EoZ: Amnesty’s Car-Crash on Israel
Thanks to ElderofZiyon
Amnesty International’s Problematic Israel Report
Eugene Kontorovich, director of the Center for the Middle East and International Law at George Mason University Scalia Law School, believes “there is clearly a coordinated campaign by far-left NGOs to mainstream the apartheid accusation, with an eye o[n] getting it adopted and ‘made official’ by the ICC [International Criminal Court] and the UNHRC.” Kontorovich continued, “Having a U.N. agency, even a discredited one like the UNHRC, accuse Israel of apartheid will certainly give diplomatic momentum to those who seek to destroy Israel.”
Herzberg sees Amnesty’s report as “timed to feed into a March 2022 report where U.N. Human Rights Council Rapporteur Michael Lynk will accuse Israel of apartheid, which in turn will serve [as] the basis for the Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry on Israel levying of the charge. They also hope their reports will influence the ICC to indict Israelis for a crime against humanity.”
Schanzer said, “This [report] was designed to be ammunition, and it will be.” Schanzer concluded, “All of this could potentially build in a dangerous direction.”
That direction isn’t an entirely new one. This effort recalls the United Nations’ declaring in 1975 that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” While the United Nations finally repealed that resolution in 1991, Soviet-style anti-Zionism lives on.
Izabella Tabarovsky, senior associate with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center and research fellow with ISGAP, told me, “Soviet antizionist propaganda deeply influenced [the] Western left back [in] the 1960s-1980s. Soviet propaganda was comparing Israel to South Africa already in the 1960s and applying the apartheid label regularly … These comparisons were as baseless then as they are today, but they fulfilled a political purpose.”
Anti-Israel activism remains a popular and unifying cause among leftists; it can also imperil local Jews. Tabarovsky observed: “Demonization of Israel and Zionism creates an atmosphere of antisemitic incitement that endangers Jews in the diaspora in very real ways—we saw it last May. … In my research, numerous people told me that demonization of Israel by Soviet press in the run-up to the Six Day War created such an antisemitic atmosphere that they feared for their personal safety. … They were sure that there would be pogroms,” because inflammatory rhetoric has consequences.
Even before releasing this report, Amnesty was an organization whose members voted against actively combating rising antisemitism in Britain in 2015. So Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty USA, can’t be taken seriously when he tweets, “We want to be very clear—it is unacceptable and inappropriate for this report to be used as justification for any recrimination against the Jewish people. We condemn antisemitism in the strongest possible terms.” Indeed, that tweet’s no more credible than Amnesty’s report on Israeli “apartheid.”
On Amnesty’s car-crash interview in Israel
Their responses to simple questions were, for the most part, a mix of exasperation, ignorance, self-contradiction, and conspiratorial magical thinking. Luther in particular was almost comically unprepared for the most obvious of questions, and he seemed genuinely resentful at being asked them.
The most obvious question, of course, is why the obsessive and disproportionate focus on Israel in the human rights community. There are a few coherent, even if not terribly persuasive ways, to deal with the question. One would be to argue that all of the attention of Amnesty, HRW, the UNHRC and others is completely justified because Israel truly is a unique evil on the global scene and much worse than all other countries combined. Another would be to deny completely that there is a disproportionate focus on Israel. And a third would to be acknowledge it, maybe claim that it is a problem of other organisations, but argue that in this specific case it is not what is happening.
What is incoherent is trying to do all three, which is precisely what Luther does. He wants to ‘push back’ on the idea that there is a large focus on Israel. Two sentences later, he tacks in the other direction: ‘I’m not sure what the problem is.’ And later again ‘I don’t think there evidence for that.’ When confronted with the specific example of the UNHRC, which year after year passes more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined, Luther is flatfooted. He avoids the question, isn’t sure about the facts. He seems unaware of the ‘permanent item’ dedicated to Israel on the Commission’s agenda, when no such item exists for any other country.
No one expects an Amnesty director to sound like AIPAC speaker. But it is not expecting too much for someone whose entire professional life is dedicated to the topic of human rights in the Middle East to have an opinion of some kind on the matter.
And it’s jarring that people who believe so fervently in human rights don’t see something amiss in this. Let’s imagine a village with 193 families in it, and the local police assigns one of its only cops to follow only one family’s car and constantly measure its speed, and the tax department goes over every receipt of this same family looking for irregularities, and a grand jury sits permanently to investigate any possible crimes of this same family, and the local paper has a reporter permanently assigned to sniff out any infidelities or disputes inside the family. You don’t need to be an expert with 20 years experience (as Luther reminds us in the interview he has) in the field of human rights to understand what is wrong with this situation.
When Berman comes back to the UN issue one last time, Luther gives perhaps the most astonishing response. He says Israel has actually managed to ‘shut down scrutiny using the power of its relationships’ and charges that the UN is actually a locus of inaction because Israel ‘has influence over powerful allies who then manage to stop it, stop the scrutiny.’
And that of course is the appeal of anti-Israel activism in the West: the sincerely held belief that by engaging in it you are somehow standing up to dark powerful forces at home. There’s a word for this pathology.
