Amnesty International has become the latest human rights organization to describe Israel’s activities in relation to Palestinians as “apartheid” when it released a special report on Tuesday. Prior to its release, major U.S. Jewish groups argued 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 before the release 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. On Tuesday, when the report was released, NGO Monitor found and posted evidence of revisions in which Amnesty walked back accusations that Israel was committing apartheid within its 1967 borders.
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.
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.
In 1945 my brother in law who had been in the Merchant Marine during World War 2 decided to go to Palestine once the war was over. He went to a Habonim training camp in the Midwest where because of his seaman experience he was recruited to help smuggle Jewish refugees into Palestine. His ship was stopped by the British and as he was able to jump ship he headed to a kibbutz founded in March, 1947 by Jews from Chicago. While there he joined the Palmach. I met him when he came to America in 1952 for my wedding to his brother. He and his wife and young son stayed in the US for a few years before returning to Israel.
One night he told our family of what he had done in 1948. In May, 1948 the Palmach was given orders to expel the Arabs from all of their villages in the north of Israel. He said that the well armed men went under cover of night and at gun point forced every man, woman and child, including the elderly and infirm, from their homes and made them walk barefoot to their exile in Lebanon. I recall asking him why they were barefoot. He said that they couldn’t give them time to put on their shoes or to take any belongings with them. He said that anyone who tried to come back was called an infiltrator and shot on sight. I didn’t ask him if he killed anyone. I liked him and just as the “good Germans” didn’t want to know what happened to the Jews, I as a “good Jew” didn’t want to know if he killed anyone.
The land of one of the ethnically cleansed villages was taken by his kibbutz and after the homes has been blown up, the stones of their homes were broken up for a new road at the kibbutz.
Our family was astounded to hear his story and we believed the what the Israelis had said when the said that all of the Arabs fled because their leaders had told them to flee.
In the early 2000s his daughter and his daughter’s husband left Israel with their three children. They said that they had been oppressors when they served in the IDF and didn’t want their children to also be oppressors as they had been..
In the mid 1980s the Israeli government opened to Israeli historians part of their official archives regarding 1948. The archives revealed extensive ethnic cleansing as well as a number of terrible massacres of Arab men, women and children in their villages. .. Several Israeli historians, including Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe and Tom Segev, wrote about their findings. Those archives are now permanently sealed no doubt because they would not only prove embarrassing to Israel but show that the state was built on war crimes.
Do you have the courage to publish this or are you afraid of the truth?