist regime.
Amnesty has only accused one other country of current apartheid policies, by the way: Myanmar, which is regularly genocidal against the Rohingya minority. Not China, Iran or Syria, which also seek to wipe out minority populations.
The report reviews Israel’s history since independence, pointing to a skein of examples that supposedly prove the “apartheid state” canard.
But what a lot of history Amnesty ignores. The Holocaust appears only in discussing Israel’s 1952 proffer of citizenship to any Jew who wanted it. It mentions “expulsion” — without noting, for example, Jews getting the boot from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.
Yasser Arafat does not appear. It mentions Hamas 25 times but no specifics of its political and military programs that openly aim at Israel’s annihilation. References to Egypt’s “tight” restrictions on the Rafah border crossing don’t explain the “why” — namely, that nation’s desire to prevent terror attacks on both sides of that border. It describes the unprovoked May 2021 indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli citizens as just “armed hostilities [breaking] out.”
Simply missing is any real sense that the Palestinian political leadership has long pursued policies founded in the denial of Israel’s right to exist. Then again, it never treats Palestinians as having any control over their own actions.
The long “Recommendations” section calls for sanctions, arms embargoes and other international actions against Israel as a whole. But it asks of the Palestinians only that their political leaders “document . . . the discriminatory impact of Israel’s system of apartheid against the Palestinian population” and stop security co-ordination with Israel.
Nothing about Hamas abandoning its genocidal rhetoric, let alone its efforts to deliver on it. Or about committing to no further rocket attacks on civilian targets.
It’s sad to see a second big-name global human-rights group pushing this garbage, but Amnesty isn’t offering anything new: just more distortions, double standards and table-pounding.