Israel leaks Amnesty report on ‘apartheid’ against Palestinians
The Israeli government has carried out what it termed “a pre-emptive strike” against Amnesty International, leaking in advance a report by the human rights organisation and branding the 211-page document as “antisemitic”.
Amnesty’s 211-page report, which will be released officially on Tuesday morning, accuses Israel of apartheid against Palestinians and forcing them to live with “cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion amounting to crimes against humanity”.
The human rights group called on the UK to impose an import ban on all products from Israel’s illegal settlements and to reassess its close ties with the Israeli government.
Israeli officials claim they were not informed or approached by Amnesty, but that Israeli intelligence services were able to obtain the report before publication.
However, Amnesty International made clear in its report that it contacted the Israeli foreign minister last year detailing its accusations.
Israeli officials also claimed that Amnesty began distributing embargoed copies of the report last Thursday, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In response, a spokesman from Amnesty said: “We did not proactively distribute the report on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Amnesty’s international secretariat only provided the embargoed report to a small number of media contacts last week, who had requested it in response to our press conference invite.”
Authorised by Naftali Bennett, the prime minister, and Yair Lapid, the foreign minister, Israeli officials leaked the report to selected media and non-governmental organisations in an attempt to “seize the narrative”.
They prepared a dossier of information on Amnesty’s senior personnel and the London office, pointing to allegations that surfaced last year that the organisation has “a culture of white privilege with incidents of racism”.
“Amnesty have tried in a despicable way to publish an antisemitic report without getting Israel’s response,” Lior Haiat, the foreign ministry spokesman, said. “The report denies the right of Israel to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people and uses a double standard and demonisation to delegitimise it. These are the components of modern antisemitism.”
The Amnesty spokesman responded in a statement, saying: “All Amnesty’s criticism of the Israeli government is based on international law, and evidence of the great harm and suffering Israel’s policies cause to Palestinians. Amnesty criticises the Israeli government, not the Israeli or Jewish people.”
This is not the first report by a human rights group accusing Israel of apartheid. Last year the Israeli watchdog group B’Tselem issued a landmark report, followed a few months later by Human Rights Watch.
Amnesty’s report accuses Israel of discriminatory and racially motivated policies against the Palestinians, designed to ensure the dominance of a Jewish majority, both within Israel’s recognised borders and in the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which it seized in the 1967 war. The report goes back over seven decades to Israel’s policies since its foundation in 1948.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general, is planning to present the report during a press conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday morning.
Callamard said: “Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime. Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem, Hebron or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights.
“Israel must dismantle the apartheid system and start treating Palestinians as human beings with equal rights and dignity. Until it does, peace and security will remain a distant prospect for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
Israeli officials have accused her of anti-Israeli bias, based on a tweet of hers from 2013 in which she claimed that Israel had assassinated Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. Amnesty later distanced itself from the tweet.
