[The] system of apartheid originated with the creation of Israel in May 1948. – Amnesty International’s Apartheid Report, 2022. 

Israel should not exist as a state of the Jewish people. – Liam O’Brien, Director of Amnesty International USA, 2022. 

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour. (…) Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behaviour not expected or demanded or any other democratic nation.  – Two of the examples of contemporary antisemitism listed in the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism. [4]

The bending of history and facts in this [Amnesty] report is a prime example of how contemporary antisemitism manifests itself, with the sole goal of dismantling the only Jewish State.’ [5] –    The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.

The linguistic transition from ‘The Arab-Israeli Conflict’ to ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ to ‘Occupation’ to ‘Apartheid’ is designed to gradually erase any historical memory of the declared Arab goals of war (no Jewish state) and deny any legitimacy to Jewish self-determination. –  Einat Wilf, former Israeli Labor Party MK. 

As Shany Mor succinctly put it in Fathom, the apartheid accusation declares that Israel ‘is guilty of not just committing a grievous crime but of being a grievous crime.’ One cannot easily reform an existential state of being. Best retire the criminal to the dustbin of history. That eliminationist, antisemitic agenda has always been fundamental to the apartheid accusation, and the Amnesty report reinforces it. – Cary Nelson, President of the American Association of University Professors, 2006-2012, now Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This new introduction to the updated 2022 edition of The Apartheid Smear (forthcoming), originally published by BICOM in 2014, critiques a recent Amnesty International report, one of a crop of very similar ‘reports’ published by NGOs and UN bodies in 2021 and 2022 that call Israel an ‘apartheid’ state [6]. The introduction is organised in three parts, critically examining in turn the analysis, politics, and methods of Amnesty’s report. 

Why is it so important for opinion formers and policy makers who seek peace via the two-state solution to reject the Amnesty Apartheid Report?

Because it has long been understood by democrats on all sides that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impossible without the hard work of mutual recognition and peacebuilding, negotiations and compromises, and, eventually, a lasting settlement based on a division of the land and an institutionalisation of the democratic right to national self determination of both peoples.

Some way-stations on the journey to peace have been Madrid, Oslo, Camp David, Taba, Annapolis, and the Kerry-Obama talks. Yes, the last inch of the journey, as the saying goes, is a mile deep, but there is no real-world alternative to trying again to traverse it. Today, that effort will proceed in the more hopeful context of the Abraham Accords, a historic series of agreements between Israel and several surrounding Arab states. For an extensive collection of some of the most creative and expert thinking from Israelis, Palestinians and others about how to recommence that journey to peace see Rescuing Israeli-Palestinian Peace: The Fathom Essays 2016-2020.

However, while a negotiated two-state solution remains the only viable way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict  – by recognising the right of both peoples to national self determination – right now the gaps between the sides remain significant, and there is insufficient trust, or political will, to build the kind of relationships between the leaderships that might allow those gaps to be bridged.

In the real world, which is found at some distance from NGO-UN Reportland, the task of Britain, along with other European states, the US and Arab leaders, is not to make Israel an international pariah as the Amnesty report would have us do, but to prevent further deterioration on the ground, lower tensions, and find ways to improve the situation. This approach may not be well suited to winning applause from a campus audience, but it is well suited to encouraging a recommencement of the peace process down the line. The analysis, politics and methods of the Amnesty report would take us in the opposite direction, and should be rejected as a political dead-end by opinion-formers, policy makers and, not least, Palestinians.

PART 1: WHAT IS WRONG WITH AMNESTY’S ANALYSIS?

Amnesty’s analysis is based on four major errors, which combine to radically misrepresent Israel and the conflict.

1.1 Amnesty’s First Analytical Error: Thinking a ‘Jewish State’ must be a Racist State

Amnesty thinks that because Israel is a ‘Jewish state’ it must be an ‘Apartheid State’ for non-Jews. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Nation-states are normal. The Jewish nation-state is the expression of the Jewish people’s democratic right of national self-determination. But Israel is a Jewish nation-state with extensive rights for the national minorities.

Amnesty is very clear: a ‘system of apartheid originated with the creation of Israel in May 1948’. So Amnesty is not criticising Israeli policies but Israel’s existence. It is calling for the Jewish nation-state of Israel to be dismantled as an illegitimate and immoral racist state. Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA has removed any uncertainty: ‘We are opposed to the idea … that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people’.

Amnesty gets wrong what ‘nation state of the Jewish people’ means.

‘Jewish state’ does not mean a racial state or a halachic-religious state, as Amnesty seems to think, and from which it ‘infers’ (we will see that Amnesty’s report does an awful lot of inferring) that Israel is an apartheid state.

‘Jewish state’ means Israel is a nation-state, the homeland of the Jewish people. Israel is the place where the Jewish people express their democratic right to a collective life as a people, their right to national self-determination. (The false claim that the Jews were colonialist outsiders who ‘stole’ the land is fully treated in sections 1.2 and 1.4 below.) Indeed, in the happy phrase of former Israeli peace negotiator Tal Becker, ‘the idea of a Jewish state is itself democratic’ (see pp 35 of The Apartheid Smear for Becker’s argument.) Nation-states are normal and, if they are also democratic, they enshrine rights for national minorities. Israel is democratic, and does enshrine those rights [7].

Having made this all-defining, foundational blunder, Amnesty thereafter, and inevitably, misrepresents a long list of Israeli policies and practices as ‘apartheid’.

Example: Amnesty and ‘Jewish Majority’. Amnesty says it is ‘apartheid’ for a Jewish nation state to take steps to preserve a Jewish majority. It isn’t. It is a normal aspect of the exercise of the Jewish people’s – any people’s – democratic right to national self-determination. Preserving a majority is what nation-states do because they are states which express the collective identity and collective self-determination of a people, as well as having equal citizenship rights for all. Nation states routinely use immigration policy to achieve that entirely legitimate end.

This is also an example of Amnesty’s systematic use of the double standard to infer Israel is an apartheid state. As Salo Aizenberg has pointed out, ‘While Amnesty recommends that Israel repeal its Nation-State Law, it does not recommend that the Palestinian Authority change its constitution calling itself part of the ‘Arab nation’ or that ‘Islam is the official religion of Palestine’ or that ‘Islamic Shari’a’ is the principal source of legislation…’[8]. Aizenberg goes on: ‘Amnesty’s refus[es] to accept that Israel can self-define itself as Jewish while having no problem with numerous Christian and Muslim states [the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Islamic Republic of Pakistan] doing the same. … It is accepted worldwide that states can self define by religion or ethnicity and still be considered democracies – but not for Jews…’[9]

Example: Marriage and Citizenship. Amnesty infers that the policy of not automatically granting citizenship to marriage partners is part of Israel’s ‘apartheid system’. But many states do the same. The UK, for example, does not automatically grant citizenship to marriage partners.

Example: Terrorists and Politics. Amnesty’s report (p.13) even infers that Israel’s policy of banning would-be election candidates who ‘support armed struggles by a hostile state or a terrorist organization against Israel’ is an example of its ‘apartheid system’. This is ludicrous. Even a refusal to commit national suicide is apartheid for Amnesty, if it is Israel doing the refusing.

Part 3 of The Apartheid Smear (see pages 35-40) explains at greater length why being a ‘Jewish state’, a homeland for the Jewish people, with rights for minorities, does not make Israel an apartheid state.

Amnesty infers from the existence of unequal outcomes between majority and minority in Israel that Israel is an ‘Apartheid State’. This is ridiculous. Such unequal outcomes are normal in more or less every nation state in the world.

Example. Infant Mortality | Inequality, yes; apartheid, no. Arab infant mortality is 5.4 (per 1,000 births) but only 2.4 for Jews. Amnesty infers apartheid from this kind of difference. But as Aizenberg has pointed out, ‘In the UK, infant mortality for blacks and Muslims is about 6 versus about 3.7 for whites. In Australia 6.3 for Aboriginal persons versus 3.1 for whites. In the US it’s a huge 10.8 rate for blacks (twice the rate for Israel’s Arab citizens) versus 4.6 for whites.’ Aizenberg observes that, ‘The story should be how the Arab minority in Israel has a lower infant mortality rate than minorities in the UK, Australia and the U.S. as well as surrounding nations Lebanon (6), Turkey (8), Jordan (13) and Egypt (17)’.[10]

Example: Life Expectancy | Inequality, yes; apartheid no. Life expectancy is 83.1 years for Jews versus 79.5 for Arabs. An inequality? Yes. Can we infer apartheid from that inequality? Hardly. Arab Israelis have a higher life expectancy than those Arabs who live in the 21 non-Apartheid Arab countries including the Gulf States. In fact their life expectancy is roughly equal to the US average.[11]

Amnesty claims the Arab citizens of Israel suffer ‘apartheid’. They don’t. 

Israel is not an apartheid state. [12] – Mansour Abbas, Arab Muslim leader of Ra’am party which sat in the Israeli government for a year, 2021-2022.

Israel has many problems but it is not an apartheid state. – Issawi Frej, Arab member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) for the left-wing Meretz party.

The Amnesty report claims that Israel has been engaged from 1948 in the systematic ‘exclusion and intentional neglect of Palestinian communities inside Israel’ and that it does so because it is a ‘racist’, ‘apartheid’, ‘Jewish supremacist’ and ‘cruel’ state and society.

Among the mountain of facts that make clear that Amnesty’s claim is ridiculous we can note the following:

– Israel within the 1967 Green Line is a society where the Arab minority are citizens with voting rights, who play a full role in society and use the same universities, hospitals, parks, beaches and shops as their Jewish counterparts.

– Issawi Frej, the Israeli Minister for Regional Cooperation (2021-22), is an Arab citizen of Israel. So are Salman Zarka, one of Israel’s Covid Czars; Osila Abu Assad, appointed Israeli District Court judge, and the chairman of Bank Leumi, the largest bank in Israel, Samer Haj Yahya. Arab Israelis are also university professors, doctors, lawyers, diplomats and business and property owners. In February 2021, Judge Khaled Kabub became the first Arab Muslim appointed to the Supreme Court, following earlier Arab Christian Supreme Court Justice appointees George Karra, Salim Joubran and Abdel Rahman Zuabi.

– 68.3 per cent of Israeli Arabs prefer to live in Israel over living in the US or in any other Western country.[13]

– There are over 400 mosques in Israel, 73 of which are located in Jerusalem. The number of mosques in Israel has increased four-fold since 1988, when they were only 80. 300 Imams receive monetary grants from the Israeli government.

As Lorena Khateeb, a member of Israel’s Druze minority and social media officer for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tweeted, ’As an Israeli Arab citizen, I condemn @amnesty report. I grew up studying and working with Muslims, Christians, Druze and Jews, we all put together the Israeli puzzle, despite the challenges, we enjoy equal rights and even work to fix what is not.’

Amnesty claims that ‘While Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote and run in national elections, in practice their right to political participation is limited, and they continue to be perceived as the “enemy from within”’. Amnesty ignores the presence in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) of 14 Arab MKs from six different parties. Mansour Abbas, a Palestinian Islamist, was an integral part of the government. His Islamist party, Ra’am was a key player in the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid coalition for a year until the dissolution of the government. Amnesty’s report does not mention him once in a report ostensibly about the relationship between majority and minority in Israel.

Amnesty uses four tricks to support its claim that Israel’s Arab citizens suffer ‘apartheid’

Amnesty’s First Trick: Never compare the Israeli Arab present with the Israeli Arab past

Amnesty’ first trick is to compare today’s measures of Israeli Arab outcomes (income, education, health etc) with Israeli Jews today, and never with Israeli Arab outcomes in the past. This allows Amnesty to present inequalities, normal in nation-states, as markers of a uniquely Israeli, uniquely Jewish, apartheid or ‘Jewish Supremacism’ (a phrase popular with the KKK, note, but also used freely by Amnesty).

If we compare today’s Israeli Arab outcomes with yesterday’s Israeli Arab outcomes, the picture changes radically. Here are some examples:

Arab High School Graduates, Past and Present. 17 per cent more Jews than Arabs between the ages of 55 and 69 are high school graduates. But the disparity drops to 0.7 per cent among the 35-44-year-olds, and among the 25-34-year-olds the trend is reversed: 54 per cent of Jewish Israelis and 54.9 per cent of Arab Israelis are high school graduates.[14]

Arab University Students, Past and Present. ‘Between the years 2009/10 and 2019/20 the number of Arab university students rose substantially: undergraduate students —  from 13.1 per cent to 19.2 per cent. Masters’ degree programs from 7.4 per cent to 14.6 per cent, and doctoral degree programs from 5.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent.’[15]

Arab Educational Attainment, Past and Present. The median level of education among the Arab Israeli public has risen tenfold, from 2.1 in the early 1960s to 12.0 in 2017. The median level of education among the Jewish Israeli public rose by 4.8 during that same period to 13. Forty-six per cent of all medical students who were accredited as doctors in 2020 were Arab and Druze Israelis, which far outpaces their relative size in the population.[16]

Amnesty’s second trick: Never compare the position of Israeli Arabs today to minorities in other states

Amnesty’ second trick is to never compare Israeli Arab outcomes with those in any other states, whether regional or international. Again, any inequalities can then be presented as ‘apartheid’ or ‘Jewish Supremacism’.

Example: Arab Incomes. Amnesty thinks it is apartheid that ‘average monthly net income per household in the Arab sector is NIS 12,700 (USD 4,097), compared to NIS 18,720 (USD 6,051) in the Jewish sector in Israel’ or 32 per cent lower (p. 167). However, fully half of British Muslims are in poverty (i.e. their household incomes are less than 60 per cent of the national medium average). As Azienberg notes, ‘Household income for Aboriginal people in Australia is 50 per cent below non-indigenous persons. The real story [in Israel] is the reverse of apartheid.’[17]

Amnesty’s third trick: Hide from the reader all Israeli government efforts to close the gaps between majority and minority

The December 2015 Government Resolution 922 allocated NIS 12.3 billion (nearly $4 billion) to the development of the Arab sector to close gaps between Jewish and Arab communities. An October 2020 extension added another NIS 500 million to the program through the end of 2021. The November 2021 budget approved a programme for Arab society totalling NIS 30 billion to address health care, social welfare and education, including the construction of over 1,000 classrooms and nursery schools in Arab communities. It also allocates 650 million NIS to reduce health disparities between the Arab community and the rest of the population, and hundreds of millions of shekels to integrate Arabs into Israel’s hi-tech sector. In a separate part of the budget, the Public Security Ministry was provided NIS 2.5 billion to counter violence and organised crime in Arab communities.

A report on the progress of this equalising programme noted that ‘Arab Israeli MKs largely hailed the move to extend the 922 funding and remove obstacles to its use by local municipalities.’ An official from the widely respected Arab-Jewish NGO Sikkuy, which has been central to the ‘close the gaps’ agenda has highlighted some of 922’s key achievements, including ’improving the integration of Arab women in the workforce, expanding public transportation in Arab villages, and increasing public trust and collaboration between Arab municipalities and the Israeli government.’

Amnesty’s report includes nearly a full-page sidebar about how exemption of Palestinians from military service is somehow an element of Israel’s apartheid system, as it excludes Palestinians from the economic benefits of serving. (pp. 83-4) Amnesty downplays the fact that Arabs can join the military, and many choose to do so. [They are just not compelled to do so.] One can only imagine Amnesty’s outrage if Israel forced Israeli-Arabs to join the IDF and fight other Arabs when they attack Israel. For Amnesty, it is apartheid if you do and apartheid if you don’t.[18]

Amnesty’s fourth trick: Invent special, new, unique meanings for the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘race’ to trap Israel 

The true meaning of ‘apartheid’ in international law was discussed in two recent reports by legal experts Joshua Kern and Anne Herzberg: ‘False Knowledge as Power: Deconstructing Definitions of Apartheid that Delegitimise the Jewish State’ (December 2021) and ‘Neo-Orientalism: Deconstructing Claims of Apartheid in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ (March 2022). Both made clear that Amnesty has engaged in what the academics call ‘concept stretching’, i.e. pulling a concept so far out of shape that it takes on a qualitatively different meaning.

Amnesty’s changes the meaning of both ‘apartheid and ‘race’ in order to present what is really a national conflict between two peoples as a racial conflict between two races.

Amnesty claims their report does not seek to ‘argue that, or assess whether, any system … as perpetrated in Israel and the OPT is … the same or analogous to the system as perpetrated in South Africa’. But they should have. The 1976 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid insists that the definition of apartheid ‘shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa.’

Amnesty relies on the 1973 Apartheid Convention, adopted during the Cold War. There are several problems with this. In 1973 Stalinist dictatorships and Islamic states took the lead. They would go on to use their numerical if not moral superiority at the UN to pass the notorious ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution two years later in 1975. The 1973 Convention was not signed by any Western countries, nor by Israel, and it is not customary international law. Israel is not bound by it.

Academic expert Cary Nelson points out that because Amnesty’s non-stop racialising of the conflict is ‘accusatory but undocumented’ it ‘amounts to race-baiting’. Amnesty’s admits it can find no Israeli ‘plan to subject one racial group to oppression and domination’ but then claims this does not matter because ‘the plan can simply be inferred’ (51). Nelson objects to this move: ’South Africa had an elaborate set of discriminatory laws covering virtually every aspect of social and political life. Israel has nothing of the kind. … Israel has Basic Laws and multiple court decisions guaranteeing equality within its pre-1967 borders’.

Nelson also points out that Amnesty twists the meaning of the word ‘race’ until it becomes a synonym for national group. By doing this, Amnesty is able to misrepresent a national conflict as a racial conflict. ‘National origin’, writes Nelson ‘should not … substitute for race as historically understood … Palestinians are not a race; they did not even cohere as a people, a cultural and political entity, until the 1960s. And Israelis are not a race, as a day spent in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv makes obvious. Nor are Jews a race.’

Part 1 of The Apartheid Smear is a more detailed survey (updated for 2022) of the true position of the Arab minority in Israel today, covering both the grounds for celebration and the areas where further reform and change are still needed to close the gaps.

1.2 Amnesty’s Second Analytical Error: Erasing the 100-Year War on the Jews

Amnesty decontextualises the history of the conflict to demonise Israel.   

First, Amnesty erases the context of a 100-year Arab war against the Jewish presence. Second, Amnesty erases the context of the peace process and the offers made by Israel and the international community to divide the land, each rejected by the Arab and Palestinian leadership.

Before considering some examples of the first form of historical erasure, it is important to understand why both forms of erasure are strategic on Amnesty’s part and pivotal to the game Amnesty is playing with Israel in its report.

As we have seen, Amnesty admits there is no Israeli apartheid plan or law. Instead, Amnesty infers apartheid by claiming that Israel’s policies and practices towards the Palestinians are motivated not by genuine security concerns, or by the exigencies of an unresolved national question, but by racism. In Amnesty’s own words then, to qualify as apartheid Israeli policies and practices must be shown to have been ‘committed with the intention to maintain’ a system of racist domination of the Palestinians.

Amnesty then hides from its readers the all-determining contexts that would, if taken into account, make clear that Israeli intentions stem not from racism but from the existential need – and solemn duty – to maintain the security of its citizens, Jewish and Arab, against war and terror. Ditto when Amnesty excludes from consideration that other context of Israeli policy and practice – Israeli peace efforts and Israeli proposals to divide the land into two states for two peoples from 1947, and repeated Palestinian rejections, which have left an unresolved national question.

The impact of Amnesty’s double demonising erasure – of the 100-year Arab war against the Jews and of the peace process – when combined with Amnesty’s foundational error of thinking a Jewish state can only be a racist state, leaves the reader with no context to explain Israeli actions other than ‘cruel’ and intentional ‘Jewish supremacism’.

Amnesty says it excludes any consideration of Arab war and terror against the Jews because these ‘violations’ – a weasel word for the bloody reality – are ‘not the focus of this report’. This is ludicrous because these ‘violations’, from the early 20th century to today, are an absolutely key context of what is the focus of the report: the evolving relationship between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority. Amnesty erases the determining contexts of that relationship until what’s left is a blank page on which Amnesty can write the word ‘apartheid’.

Amnesty Erases the Wars against Israel

Example: Amnesty and the 1948 War. Amnesty tells us that Israel made ‘territorial gains … in 1948’ and this was apartheid. But Amnesty erases the predatory war on the Jews, launched (and lost) by five Arab armies determined to drive the Jews into the sea three years after the Holocaust, a war launched after the Palestinian national movement and the Arab League had rejected the UN partition plan, which the Jews had accepted.

These are not small facts.

They are the ones you need to make any proper sense of the history. Amnesty erases all of it, including Abdullah el Tell, commander of the Arab Legion saying jubilantly – after expelling all Jewish residents from the Old City and allowing Arab Muslim refugees to settle in the vacated Jewish Quarter – ‘For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.’

Amnesty erases the fact that every single battlefield victory the Arabs achieved in 1948 was followed by the ethnic cleansing (or massacring) of the Jews. Every one. Amnesty turns 1948 on its head: a predatory-genocidal Arab war on the Jews is presented as a racist takeover of land by the Jews. (And note, by the way el Tell’s easy passing reference to ‘1000 years’. What a recent invention is the idea, so popular on campuses, that the Jews are 19th century ‘European settler colonialists’!)

Example: Amnesty and the 1967 War. Amnesty says Israel annexed East Jerusalem and occupied the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 because it is an apartheid state. Again, Amnesty erases the basic facts: Israel won a war of self-defence (again) after being surrounded by Arab armies vowing to drive the Jews into the sea (again), after the Egyptian army had demanded the UN leave the previously demilitarised Sinai desert and subsequently massed on Israel’s borders, holding a knife to Israel’s throat. Amnesty also erases the fact that Israel’s peace overtures in the aftermath of the Six-Day War were famously rejected by a united Arab League cry of ‘No peace! No recognition! No negotiations!’ at Khartoum.

Example: Amnesty and the 1973 War. The Yom Kippur War took place in 1973 when Egypt and Syria tried to destroy Israel on the Jewish holy day, and came closer to succeeding than many appreciate. Amnesty’s response is to simply cut the war tout court from the report’s historical timeline.

So, three wars of conquest which were by the Arabs’ own proud boasts genocidal wars of conquest, yet Amnesty manages to infer from each evidence of… Israel’s Cunning Apartheid Plan For Jewish Supremacy.

Amnesty Erases Terrorism Against Israel

Again and again, Amnesty infers apartheid from Israeli policy responses to terrorism. By erasing the terror threat Israel faces, by putting the word security in scare quotes, the Amnesty report further distorts our understanding of the conflict.

Amnesty’s attitude is ‘Terror, What Terror?’

Amnesty does not mention the Iranian-sponsored antisemitic terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad or once use the words ‘terror’, ‘bombing’, ‘suicide’ ‘stab’ or ‘stabbing’ in its 280-page report. Not one Palestinian terrorist attack against Israelis is discussed. One critic registered the moral significance of Amnesty’s omission: ‘It is simply amazing that an organization ostensibly devoted to “human rights” would work so hard to dehumanize these [Israeli] victims of Palestinian terrorism, in effect to bury them a second time.’[19]

Amnesty Gets Hamas Wrong

Amnesty whitewashes the antisemitic terrorists of Hamas. For example, Amnesty decries the Israeli revocation of residency status of four Jerusalem residents in 2006, inferring from this decision another example of apartheid. In fact, the four, Muhammad Abu Tir, Ahmad Attoun, Muhammad Totah and Khaled Abu Arafeh, were all Hamas members.[20] By hiding this fact Israel can be portrayed as an apartheid state revoking the rights of random non-Jews.

Amnesty infers an ‘apartheid system’ from Israel’s ‘repeated military offensives’ in Gaza. In fact, each operation was undertaken in self-defence to restore deterrence against indiscriminate Hamas rockets falling on the Arab and Jewish civilians of Southern Israel, and after repeated Israeli demands, unheeded, that Hamas desist. Amnesty also erases the fact that these rockets have been getting progressively more potent, at times including Iranian-supplied Fajr 5 missiles able to reach Tel Aviv.

One critic notes that Amnesty infers as an example of Israel’s apartheid system the ‘USD 27 million loss in the agriculture sector’s greenhouses, agricultural lands and poultry farms as a result of the destruction caused by Israel’s military offensive in May 2021’. But once more, Amnesty erases all context. Hamas began the 2021 exchange by firing over 4,000 rockets into Israel. Israel was responding in self-defence to this massive barrage against its cities. Amnesty also erases Israel’s own economic loss of $166 million.[21]

Amnesty infers apartheid from the fact that ‘Israel imposed a “dual use” policy in Gaza in 2007, restricting the entry of any goods it deemed to potentially have military, as well as civilian, use, including chemicals and technology.’ And what do we think might have happened in Gaza that year that made Israel decide this policy was necessary? Amnestinian Silence. No mention of the takeover of the Strip by an eliminationist antisemitic terror gang committed in its Charter to Israel’s destruction as an Islamic duty. No space in 280 pages for that. No space to explain to the reader that Hamas was using the Strip as a terror base from which to attack Israel.

Amnesty even infers as another example of the apartheid system that ‘this [dual use] policy only applies to Palestinian importers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, not to their Israeli counterparts or even to Israeli settlers in the OPT’ (18) Again, can Amnesty really think of no reason for Israel to make that kind of practical discrimination other than ‘cruel’ ‘Jewish supremacism’?

Amnesty infers that Israel’s naval restrictions around the Gazan coast are unnecessary and illegal and an example of the ‘apartheid system’. Amnesty hides from the reader the 2011 UN Palmer Commission which concluded ‘Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza…The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.’

Just once, Amnesty lets Israel get a word in edgeways. About the aerial-spraying of herbicides over Palestinian crops along the fence between Gaza and Israel, Amnesty tell us that ‘Israel claims that the spraying is intended to “enable optimal and continuous security operations’’’. But this is just a bit of throat-clearing by Amnesty who immediately go on to say there is no evidence to support Israel’s claim. So Amnesty requires us to believe two impossible things before breakfast. One, that Hamas rocket teams – who use hospitals, schools and tower blocks without a qualm – have never, and would never make use of the cover provided by agricultural growth along the border fence. Two, that only cruel Jewish racism could have motivated the spraying, even though at the very same time Israel is shipping over the very same border – to a regime committed to its destruction – many tons of food and medical equipment every month, as well as facilitating access to Israeli hospitals for thousands.

Amnesty Gets the West Bank Wrong

Amnesty infers that the security barrier is part of a racist Israeli ‘Apartheid system’. But Amnesty erases what led up to Israel’s decision to construct the barrier: the so-called ‘second intifada’, which included waves of Palestinian suicide bombings, Israeli teenage kids being blown to pieces in pizza parlours and the Dolphinarium discothèque, atrocity upon atrocity, day after day, for years before the construction of the barrier was begun. Neither does Amnesty tell the reader about the barrier’s huge contribution to reducing terror attacks and so the number of dead Jews.

Amnesty infers it is part of the ‘apartheid system’ that West Bankers have to apply for a permit to cross into Israel for medical treatment. It does not mention the terror attacks that have been launched under the cover of medical visits, some of which are cited in The Apartheid Smear (see p. 48) and which prompted the introduction of the policy. With that context removed, Amnesty can throw yet another policy on the pile marked ‘Infer Cruel Jewish Apartheid From This’. In 2021 13.5 million individual crossings were registered of Palestinians who entered Israel from the West Bank for work, commerce, medical treatment, and humanitarian aid.[22]

Amnesty Gets Rioting Wrong

Amnesty infer that the anti-Jewish riots in Israel in May 2021 – prettified by Amnesty as ‘peaceful protests’ – are a case of apartheid, in part because more Arabs than Jews were arrested. What Amnesty erases are these inconvenient facts: ‘between May 11-16 Arab rioters set fire to 10 synagogues, 112 Jewish homes and 849 Jewish-owned cars, in addition to significant looting. In contrast, Jewish rioters did not burn down any mosques, no Arab homes were reported looted, 13 Arab properties were damaged and 13 Arab-owned cars burned. In two pages of detailed statistics, Amnesty did not find room to state these facts because they would have contradicted their demonizing “apartheid” narrative.’[23]

1.3 Amnesty’s Third Analytical Error: Erasing International / Israeli Peace Offers And Palestinian Rejectionism

It is not only the 100-year Arab war against the Jews that Amnesty erases. They also erase the history of the peace process and the Israeli offers to divide the land between the river and the sea.

Looking through the Amnesty report, the reader might think none of the following events happened: the 1948 Jewish acceptance of the November 1947 UN Partition Plan (rejected by the Palestinian leaders and the Arab states who launched a war to stop it); the Jewish Peace Offer of 1967 (which followed another predatory Arab war) met by the Arab League’ ‘No, No, No’; the Madrid Talks in 1991; the Oslo Accords of 1993; the return of the PLO and establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli partial withdrawals from the West Bank following the 1995 Oslo II Agreement and 1997 Hebron Protocol; the Camp David peace talks of 2000 and the follow-on Taba peace talks and the Clinton Parameters of December 2000 (the rejection of which by then PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat was called a ‘crime’ by Saudi Arabia); the Israeli withdrawals from part of the West Bank; the Israeli withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip in 2005; the Annapolis talks in 2008 (during which Olmert offered the equivalent of 100 percent of the West Bank and to which PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas did not formally respond); and the Kerry-Obama led talks of 2013-4 (to which – once again – Abbas did not formally respond).

Instead of telling that story, Amnesty’s narrative leaps 17 years in a single bound, from the 1993 Oslo Accords to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s 2020 stated (but never enacted) plan to annex parts of the West Bank.

1.4 Amnesty’s Fourth Analytical Error: Turning an unresolved national question between two homeland peoples into a ‘racial’ conflict between ‘settler colonials’ and ‘indigenous’

‘The past is being rewritten so fast that we just don’t know what will happen yesterday’. (A joke told in the Soviet Union.)

Amnesty’s fourth analytical error is to misrepresent a national conflict between two homeland peoples as a racial war between White, Racist, European Settler Jews and Black, Indigenous Palestinians.

Amnesty presents Israel’s very existence as a form of ‘white supremacy’, claiming that ‘the State of Israel considers and treats Palestinians as an inferior non-Jewish racial group’. The report is stuffed full of ‘race-baiting’ language. The phrase ‘Jewish domination’ crops up 145 times, alongside ‘racialized policing of protests’, ‘racially motivated dispossessions’, ‘a regime of systematic racial oppression and domination’, and ‘the racialized and discriminatory dispossession of … lands and property’. Amnesty asserts that ‘the racial discrimination against and segregation of Palestinians is the result of deliberate government policy’ and calls for ‘restitution of and compensation for all properties acquired on a racial basis.’ As the Jewish Forward put it, the Amnesty approach does more ‘to demonize Jews than uplift Palestinians.’[24]

Amnesty, ‘Apartheid’ and the ‘Settler-Colonial State’ Myth 

It is important to grasp that the ‘apartheid’ smear functions in the world as the activist political expression of a theory now popular in left academia – settler colonialism theory – that has been stretched to fit the Israel case. The theory claims Israel is an alien, European, ‘settler-colonial society,’ an implant stuck into the Middle East by ‘Imperialism’. According to this theory the Jewish presence in Israel is just like the ‘settler invasions’ of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Jews are just another group of ‘white’, ‘European’, ‘racist’, ‘settler-colonialists’ who ‘invaded’ a territory and imposed a racist system on the ‘black indigenous’.

The theory is designed to allow the global anti-Israel campaign to associate their cause with the zeitgeist, with Black Lives Matters and Critical Race Theory. Amnesty’s charge of ‘Jewish supremacism’ is an accusation of racism, just like the charge in the US of ‘white supremacism’. Note that Amnesty does not make the accusation of ‘Arab supremacism’ or ‘Islamic supremacism’ against other countries in the region in which ethnic or religious minorities suffer much worse, compared to the majority populations, than the Arab minority in Israel. This use of the double standard makes Amnesty’s charge of ‘Jewish supremacism’ antisemitic within the terms of the IHRA Definition.

The apartheid smear and ‘Settler Colonialism’ theory work together, pushing aside the two states for two peoples paradigm, and the political approach to resolving the conflict by negotiations, which is suitable for an unresolved national question between two homeland peoples. In its place is the revanchist (and frankly genocidal) alternative of ending the existence of Israel, the one Jewish state in the world, and chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, which is suitable for a South Africa-like racial conflict between an minority oppressor race and a majority oppressed race.

The trouble is this: Israel is no more a ’settler-colonial’ state than it is an ‘apartheid’ state. There are four fundamental differences between the Israeli experience and that of the ‘settler colonial states’ like America or Australia.

First Difference: The intimate Jewish relationship to the land 

The ‘apartheid’ / ‘Settler Colonialism’ paradigm misses everything that is historically and religiously distinctive about the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel/Palestine. That relationship is utterly unlike anything you can find in the societies usually identified as ‘settler colonial’. The Jews were a homeland people returning to a land that had been theirs, in which their religion was born, their temple built, and their Matriarchs and Patriarchs walked. A land that was at the absolute centre of Judaism and Jewish peoplehood. The land from which they had been forcibly expelled, though on which they had maintained an unbroken presence, and had been the majority in Jerusalem since the 19th century.

Second Difference: The exceptional history of Jewish persecution

The ‘apartheid’ / ‘Settler Colonialism’ paradigm erases Europe’s antisemitic history as a driver in the rise of Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state: the collapse of the post-1789 liberal and emancipatory society, the murderous backlash against the limited inclusion of Jews in European societies in the late 19th century; the radicalisation of European antisemitism in the 20th century culminating in the Holocaust, a rupture in world history and Jewish history that made the creation of a Jewish state in the land of Israel nothing like the creation of the ‘settler colonial’ societies such as the US or South Africa.

Third Difference: The fact of Jewish indigeneity 

The ‘apartheid / Settler Colonialism paradigm erases the local character of the majority of Israeli Jews. The Jews are a homeland people, exiled and returning. Jews were a majority (again) in Jerusalem from the 19th century. Around 800,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from Arab lands from the late 1940s-early 1950s, moving within a region they had lived in for millennia. Most were driven out of their homelands by Arab and Muslim antisemitism, many carrying the handful of belongings they had been given 24 hours to pack after millennia of residence.

Fourth Difference: The international community superintended the creation of Israel 

Unlike actual settler colonial states like the USA or Australia, Israel was brought into being by a series of international community mandates – including the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1922 San Remo Conference and the 1947 UN Partition Plan.

PART 2: AMNESTY’S POLICIES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The policy recommendations of the Amnesty report, were they endorsed, would lead to two disastrous political consequences. First, western governments and civil society actors would find it impossible to make any useful contribution to the easing and resolution of the conflict. Quite the reverse in fact. Second, the antisemitic anti-Zionism which is already poisoning campuses, politics, civil society and communal relations in the West would worsen.

2.1 Amnesty proposes one-sided, non-starter, ‘solutions’ to the conflict that would end all chances of mutual recognition and a peace agreement, as well as threatening Israel’s short-term security and long term existence.

Amnesty’s practical proposals threaten Israel’s short-term security

In the short-term, Amnesty’s proposals would make Israel an international pariah: diplomatically isolated, boycotted, cast out from the economic and cultural life of humanity, unable to rearm, and vulnerable to the depredations of regional enemies of all kinds.

Amnesty proposals include: the international community to send Israel to the International Criminal Court; the international community to impose a ‘comprehensive arms embargo’ on Israel (at a time, note, when Israel is threatened by terrorist organisations like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, and by a state, Iran, which has made clear its genocidal intent many times); the UN to sanction Israel (and only Israel); a global civil society campaign to support BDS; an international tribunal to try Israeli officials for ‘apartheid’; corporations to end their business relationships with Israel; the ending of Palestinian Authority security cooperation with Israel, and the ending of the newly warming relationships between Arab states and Israel.

Amnesty ‘recommends’ that Israel opens all borders to Gaza and allows the free entry of all goods into Gaza. (It does not ‘recommend’ that Hamas stop building rockets or tunnels.) Amnesty also recommends that Israel remove the security barrier in the West Bank. (It does not recommend that Palestinians halt all activities that promote terrorism, such as the so-called ‘martyrs’ payments’, naming schools after terrorists and providing summer camps for children that glorify terrorism and teach antisemitism).

Amnesty’s proposals threaten Israel’s long-term existence

Amnesty proposes that Israel accept the unqualified right of ‘return’ of the refugees of 1948 and of several millions of their descendants, anything less being inferred as apartheid. Amnesty calls for this ‘right’ to be exercised not in the new Palestinian state that Israel has tried to negotiate, but in Israel itself. The report is very clear: ‘Palestinians who were displaced in the 1947-49 and 1967 conflicts, and their descendants, have an internationally-protected right to return to their former places of residence or property’ says Amnesty, who add that Israel ‘must also recognize the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived in Israel or the OPT.’[25]

Amnesty’s maximalist ‘return’ politics (a throw back to the 1970s era PLO, by the way) would mean that, in time, instead of having a Jewish state and a Palestinian state – a solution that would allow mutual recognition and the national self-determination of both peoples – there would instead be two majority-Arab states. So, the only Jewish state in the world would disappear, but the 23rd Arab state would be brought into being.

How out of date Amnesty (and much of the Global Left) is. While the Arab world moves forward to an historic rapprochement with Israel – opening up new opportunities for restarting the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians – Amnesty would move us back to the dead-end politics of the Cold War: ‘return’, state boycotts and Soviet-inspired ‘anti-Zionist’ propaganda about ‘apartheid’.

2.2 Amnesty’s report will boost antisemitic anti-Zionism in the West, further poisoning campuses, civil society and politics, dividing communities and endangering Jews.

Branding Israel an apartheid state is more than historically inaccurate. I believe it’s part of a larger effort to delegitimize the Jewish state. Such language, I see it spilling over onto campuses where it poisons the atmosphere, particularly for Jewish students. – Professor Deborah Lipstadt, US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, in evidence to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Amnesty’s USA Director Paul O’Brien is very clear that ‘Israel should not exist as a Jewish state’. He also says he does not believe polls showing the vast majority of American Jews support Israel. (One wonders who he thinks has the uncanny power to manipulate all those polls.) Little wonder the UK Government’s adviser on antisemitism, Lord John Mann, believes ‘It is time for Amnesty to receive some training in what antisemitism is’.[26]

A Modern Blood Libel? 

Some commentators have compared Amnesty’s systematic decontextualisation of Israeli responses to terror attacks to the medieval blood libel. Aizenberg offers the example of Amnesty devoting much space (p. 183) to the case of Ms. Nisreen Qudeh, a Gazan farmer whose house and plant nursery [in Kuza’a] were destroyed in Israeli strikes in 2014. But Aizenberg notes that Amnesty fails to tell the reader that ‘there was a Hamas terror tunnel that opened inside Gaza at Khuza’a from where Israel was infiltrated and attacks were launched.’ He contends that when Israel’s actions are shorn of all context in this way, ’Amnesty simply promotes blood libel: Israel attacked Khuza’a to promote its cruel system of apartheid.’

In many ways, the daily, global, mass communication of decontextualised, demonising and antisemitic online messages, ostensibly about ‘Israel’ but drawing deep from the well of antisemitic tropes, images, and prejudices, is the blood libel of our times. Whatever Amnesty’s intentions, its ‘apartheid’ report will make worse an already hostile environment for Jews in the West. As the President of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald S. Lauder, has pointed out, while the Amnesty report ‘does absolutely nothing to offer a constructive way forward’, it will ‘fuel the fires of antisemites’.

Antisemitism changes over time and place according to the needs of the antisemites. Medieval Priests, Enlightenment philosophers, Nazi SS officers and Stalinist Central Committee members each told a different story about the alien, powerful, and malevolent Jew: the Jews are God-Killers; the Jews are the clannish obstacle to an Age of Reason; the Jews are a biological pollutant of the Aryan Race; the Jews are Uber-Capitalists, Rothschild Capitalists, Rootless Cosmopolitans and Zionists, and so on.

The creation for the first time in two thousand years of a Jewish state has transformed the language and style of antisemitism once again. As the historian David Nirenberg, author of the seminal Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, puts it, ‘We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of “Israel”’.

The Amnesty Report is of this age.

By depicting the Jewish state as a racist endeavour with no right to exist, by depicting its policies as motivated by an intentional and cruel racism, and by leaving the reader thinking that Israel’s acts of self-defence against terror are acts of pure cruelty and ‘Jewish supremacism’ it has helped put into global circulation a demonising and dehumanising discourse about Jews. How could this not have antisemitic effects? The ADL believes the apartheid smear is putting a target on the back of everyone who supports a Jewish and democratic state, ‘including the vast majority of Jews around the world’ and is helping to create a ‘fertile ground for a hostile and at times antisemitic discourse.’

Cary Nelson, a former head of the US association of university professors, warns that Amnesty is trying to racialise our understanding of the conflict. ‘Amnesty’s relentless repetition of the racism accusation crosses a threshold,’ he believes. With its drumbeat of ‘Jewish Supremacism’ ‘Amnesty ‘goes beyond indicting Israel to indict Judaism itself for a nonexistent racist inclination to see itself as superior to other religious and national groups’ and he contends that this is ‘one of the ways the Amnesty report crosses a line into antisemitism.’[27]

CONCLUSION: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Luke Akehurst has made the fundamental point: Amnesty has a legitimate role in holding all governments and powers to account for human rights violations but it does not have a legitimate role in ‘deciding that the Jewish people are not entitled to national self-determination and a state where they are the majority, when the existence of such a state is the Jewish people’s only guaranteed shield against pogroms and genocide.’[28]

Democrats face a choice when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict: be instrumental-constructive or be expressive-destructive.

Either / or.

Either one accepts the frustrating reality that the conflict is a complex, protracted, hitherto unresolved national question between two homeland peoples, and tries to ensure one’s actions and statements support if possible, but at least do no harm to, the efforts of the two peoples to reach peace by mutual recognition, negotiations, compromise and agreement.

Or, as Amos Oz put it in his classic pamphlet How to Cure a Fanatic, one treats the conflict as a racial war of good vs. bad, cheering one side and booing the other, chanting ‘From the River to the Sea’, cancelling ‘the Zionists’, using the conflict as a screen on to which to project a radical left-wing identity.

In the mid-1980s in Britain we had to fight far-left anti-Zionist activists in the UK National Union of Students who were trying to ban student Jewish Societies. Jews were ‘racists’ they said, because Jews were ‘Zionists’ and ‘Zionism is racism’. [29] In 2021-22 a crop of reports from NGOs and UN bodies have updated that same claim: Israel is racist because Israel is Zionist, so Israel and its supporters must be cancelled.

The time for being polite about this kind of antisemitic demonisation has long passed. Its real world consequences are visible all around us: a rising tide of antisemitism that is moving from discourse to violence. That the demonisation now comes dressed up in a ‘UN’ logo, because a majority of Islamic states and thug-ocracies have colonised this or that UN committee, or is published in the name of a once great human rights NGO captured by antizionism, makes no difference. [30] It’s still demonisation.

And enough is enough.

APPENDIX: AMNESTY IS A BIASED MESSENGER USING DUBIOUS METHODS

I now raise some questions about the credibility of Amnesty as a messenger and the reliability of the methods used in its 2022 ‘apartheid’ report. I draw liberally on Salo Aizenberg’s brilliant and forensic critical reading of the Amnesty report, in which he identified 287 errors, omissions, double standards, misrepresentations and dead citations, all of which, he demonstrates, err in the same direction: the demonisation of Israel.  

1. AMNESTY IS A BIASED MESSENGER

Whatever can be said for its reports on other countries, when it comes to Israel, Amnesty has not been a credible messenger for some time. 

As long ago as 1970, the group’s U.S. chairman Mark Benenson publicly slammed the organisation, charging that its reporting on Israel ‘reveals the zeal of the prosecutor, convinced of the defendant’s guilt,’ and ‘omits material which would help the defense.’ 

Two years later, after Amnesty appeared to shrug at the massacre of Israeli Jews by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics, Gidon Gottlieb, Amnesty’s representative to the United Nations, resigned citing his colleagues’ ‘moral obtuseness’ and the organisation’s ‘climate of tolerance [of] inhuman acts by “the underdog.”’ [38]

Amnesty has a history of making false charges against Israel (e.g. here, here, here, and here). Its leader Agnès Callamard ‘had to apologize after her bizarre anti-Israel tweets were publicized.’ [39] Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has complained that ‘Amnesty’s secretary general previously accused Israel of killing Arafat without any basis or facts’ pointing out that ‘It took Amnesty eight years to take back these false accusations’. [40]

Salman Rushdie charged Amnesty International with ‘moral bankruptcy’ in 2010. [41]

The Director of Amnesty Israel, Molly Malekar has been blunt about the organisation’s failings. ‘I have a problem with Amnesty International’s approach on antisemitism. Amnesty is supposed to fight antisemitism. It does, but not enough, and sometimes I feel that it needs to be pressured into action (on the issue).’ Malekar has also rejected Amnesty’s claim that Arab Israelis who identify as Palestinian were ‘perpetual, passive victims of apartheid, devoid of any rights and agency’ which she pointed out is ‘neither true nor helpful’. [42] 

In 2019, a 200-page report commissioned by Jewish Human Rights Watch, ‘Amnesty International: From Bias to Obsession’, was published online.[43] It provided links to dozens of social media accounts and monitored the output of over 40 Amnesty staff and volunteers. Many of the case studies concerned people who are (or were) instrumental in directing Amnesty’s focus. The research took several months and hundreds of thousands of social media posts were logged.  

The research concluded that ‘there are clear political and discriminatory influences at work at Amnesty’ and ‘targets are not chosen for their actions but rather for their identity.’ Moreover, ‘Every part of Amnesty’s arsenal spends a disproportionate amount of time attacking Israel. When fused together in a coordinated manner, the focus appears obsessive and persecutory. Campaigns against Israel are visibly better funded, more frequent and promoted with far more energy – than anything else Amnesty International undertakes.’ The report continued: ‘More worrying still is the alignment between Amnesty’s anti-Israel campaigns and the aims of the BDS movement, which leave little room for doubt that it is coordinated rather than coincidental.’

These are some of the key findings of ‘Amnesty International: From Bias to Obsession’. 

‘Amnesty’s problem has been a long time in the making. Almost two decades ago they dropped rules that protected them from “conflict of interest” issues and began to employ “one cause” activists – in other words – people who use human rights activism as a convenient disguise.’ 

‘Israel is not treated by Amnesty International as a legitimate state. When Amnesty talks about Israel their language changes and there is deep hostility. Amnesty officials can direct praise to the most brutal of regimes – but never is a good word said about Israel.’ 

‘Time after time, important Amnesty officials were found sharing more material attacking Israel than anything else – even if officially their attention was meant to be elsewhere.’ 

‘One Amnesty consultant was found posting an image of two fallen Islamic Jihad terrorists, with a love heart next to the word “heroes”. One account, listed by Amnesty as a “Middle East and North Africa Media Manager” appears to have sent advice to factions in Gaza not to claim fallen “martyrs” when they are killed, but rather leave the west to think they were innocent civilians. This from a person Amnesty use as the point of contact for western media.’

‘A Deputy Director for MENA at Amnesty is just a Palestinian anti-Israel activist from Ramallah who used to have a terrorist as his Facebook profile picture. He is officially meant to focus on abuse throughout the region – all he does is post anti-Israel rhetoric. Another of Amnesty’s people just says “f**k Israel”, one boasted of helping pass the BDS motion at her university, one tweeted “from the river to the sea” another called for Israel to be dismantled. The list goes on and on.’

‘When directed towards Israel, the cumulative obsession can clearly be labelled antisemitic.’

2. AMNESTY USES DUBIOUS METHODS

Searching questions about the methods employed in the 2022 Amnesty report have been put by Michael Ehrlich, a member of the Israel section of Amnesty International throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and the chair of Amnesty’s board of directors in 1998-1999: ‘Amnesty International prides itself on the organisation’s high level of research and its neutrality. This [2022 apartheid] report is an extreme example of how baseless that claim is. If one writes a report based almost entirely on all one-sided sources, does not bother to engage with civil society organizations that hold a different perspective, and does not turn to mainstream academics and legal experts, then he is conducting biased and negligent research with the main purpose of smearing Israel and harming its international status.’ 

Amnesty does not possess ‘the manpower and financial resources’ for such investigations, he suggested, ‘rendering its reports far less professional.’ He added: ‘Amnesty International’s reports are written anonymously’ so ’there is no way to know who authored the report, how many researchers were involved in its preparation, what their professional experience is and so on.’

I now cite some examples of Amnesty’s dubious methods, quoting liberally from Salo Aizenberg’s critique.  

1. Amnesty’s self-referential or circular sourcing

As a genre, the apartheid reports produced by the anti-Israel NGOs and UN bodies tend to be exceptionally self-referential: they all cite each other. Ehrlich again:

In addition, when examining the sources on which the current [Amnesty] report is based, a disturbing picture emerges. The report contains about 1,600 footnotes, the majority of which refer to past reports and policy papers by Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Adalah, HaMoked, Ir Amim, Bimkom, Al-Haq, and additional far-Left Israeli organizations, as well as reports by the UN Human Rights Council and similar international bodies. When these are the sources for ‘research’ that purports to examine the State of Israel’s attitude toward its Arab population from 1948 to the present, it is clear that the result will be biased and one-sided.  [44]

Despite the fact that the report claims to confirm the theory that Israel, since its inception, has aspired to discriminate against Arabs on racial grounds, the number of sources concerning Israel’s first fifty years is negligible compared to those concerning recent decades.

It has been noted that Amnesty ‘does not name the authors of the report or the experts it consulted for its analysis … [interviewees] are not named, how they were selected is not explained, whether Palestinian “minders” were present during interviews is not disclosed’ More: ‘Amnesty asserts that its report is the product of ‘engaging with and seeking advice from external experts on international law,’ [but] these individuals are not named. The citations on points of law are remarkably thin and circular (using sources that simply cite to each other).’ Moreover, Amnesty does not engage with legal opinion that differs from its own. [45]

Example: ‘Trigger Happy’. Amnesty writes that ‘Israeli forces appear to have deliberately targeted medics, journalists and human rights defenders during protests,’ (p. 251) Aizenberg responds: ‘Footnote 1465 cites Amnesty’s own report from 2014 titled “Trigger Happy” where on page 8 it simply writes virtually the exact same line – but offers no source. On page 59 it discusses the case of a medic who was injured by a foam-tipped bullet that hit his right knee which he claims a soldier fired on him on purpose. Then the report says: “PHR-Israel documented eight cases where Israeli forces targeted medics and injured them…” but with no further evidence. The second source cited for this claim is yet another Amnesty report titled “Six Months On: Gaza’s Great March of Return” where it discusses medics who were injured but does not discuss if or how they were deliberately targeted. Thus, once again Amnesty fabricates a charge of war crimes with no evidence, simply citing two of its own earlier reports that similarly offer no evidence.’  [46]

2. Amnesty’s perfection standard for Israel 

Aizenberg argues that Amnesty holds Israel to a ‘perfection standard’, citing several examples. Any disparity between Arabs and Jews, he points out, ‘is seen by Amnesty as a result of and evidence of apartheid.’ And to make this claim easier to make, ‘Amnesty deliberately presents all data in a vacuum since any comparison to other nations would contradict their apartheid narrative.‘ 

Example of Amnesty’s Perfection Standard: Poverty Rates. Poverty rate differences between Arabs and Jews in Israel are presented by Amnesty as evidence of apartheid even though the rates in Israel show Arabs fare better than minorities in many Western nations that Amnesty would not dream of calling ‘apartheid’.  [47]

Example of Amnesty’s Perfection Standard: Airport Security. Another example of the perfection standard is when ‘Amnesty considers harsher security checks at Israeli airports for Arabs versus Jews [to be] evidence of discrimination and an important item evidencing apartheid.’ The practice is not evidence of apartheid, of course. ‘Did President Obama implement an apartheid-like policy when approving special scrutiny, such as full-body parts, to persons from 14 Muslim nations?’ asks Aizenberg. 

Example of Amnesty’s Perfection Standard: Life Expectancy. Amnesty infers apartheid from the fact that Jews live on average for 83.1 years while Arabs live only for 79.5 for Arabs, even though ‘Arab Israelis have the highest life expectancy compared to all 21 Arab countries including the Gulf states, and commensurate with life expectancy in the U.S.[48]

3. Amnesty’s dubious uses of data

Example. Poverty rates. Amnesty cites high poverty rates among Arabs and Bedouins as evidence of apartheid, by referring to a UN report. Aizenberg points out that the report, when checked, is about poverty among ‘older persons, Bedouin families, Arab Israeli families and ultra-Orthodox [i.e. Jewish] families’. More: Amnesty omits more recent statistics from the OECD website that show income inequality in Israel is now better than the UK, US and Chile none of whom, on last check, Amnesty were calling apartheid states.’  [49]

Example: Measuring GDP. Amnesty writes: ‘Since 1999, Palestinian gross domestic product (GDP) in the OPT has effectively remained stagnant clearly pointing to the “suppression of human potential” and economic growth resulting from Israel’s oppression and domination of Palestinians.’ (p. 168) This is incorrect. World Bank data shows that GDP has grown consistently in the West Bank and Gaza at $15.5 billion in 2020 versus $4.3 billion in 1999, for about a 6 per cent compound annual growth rate.’ Amnesty gives as an example of apartheid the 2019 GDP growth rate in the West Bank of 1.15 per cent, noting this is down from 2.3 per cent in 2018, itself the lowest rate since 2012.’ (p. 168). As Aizenberg points out, for Amnesty, ‘consecutive years of growth is “apartheid”’.[50]

Example: Reversing the historical timeline to demonise Israel. Amnesty writes: ‘In 2005 … Israel withdrew its settlers and ground troops [from Gaza] and subjected the territory to a land, sea and air blockade…’ Not so. Israel left in 2005, but only began controlling the entry points in June 2007, ‘after Hamas violently took over Gaza and threatened Israel.’  [51]

4. Amnesty’s unsourced claims

Example: Policing and the May 2021 Riots. Aizenberg noted that ‘Amnesty also claims without evidence that the [police] operation was aimed at “settling scores” suggesting it was not merely to stop violence but to proactively and deliberately harm innocent Arabs. Footnote 464 cites Amnesty’s own June 2021 report on the topic which claims that “Israeli media” said the operation aimed to “settle scores” but does not cite which media and when. Thus, a serious charge about the intentions of Israeli actions are nothing more than “we say so.”’  [52]

5. Amnesty distorts history

Example: Palestinian Citizenship Orders. Amnesty claims that Israel stripped Palestinian refugees of their ‘Palestinian citizenship granted under the Palestinian Citizenship Orders of 1925-1942’ (p. 82-3). Actually, Palestinian Citizenship Orders of 1925-1942 were a form of citizenship granted by the British government authorities under the British Palestine Mandate. After Britain withdrew in May 1948, all persons who held this citizenship, lost it, Jews as well as Arabs. 

Example: Family Reunification Laws. Amnesty presents Israel’s Family Reunification Laws as being strictly applied and another example of apartheid. But Aizenberg shows that ‘from 1993 to 2002 there were a total of 16,007 applications for family reunification or 800 per year, and data shows that more than half were approved. After new tighter legislation was passed in 2003 until 2013 there were 12,284 family unification requests, of which 5,629 were approved, 4,249 rejected and the remainder postponed or delayed.’ In other words, ‘a few hundred per year were rejected, often for security reasons and sometimes because “center of life” requirements could not be verified.’ 

6. Amnesty misunderstands what the numbers are actually saying

Example: Classrooms. Amnesty thinks it is evidence of apartheid that ’In 2016, only 526 classrooms were built in Arab localities, compared to 2,171 classrooms built in the Hebrew education system.’ (p. 213) The numbers prove something else though, as the 20 per cent of classrooms built for Arabs are in the same proportion as their population. [53]

7. Amnesty’s false claims

Example: Amnesty and International Law. Amnesty states that the Gaza Strip has been placed ‘under an unlawful blockade’. (p. 62) The controls on imports are in fact legal, according to the UN. [54]

Example: Amnesty and Supreme Court Judgments. Amnesty claims that the state’s Jewishness ‘allows the state to limit the right to equality and violate other rights that are protected within the Basic Law’ (p. 64-5). Amnesty presents Supreme Court Judge Barak as arguing exactly this. In fact, Barak argued the opposite, writing ‘It is true, the Jewish people have a special key to enter the home that is called The State of Israel. That is the point of Zionism and that is the point of our Jewish heritage…[but] giving the right of immigration to Jews does not discriminate against non-Jews.’ Later, Barak added, ‘Of course the values of the State of Israel as a democratic state oppose all discrimination and necessitate equality.’ Aizenberg concludes ’There is absolutely nothing in the article [by Judge Barak] that supports Amnesty’s fabricated statement; in fact it proves the reverse.‘  [55]

8. Amnesty sometimes presents what (might) have (temporarily) happened to one Palestinian as always happening to all Palestinians

Example: Opening a Bank Account. Amnesty claims that ‘Palestinians in Gaza still experience difficulties opening a bank account or making any bank transactions given that banking mechanisms continue to be linked to the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and ultimately, to Israel.’ (p. 92) Footnote 343 cites a 2012 Norwegian Refugee Council report, where on page 73, the only place in the report where a bank account is mentioned, it discusses the case of one woman who had some difficulty opening a bank account but as the report concludes ‘She was eventually able to open the bank account.’ So even though the bank account was eventually opened, simply the difficulty experienced is evidence of apartheid. The report’s source (note 298) is a verbal interview with this woman. Amnesty’s complaint about banking is based solely on this one third-party interview. [56]

9. Amnesty leaves on the cutting room floor whatever does not fit the ‘apartheid’ narrative

Example: Amnesty cuts Egypt out of their narrative. Amnesty blames Israel and only Israel for Gaza being ‘cut off’ from the rest of the world. In fact it is Egypt that controls Gaza’s southern border, not Israel.  

Example: Amnesty erases court rulings when inconvenient for their narrative. ‘Amnesty cites a November 2020 ruling by a magistrates’ court in Krayot that invoked the Nation-State Law as one of the reasons to reject certain school funding for Arab students. (p. 66) However, Amnesty deliberately omits a February 2021 ruling from a higher court that said the lower court was wrong in how it interpreted the Nation-State Law. The article on the matter noted that the judge explained that the Nation-State Law did not repeal other laws such as the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty or the fundamental principles included in the Declaration of Independence and also quoted portions of the Declaration of Independence guaranteeing equal rights to all of Israel’s citizens. Why would Amnesty hide this higher court ruling that happened well before the publication of Amnesty’s report? Because the ruling contradicts the fabricated apartheid narrative.’ [57]

Example: Amnesty’s story about the theft of Palestinian bank accounts. Amnesty claims that after the 1948 war Israel ‘took over… 6,246 [abandoned] bank accounts’ as another example of apartheid. What Amnesty does not mention is that ’94 per cent of account assets were returned, and the remainder was almost entirely due to lack of claimants’. So ‘the whole notion of Israel stealing Palestinian bank accounts is a complete fabrication.’ [58]

Example: Amnesty erases Palestinian opinion when it contradicts their narrative. Amnesty notes that in May 2018 the Israeli government announced major investments in East Jerusalem but criticised the government because a portion of the education budget was conditioned on East Jerusalem schools adopting the Israeli curriculum. (p. 215) Amnesty does not mention that ‘Arabs in East Jerusalem requested the Israeli curriculum. The Palestinian curriculum was seen as outdated, while the Israeli curriculum offers technology studies, help for students with disabilities, and necessary Hebrew language education.’  [59]

Example: Amnesty erases Arabs and Bedouin who serve in the IDF. Amnesty writes: ‘It is inconceivable for almost any Palestinian citizen of Israel to serve’ in the army. (p. 83). In fact, record numbers enlisted in 2020, with more 1,000 new Arab soldiers. The Bedouins have a long history of military service, with 1,500 currently in the IDF. [60] (And remember, Amnesty previously criticised Israel for not making Arabs serve. Apartheid if you do, apartheid if you don’t.) 

Example: Amnesty erases the rise in the Arab population in East Jerusalem. Amnesty says Israel has ‘restricted the number of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem to maintain a Jewish majority in the city’ Aizenberg points out ‘The Arab population in East Jerusalem has soared over the decades, up about 33 per cent since 2009 (nearly a 90,000 person increase). The ratio between Jews and Arabs has also narrowed, from 70 to 30 to 66 to 34. 

10. Amnesty mangles quotes to demonise Israel and Israelis

Example: Former Prime Minister Netanyahu on the Jewish Nation-State. An example of quote-mangling is found on page one, line one of the Amnesty Report, which reads: 

‘Israel is not a state of all its citizens… [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.’ Message posted online in March 2019 by Israel’s then prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here is what Netanyahu actually wrote, in response to a post by Israeli actress and model Rotem Sela:

Dear Rotem, an important correction: Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People – and them alone. As you wrote, there’s no problem with the Arab citizens of Israel – they have the same rights as us all and the Likud government has invested in the Arab sector more than any other government. (emphasis added)

Amnesty’s report cut what Netanyahu said (in bold above), misleading the reader about his views. Amnesty’s cuts turn a statement about Israel being the nation-state of the Jewish people, not a bi-national state (Netanyahu’s point), into a quote about Israel being only for the Jews. 

Example: The UN and Gaza. Amnesty again cites the UN document ‘Concluding Observations: Israel 12 Nov 2019’ urging Israel to ‘‘[i]mmediately lift the blockade and closures on the Gaza Strip’ and other related recommendations. (p. 209) But Amnesty omits this comment from the same UN document prefacing its urgings: ‘While noting the serious security situation affecting [Israel].’ So Amnesty cites the recommendation but deliberately omits the UN acknowledgment of Israel’s ‘serious security situation.’  [61]

11. Amnesty’s wild exaggerations to demonise Israel

There are many examples of wild exaggeration in the Amnesty Report. Here are a few. 

Example: Bulldozing Agricultural land. Amnesty claim ‘According to OCHA, between 1 January and 19 October 2020, many of the 42 Israeli military incursions into the Gaza Strip included bulldozing agricultural land and destroying crops.’ (emphasis added) In fact, according to Aizenberg, the source cited ‘mentions only one instance and there is no information on any other’ and the source (but not Amnesty’s report) also notes that ‘the operations were aimed at destroying tunnels dug by Palestinian armed groups for military purposes’. So, one not many, and for reasons of security not apartheid.  [62]

Example: ‘Intensive Destruction’. Amnesty says Israel’s siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002, is an example of ‘intensive destruction’ of Palestinian archaeological sites, and so apartheid. Aizenberg explains why Amnesty are wrong. ‘First, this above ground church is not an “archaeological site.” Second, Amnesty omits that dozens of armed Palestinian militants entered the church as a haven to avoid capture by Israel, effectively using the site as a shield, knowing that Israel would not attack the church – it is thus Palestinians themselves who cynically desecrated a holy site by using it as a shelter. After 39 days, a peaceful resolution was reached, and the militants surrendered. Due to some minor gun battles each side accused the other of starting, some slight damage occurred to the church. The notion of “intensive destruction” is pure fabrication and libel.’ [63]

Example: How many shops?! Amnesty claims that Israel expropriated over 10,000 shops from Palestinian refugees in the 1948-9 war (p. 23 and 120). Aizenberg shows that the source Amnesty cites is a self-published blog post by an individual with no credentials in the field. The 10,000 number is preposterous since ‘it would mean that the retail landscape in the majority agrarian and Bedouin Arab population of British Mandate Palestine was three-times denser than 2020 America, the world capital of retail.’  [64]

Example: ‘Deliberate Impoverishment’. Amnesty says Israel pursues ‘the deliberate impoverishment of the Palestinian population both within Israel and in the OPT’ (A 15). Note that claim carefully: ‘deliberate impoverishment’. In fact, as discussed above and in The Apartheid Smear, an historic government spending programme in Israel’s Arab communities, celebrated by Jewish-Arab NGOs active in the field, has been boosting Arab well-being and closing the gaps with the Jewish majority. 

REFERENCES

4. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, ‘What is antisemitism?’, 2016. https://www.holocaust remembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism

5. ISGAP Fellows Reject Antisemitic Tropes in Amnesty Report’, ISGAP, 23 April, 2022. https://isgap.org/post/2022/04/isgap-rejects-amnestys-report-on-israel/

6. Amnesty International, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity, 2022. 

7. See Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein, Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights, Routledge, 2003.

8. Salo Aizenberg, Amnesty International’s Cruel Assault on Israel: Systematic Lies, Errors, Omissions and Double Standards in Amnesty’s Apartheid Report, April 2022, p. 10. https://www.ngo-monitor.org/pdf/SaloAizenberg_Amnesty_Rebuttal.pdf

9. Ibid, p.54.

10. Ibid.

11. Idib, p.119.

12. Joseph Krauss, ‘Ra’am head Abbas rejects Amnesty’s apartheid label for Israel’, Times of Israel, 11 February 2022. https://www.timesofisrael.com/raam- head-abbas-rejects-apartheid-label-for-israel/

13. Philip Podolsky, ‘Most Arabs prefer living in Israel, accept Jewish character of the state’, Times of Israel, 6 June 2012.

14. Cited in Ben-Dror Yemini, ‘This Experiment Hasn’t’ Failed,’ Yediot Ahronot (Hebrew), 14 June 2022.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Aizenberg, p. 84.

18. Ibid p. 44.

19. Alex Safian, ‘Amnesty International’s Big Lie About Israel’, 31 January, 2022.  https://www.camera.org/article/amnesty-internationals-big-lie-about-israel/

20. Aizenberg.

21. Reuters, ‘Palestinians and Israelis count cost of 11 day fight’. 20 May, 2021. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-eat/palestinians-israelis-count-cost-11-day-fight-2021-05-20/.

22. COGAT Summary of Activities, 2021, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/cogat-summary-2021-2-feb-2022

23. Honest Reporting, ‘Media Draw False Equivalence Between Arab Rioting and Internally Denounced Jewish Response’, 19 May 2021. https://honestreporting.com/media-draw-false-equivalence-between-arab-rioting-and-internally-denounced-jewish-response/

24. Sharon Nazarian, ‘Amnesty’s Israel Report has dangerous implications – for Jews and Palestinians alike’, The Forward, 8 February, 2022. https://forward.com/opinion/481994/amnesty-israel-report-has-dangerous-implications-for-jews-and-palestinians/

25. ‘JTA and TOI staff, ‘Amnesty’s US director: Israel shouldn’t exist “as a state for the Jewish people”’, Times of Israel, 12 March 2022. https://www. timesofisrael.com/amnestys-us-director-israel-shouldnt-exist-as-a-state-for-the-jewish-people/ Even J Street tweeted that ‘Amnesty USA would be well- served to … not try to assess Jewish public opinion.’

26. David Rose, ‘Calls for Amnesty charity probe over Israel ‘apartheid’ smear’, Jewish Chronicle, 3 February 2022.

27. Cary Nelson, ‘Amnesty International, Israel and Race-Baiting’, Fathom, March 2022, https://fathomjournal.org/amnesty-international-israel-and-race- baiting/ 

28. Luke Akehurst, ‘Amnesty’s apartheid slur is an attack on Jewish self-determination,’ Times of Israel, 31 January 2022. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ amnestys-apartheid-slur-is-an-attack-on-jewish-self-determination/

29. Dave Rich, The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism, Biteback Publishing, 2016.

30. It is not only Amnesty’s treatment of Israel that has raised concerns. Amnesty’s Summer 2022 intervention in Putin’s war on Ukraine shocked many. See CNN, ‘Russia uses NGO report to fuel war propaganda’, 9 August 2022. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/08/09/russia-ukraine-amnesty- international-pkg-marquardt-nr-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn.

31. Stan Crooke, ‘The Stalinist Roots of left “anti-Zionism”’. Workers’ Liberty, 2004. http://www.workersliberty.org/node/1748

32. Quoted in Robbie Sabel, The Campaign to delegitimize Israel with the false charge of apartheid. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2009: p. 5.

33. Nachman Shai, ‘Israel right to say ‘Enough!’ to grotesquely biased UNHRC inquiry’, Haaretz. 1 February 2013 http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/israel-right-to-say-enough-to-grotesquely-biased-unhrc-inquiry.premium-1.500876

34. See these readings on the Durban Strategy to delegitimise Israel. http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/ngo_forum_at_durban_conference. Also see David Hirsh ‘Defining antisemitism down’, Fathom Issue 1. http://www.fathomjournal.org/policy-politics/defining-antisemitism-down/

35. Quoted in Benjamin Pogrund, ‘Israel is a democracy in which Arabs vote’. Engage Online, 2005.

36. See Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Serif, 2005. http://archive. adl.org/durban/durban_083101.asp

37. For an excellent account of the historical development of the Apartheid Smear see Ben Cohen’s ‘The ideological foundations of the boycott campaign against Israel’. American Jewish Committee, 2007. http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/per.cent7b42d75369-d582-4380-8395-d25925b85eafper.cent7d/ IdeologIcal_foundatIons.Pdf

38. Cited in Gilead Ini, ‘Case study: the anatomy of one of Amnesty’s Falsehoods’, JNS, 14 February 2022. https://www.jns.org/opinion/case-study-the- anatomy-of-one-of-amnestys-falsehoods/

39. Alex Safian, “Amnesty Intenational’s Big Lie about Israel’, JNS, 1 February 2022.

40. Lazar Berman, ‘Israel blasts Amnesty UK for ‘antisemitic’ report accusing it of apartheid’, Times of Israel, 31 January 2022. https://www. timesofisrael.com/lapid-attacks-delusional-amnesty-uk-ahead-of-report-accusing-israel-of-apartheid/

41. Richard Kerjab, ‘Salman Rushdie: Amnesty International is morally bankrupt,’ The Sunday Times, 21 February 2010. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/ article/salman-rushdie-amnesty-international-is-morally-bankrupt-lt3zrmrfxqp 

42. Tani Goldstein, ‘Amnesty International chief criticizes group’s report accusing Israel of apartheid’, Times of Israel, 21 February 2022. https://www.timesofisrael.com/amnestys-israel-chief-criticizes-groups-report-accusing-israel-of-apartheid/

43. David Collier, ‘Spotlight on Amnesty International: From Bias to Obssession’, 2019. https://david-collier.com/amnesty-international-obsession/  See also ‘Amnesty takes disciplinary action over official’s “Jewish MPs” tweet’, Jewish Chronicle, 21 November 2021.  

44. Michael Ehrlich, ‘Behind the Scenes of Amnesty International’s Report on Israel’, Jewish Journal, 22 March 2022. https://jewishjournal.com/ commentary/opinion/346357/behind-the-scenes-of-amnesty-internationals-report-on-israel/

45. NGO Monitor, Analysing Amnesty’s Antisemitic Apartheid Attack’, 2 February 2022. https://www.ngo-monitor.org/reports/amnesty-apartheid-analysis/ See also Joshua Kern and Anne Herzberg: ‘False Knowledge as Power: Deconstructing Definitions of Apartheid that Delegitimise the Jewish State’ (December 2021) and ‘Neo-Orientalism: Deconstructing Claims of Apartheid in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ (March 2022).

46. Aizenberg.

47. Ibid, p.7.

48. Ibid, p.119.

49. Ibid, p.85.

50. Ibid, p.86

51. Ibid, p.73 (Emphasis added.)

52. vIbid, p.56.

53.Ibid, p.128.

54. Ibid, p.32.

55. Ibid, p.22.

56. Ibid, p.47.

57. Ibid, p.33.

58. Ibid, p.63.

59. Ibid, p.130.

60. Ibid, p.20-21.

61. Ibid, p.122-3.

62. vIbid, p.97.

63. Ibid, p.111.

64. Ibid, p.11.