On February 1, Amnesty International (AI) released its report documenting Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians which it said amount to the crime of apartheid. With this report, Amnesty joined with and reinforced the claims of other international human rights groups like Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights groups B'Tselem and Yesh Din, and virtually all of Palestinian civil society.
Predictably, the response from Israel and its supporters around the world was vicious and swift.
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said, "I hate to use the argument that if Israel were not a Jewish state, nobody in Amnesty would dare argue against it, but in this case, there is no other possibility." Lapid has made this argument at every turn where Israel is criticized or any action, no matter how small, is taken to protest Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
A coalition of anti-Palestinian groups, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), American Jewish Committee (AJC), B'nai B'rith International, and the Jewish Federations of North America, put out a joint statement echoing Lapid's views.
"This libellous document resorts to baseless 'apartheid' accusations against Israel, among other distortions," they wrote. "In so doing, the report commits a double injustice: It fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the only Jewish country on earth, while simultaneously cheapening and downplaying the horrific suffering that was a result of apartheid in South Africa."
The Amnesty report is over 280 pages long, and that space is entirely used to provide an air-tight evidentiary basis for their conclusion of apartheid.
But more than that, the anti-Palestinian coalition employs the common but highly specious tactic of claiming that it is not Israeli practices that might promote antisemitism around the world, rather the reporting of those crimes is what promotes animosity toward Jews.
It should be clear that the Jewish people are not responsible for the state of Israel's actions. Indeed, many Jewish citizens of Israel object to the apartheid practices but are powerless to stop it, try though many of them might. Jews outside of Israel, whatever their beliefs, are also not responsible for Israeli actions, and Israel's behaviour is obviously not an excuse for bigotry, much less violence, against Jews.
Amnesty, in fact, went to some lengths to make this very point. Their Secretary General, Agnes Callamard said at a Jerusalem news conference, "We oppose and denounce antisemitism and antisemitic acts the world over. But we defend our right and the right of anyway one else, to critique impartially and against international rights law, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. That is not antisemitism."
"Let me be clear," she continued, "such accusations … are nothing more than a desperate attempt to evade scrutiny and divert attention from our findings, that the human rights abuses to which the Palestinians people are subjected amount to apartheid."
Her contention is clearly borne out in Amnesty's record of reporting on human rights abuses around the world. But that did not stop US politicians from piling on to the human rights group.
A group of nine members of Congress put out a statement saying that "Sadly, the biased report is steeped in antisemitism and is part of Amnesty's broad, decades-long campaign to criminalize and delegitimize the world's only Jewish state." They offer no evidence to back this very serious accusation, and an examination of Amnesty's record and reporting on Israel does not support it.
They were not alone. Robert Menendez, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, accused Amnesty of "adding fuel to the disproportionate attention international organizations and institutions pay towards Israel."
Democrat Representative Ritchie Torres of New York said, "Calling Israel an apartheid state, as Amnesty has done, is a lie."
Democrat Haley Stevens of Michigan accused Amnesty of being part of a "persistent and growing effort to demonize Israel, the world's only Jewish state and a close American ally, on the international stage."
While Republicans, with just a few exceptions, have allowed their Democratic colleagues to take the lead in bashing Amnesty without basis, the administration of Joe Biden has made it clear how they prioritize the human rights of Palestinians. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said, "I reject the view that Israel's actions constitute apartheid.”
While Rep. Betty McCollum and Congress' lone Palestinian woman, Rashida Tlaib both made statements defending Amnesty, their voices were a small minority.
Yet outside of Congress, there were more vociferous defences. A coalition of thirteen of Israel's most prominent and respected human rights organizations issued a strong statement in defence of Amnesty. The groups included B'Tselem and Yesh Din, both of whom have explicitly declared that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinians. But they also include many groups that have not made such an explicit declaration.
They all came together and states that "The debate around the crime of apartheid of which Israel is accused, and its geographical scope, is not only legitimate but absolutely necessary… we are particularly concerned by the Israeli government’s extremely irresponsible allegation of antisemitism. Many of the most pre-eminent scholars of Jewish life, history and persecution have warned that the struggle against antisemitism in the world is being weakened by the unbearable, inaccurate and instrumentalized use to which the antisemitism accusation is lodged for political ends, in order to avoid debate about Israel's oppressive policies towards the Palestinians."
The common thread running through the attacks on Amnesty is that none of them ever address the contents of the report. In more than 280 pages, Amnesty documented numerous specific cases of human rights abuses and overwhelming statistical and documentary evidence of Israeli crimes, as every other human rights organization involved in Israel and the areas under its dominance has. These are not challenged by Israel or any of its defenders.
The focus exclusively on spurious accusations of antisemitism and fabricated judgments of "anti-Israel bias" by Israel and its defenders is indicative of their desperation. There has been little commentary in mainstream media on the report, and this video by MSNBC reporter Mehdi Hasan defending Amnesty is one of the few in-depth mentions of it. The accusations against Amnesty do not seem to have reverberated much beyond the echo chamber of lock-step supporters of Israeli policy.
With so many international, Israeli, and Palestinian human rights groups all agreeing that Israel is practising apartheid, the Israeli narrative becomes exceedingly difficult to make. That narrative is based on an increasingly massive conspiracy theory that contends that the United Nations, virtually the entire global human rights community, most international legal institutions and scholars, and hundreds of millions of supporters of equal rights for Palestinians all over the world, including a great many Jews, are all part of a vast, antisemitic conspiracy to "delegitimize" Israel. Many of those institutions and individuals do not specifically call Israeli crimes apartheid, but there is wide agreement that they are crimes.
Israel's fantastical defence, which was never plausible in the first place, is now being seen as absurd by more and more people. As more institutions and individuals realize just how bad it really is, whether they call it apartheid or not, the defence of Israel will become even more threadbare.
Mitchell Plitnick is a political analyst and writer. He is the former vice president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and former director of the US Office of B'Tselem.
Follow him on Twitter: @MJPlitnick
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