By Ron Kampeas
Amnesty International is set to become the latest human rights organization to describe Israel’s activities in relation to Palestinians as “apartheid” when it releases a special report on Tuesday, prompting a strong rebuke from major U.S. Jewish groups that argue the report could “inflame existing tensions and incite violence.”
The report was leaked to NGO Monitor, an Israeli watchdog, which published an extensive critical analysis online on Monday.
According to a page posted online by NGO Monitor, the Amnesty report appears to extend the apartheid designation to Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens, particularly during clashes inside Israel last May sparked by Israel’s conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Other leading human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and B’tselem, have in the past compared Israeli policy to Apartheid South Africa. But in its report released last April assessing whether Israel’s treatment of Palestinians meets “apartheid” criteria, Human Rights Watch was at pains to say its designation did not extend to Israeli practices within Israel’s pre-1967 state lines.
Like that Human Rights Watch report, Amnesty’s will reportedly offer an assessment on whether they think Israeli officials could be charged with crimes against humanity.
The report presents “an unbalanced, inaccurate, and incomplete review and instead inexplicably focuses on one aim: to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish and democratic State of Israel,” read a joint statement released on Sunday by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federations of North America and B’nai B’rith International.
The report’s “misguided and backward-looking effort to vilify Israel seems to be trying to turn back the peace clock, inflame existing tensions and incite violence, while obstructing the path to peace and the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the groups added.
Israel’s government also condemned the Amnesty report, calling it antisemitic, and urged Amnesty to withdraw it.
“In publishing this false report, Amnesty UK uses double standards and demonization in order to delegitimize Israel. These are the exact components from which modern antisemitism is made,” Israel’s foreign ministry said Monday in a statement.
Amnesty International has been one of Israel’s most consistent critics in recent decades, and the Jewish community in Britain, where Amnesty is based, has accused its officials of at times crossing into antisemitism.
Amnesty International is a bit player compared to the United Nations (UN) which has become the world centre for disseminating and inciting Jew-hatred on virtually a daily basis.
Three totally-fabricated statements have been formulated and repeatedly propagated by the UN and parroted by organisations like Amnesty International:
• Jews have no right to live in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem
• Jews living there are doing so illegally in flagrant violation of international law
• Jews are the major obstacle to peace
These statements are false for the following reasons:
• Jews have the inalienable right to live in these specifically-designated areas of former Palestine for the purpose of reconstituting the Jewish National Home (“Inalienable Right”) – legally conferred by article 6 and article 25 of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and preserved by article 80 of the UN Charter.
• Israel’s first Prime Minister – David Ben-Gurion – then the Representative of the Jewish Agency – emphasised the importance of the insertion of Article 80 into the UN Charter in evidence before the UN Special Committee for Palestine at Lake Success, New York on 7 July 1947:
“… Article 80 was adopted for this very special reason of Palestine… This is the special Article of the Charter which applies to Palestine. It was introduced only because of Palestine.”
• Article 80 preserves the Jewish People’s Inalienable Right notwithstanding the demise of the League of Nations on 19 April 1946.
Burying Article 80 of the UN Charter and the reasons for its inclusion in the Charter continues to be the fuel that enables the UN and Amnesty International to falsely condemn 600000 Jews for illegally living in areas where they are legally entitled to do so and from where all Jews were driven out and expelled between 1948 and 1967.
“Never again” is threatening to become “Yet again” – whilst the UN continues to act in flagrant violation of article 80 of its own Charter.