Hebrew University, Jerusalem; credit:Olivier Fitoussi Amnesty International has produced a report that claims Israel is an “apartheid” state. This follows similar diatribes by other NGOs obsessively promoting the delegitimisation and destruction of Israel.
Their strategy is to shift from their usual fare of false allegations about Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian Arabs in the disputed territories to false allegations about Israel’s oppression of Israel’s Arab citizens.
Libelling Israel as an “apartheid state” is the unconscionable agenda of the UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry, about which I wrote here, which is working hand-in-glove with NGOs in a veritable axis of evil determined to bring about Israel’s destruction.
The accusation of Israeli apartheid is risible, and anyone with a functioning brain can see at a glance that Amnesty has produced a report as ludicrous as it is malevolent.
It’s ludicrous to claim apartheid is enforced against the Palestinian Arabs living in the disputed territories of the “West Bank” — because they aren’t even citizens of Israel.
It’s ludicrous to claim apartheid is enforced against Israel’s Arab citizens because they have full civil and religious rights. An Arab Islamist party, for heaven’s sake, holds the balance of power in Israel’s ruling coalition. An Arab judge sent a previous Israeli president to jail. Amnesty falsely claims:
Israel maintains Jewish domination over the Palestinian economy through the exclusion and intentional neglect of Palestinian communities inside Israel.
But as Elder of Zyon points out:
Yet Israel's largest Arab-majority city, Nazareth, is a high tech hub, hosting R&D centres from Amdocs, Microsoft, Broadcom and Salesforce. Nazareth hosts over 70 startups. Thousands of Arabs work in technology and the number is skyrocketing.
If Israel intends to have Jewish dominance over the Arab economy by neglecting Arab communities, then why does it allow so many major companies to open up in Nazareth?
Why indeed. And as this report observes, Arab Israeli superstars are making strides in culture, sports, medicine, environment, fashion, diplomacy, education and technology.
You can read excellent deconstructions of Amnesty’s falsehoods by Alex Safian of CAMERA here and NGO Monitor here. But it’s not just that its assertions about Israel’s behaviour and the situation of Israeli Arabs are baseless. More fundamentally, its claim that Israel is an apartheid state is based on a definition of apartheid that bears no resemblance to what that actually was.
As everyone knows, apartheid was the system of racial segregation and white domination and oppression of the black majority population that was practised in pre-1990s South Africa. It affected every aspect of black lives and was a regime that was particular to that country.
Amnesty itself acknowledges this. It states:
Amnesty International notes and clarifies that systems of oppression and domination will never be identical. Therefore, it does not seek to argue that, or assess whether, any system of oppression and domination as perpetrated in Israel and the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories] is, for instance, the same or analogous to the system of segregation, oppression and domination as perpetrated in South Africa between 1948 and 1994.
But then, in page after page of tortuous argument, it grossly mis-states and misinterprets international law in a brazen attempt to redefine apartheid itself — and thus claim that Israel’s behaviour fits that spurious definition.
As Honest Reporting notes:
Amnesty manipulates reality through its reliance on bits and pieces of text from the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Drafted in the 1970s, only about half of the countries in the world signed on to this document. Meanwhile, modern, western liberal democracies — including the United States and the United Kingdom — did not adopt it. Additionally, Amnesty in its report used elements of the Rome Statute, which was also adopted by about half of existing nations but, tellingly, is strongly opposed by world powers including the US. In doing so, Amnesty constructed a new definition of apartheid that, obviously, had not been adopted by any country.
Amnesty redefines apartheid as oppression and domination. But these are obviously not the same as an apartheid regime. China oppresses and dominates its Uighurs; Russia oppresses and dominates its dissidents; Afghanistan oppresses and dominates its Hazara community. These are tyrannical regimes, but they aren’t apartheid states.
Where Amnesty really ties itself in knots is over its need to prove that the Palestinian Arabs are a racial group. That’s because the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute both hold that the crime of apartheid relates specifically to the systematic oppression and domination by “one racial group over any other racial group or groups” with the knowledge and intention of maintaining that regime. And the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination defines racial oppression as “based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin”.
But the Palestinian Arabs are not a race. Nor are they people of a different colour from Israeli Jews, more than half of whom are Middle Eastern in origin and dark-skinned. They aren’t a distinct ethnic group. Nor are they a national group because they were never a nation — Palestinian national identity having been invented in the sixties as an artificial construct solely in order to write the Jews out of their own history and destroy the state of Israel.
So in desperation, Amnesty tries to redefine racial groups as being “perceived as being different and possibly inferior by other groups on account of particular physical and/or cultural attributes”. A racial group, according to Amnesty, is a group that defines itself as such. And so, hey presto:
“If a group is perceived and treated as a distinct racial group, it would qualify as a racial group in the meaning of the crime of apartheid”. It is this subjective understanding of “racial groups” that is applied by Amnesty International in this report with regard to the crime against humanity of apartheid.
Moreover, under this bogus definition apartheid doesn’t even need to be applied to an entire racial group. Its oppression and domination may be achieved by targeting only part of the group. So according to Amnesty, domination and oppression of one race by another — what apartheid actually was — is now redefined as domination and oppression of some members of one race by another.
This truly magical thinking manages to diminish the monstrous racial segregation and oppression of all black South Africans who suffered real apartheid imposed by white minority rule.
And it has also managed to offend Israeli Arabs who object to Amnesty calling them “Palestinians”. They are not. They are Israeli Arabs: proud citizens of Israel with equal rights. Here is one of them:
.jpg)
.jpg)
