An organization steeped in academics like Amnesty International is one from which you have certain expectations. The damning report it published last week on Israel will not be accepted even as an essay by any university, which is why it may not be as terrible as you think, rather its existence may attest to the problematic and childish nature of its authors and proponents.
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First: the report sets a clear goal in its sights in advance. Its prelude states that its authors are gathering every bit of information to determine whether Israel's "discriminatory laws, policies and practices" against the Palestinians "amount to apartheid." Wait for it – they do. When this is the purpose of the study, it will always meet it.
In the same way, had Amnesty wanted to issue a report on the question, "Does the IDF's conduct in a conflict imposed on it by the Palestinians make it the most moral defense force in the world?" it would probably reach a favorable conclusion.
The report mixes three different themes on which it bases its apartheid accusation against Israel. The first is colonialist logic, or – to use a less sterile term – the very existence of the Jewish state. The authors state that alongside Israel's inception as a Jewish state it enacted the Law of Return that, like other laws, enabled the "preservation of Jewish demographic hegemony."
They deal with expulsions during the 1948 War of Independence – of course, without giving context or mentioning the existential threat to the fledgling state – run through the 18 years of military rule and emergency regulations, and come up to the Nation-State Law.
The second is a territorial-security logic, i.e. the "occupation." Here the report touches on everything that has happened since 1967: restrictions on movement, oppression, splitting the Palestinian territories into enclaves, and the fact that within Jerusalem, 150,000 out of 358,000 Palestinians live in areas separated from other parts of the city, negating the right to nationalism, residency, and the damage to familial life. This is all familiar, and not entirely untrue.
The third theme derives directly from the aforementioned, namely accusing Israel of crimes against humanity. According to Amnesty's math, all of the Palestinians who were killed since 1967 were victims of the regional conflict, killed by Israel as part of a systematic process of elimination pursued alongside depriving the Palestinians of their rights.
So what is the message of the report? After all, there is no apartheid here, and Amnesty is presumably not trying to encourage the Palestinians to vote in the Knesset elections, nor does it assume Arabs Israelis living within the Green Line long to put so-called Israeli colonialism behind them and become part of the Palestinian state.
In this sense, it is an own goal. Although many of the facts mentioned in the report are true and unfortunate, they are also the product of a painful and complex reality, historical or contemporary, and these issues will not be resolved as long as the situation is not correctly diagnosed.
In politics as in medicine – a misdiagnosis can lead to an intervention the results of which are potentially disastrous. The first theme expressed in the report, which deals with issues that will be solved with the improvement of civil rights, has nothing to do with the second theme, which touches on the need for a diplomatic solution.
Moreover, paradoxically, there will be those who will argue that providing a solution to the third theme (combat ethics) may actually make the "occupation" much more "friendly."
In short, there is no need to rush to debunk the report as ideologically biased, as its authors have failed methodologically.
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