‘False, Biased and Anti-Semitic’: Israel Blasts Amnesty Intl. Report’s Accusations of Apartheid

JERUSALEM, Israel – The international human rights group Amnesty International released a more than 200-page report labeling Israel as an apartheid state. Israeli critics say that the report basically says the Jewish State shouldn’t exist.

Israel is rejecting what it calls “false allegations” in the Amnesty report.

“Instead of seeking the truth, Amnesty echoes the same lies spread by terrorist organizations,” said Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid. “Five minutes of serious examination would be enough to know that the so-called facts in the report published by Amnesty this week are delusion and disconnected from reality.”

Lapid charged that Amnesty doesn’t call Syria or Iran or other “corrupt and murderous” regimes apartheid states.

“I hate to use the argument that if Israel wasn't a Jewish state, no one in Amnesty would dare argue against it, but in this case, there is simply no other explanation,” he said.

Amnesty’s report, entitled "Israel's Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity," says Israel has “has established and maintained an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination of the Palestinian population for the benefit of Jewish Israelis – a system of apartheid – wherever it has exercised control over Palestinians’ lives since 1948.”

A Wall Street Journal editorial calls that “a libel that distorts history. Israel was founded in the wake of the Holocaust with broad international support. The Jews who settled in historic Palestine had to fight to survive against Arab militias and national armies that wanted to push them into the sea.... The report is a denunciation of the very existence of Israel as a refuge for the Jewish people."

The editorial goes on to say that Amnesty doesn’t explain why Israel has to fight like it does to survive. It briefly mentions Hamas shooting rockets at Israel, but then denounces Israel defending itself.

Apartheid usually refers to the system of racial separation that gave whites superiority over blacks in South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. Amnesty’s report says it “does not seek to argue” that Israel’s policies are “the same or analogous to” South African apartheid, but instead “determines whether it meets the international definition of apartheid as set out by international law and treaties, as a violation of public international law, a serious human rights violation and a crime against humanity.”

Still, Israeli Attorney Anne Herzberg from NGO Monitor says the report is aimed at relitigating the legitimacy of Israel’s existence.

“The apartheid charge against Israel began in the late 1950s, in the early 1960s…and unfortunately the UN has been the primary venue for this attack,” said Herzberg. “It was originally used by Arab delegates in UN debates as well as members of the Soviet bloc.”

Herzberg says a lot of the language comes from Soviet-era propaganda.

“The charge is powerful because it is an easy way to essentialize and exploit anti-Semitic tropes to transform the conflict from one of disputed lands and Arab rejection of a Jewish presence in the Middle East to one of Jewish racism,” she said. “And today, racism is one of the worst accusations one can be charged with.”

Israeli Attorney David Benjamin grew up in South Africa. He says there’s no comparison.

“I was certainly a witness to the iniquities of that terrible system,” Benjamin told CBN News. “And let me be absolutely clear, I’ve been living in Israel for the last 30 odd years and there is absolutely nothing in common between the system of apartheid that applied in the old South Africa and the current situation in Israel.”