Amnesty libels the state of Israel

Israel’s fury over Amnesty International’s declaration that it is an apartheid state is understandable. It may be, as Amnesty Secretary-General Agnes Callamard claims, that in reaching that conclusion the leading human rights organisation was not comparing life in the Palestinian territories with life in apartheid-era South Africa. But the politically charged term is indelibly linked to the gross system of racial discrimination that existed in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, and use of it in relation to Israel today, as Foreign Minister Yair Lapid rightly said, is “divorced from reality”.

Unlike apartheid in its original racist form, Israel – the Middle East’s only democracy where the rule of law functions – extends full civil rights to all citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish. Its two million Arabs, 21 per cent of the population, are in prominent roles in Israeli society. An Arab party plays a key part in the post-Netanyahu coalition government led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Yet in ignoring this and aligning itself with the “apartheid state” claims of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as Iran, Amnesty contends “Israel has established and maintained an institutional regime of oppression and domination of the Palestinian population for the benefit of Jewish Israelis … wherever it has exercised control over Palestinian lives since (the state of Israel was founded in) 1948”.

Amnesty’s pernicious message is that Israel was created as an apartheid state and continues as such today, and because of that the right of the state of Israel to exist as a refuge for the Jewish people is questionable. As The Wall Street Journal noted: “The report treats Israel’s founding as the original sin from which all other offences flow.” This, the paper added, “is a libel that distorts history”. It ignores the reality that “Israel was founded in the wake of the Holocaust with broad international support”.

The “system of apartheid”, the Amnesty report says in challenging Israel’s right to exist, is a “crime against humanity”. It would be hard to imagine a slander more likely to inflame the Jewish state’s adversaries as they demand the imposition of more boycotts, divestments and sanctions and an International Criminal Court investigation into Israelis allegedly responsible for the so-called apartheid regime.

Amnesty’s stance can only add to Palestinian intransigence and scuttle what hopes are still held for Israeli-Palestinian two-state peace.