From the people who brought you “Israeli apartheid” comes another trendy smear: “Israeli genocide.” With a new report Wednesday night, Amnesty International assures its good standing in the anti-Israel herd. The price is to swallow an inversion of reality.
Amnesty poses as a fair-minded critic of Israeli policies, but it tipped its hand in its 2022 report that tried to claim “this system of apartheid originated with the creation of Israel in May 1948.” That’s well before any “occupation,” but it reflects the ideological obsession that treats the Jewish state’s existence, in any borders, as a crime.
Amnesty’s headline-grabbing apartheid report quietly conceded it wasn’t arguing Israel’s laws are analogous to South Africa’s. This new report uses a similar sleight of hand by redefining genocide. The case law at the International Court of Justice requires a finding that “intent to destroy the group, in whole or in part, must be the only reasonable inference which can be drawn from the pattern of conduct.”
Amnesty says that’s too high a bar and looks at the “broader picture” and “context.”
By context it means apartheid and all its previous slanders of Israel. What about Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, which was genocidal in character? Here’s the report’s opening line: “On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip (Gaza) of unprecedented magnitude, scale and duration.”
Gaza wasn’t occupied, and Hamas, not Israel, embarked on a military offensive. But Amnesty says it will get to the Hamas mass murder later. Here it uses the Oct. 7 massacre to pathologize the Israeli “state of mind resulting from the attacks.”
While Amnesty uses the casualty figures of the “Gaza-based Ministry of Health,” aka Hamas, it never mentions that Israel says 17,000 dead Hamas fighters are among them. It omits the crucial civilian-to-combatant ratio, which would suggest Israel has done better than most in urban warfare.
The report essentially blesses Hamas’s strategy of using human shields. It suggests Israel has no right to attack in civilian areas even if Hamas is using them, just as it wouldn’t if some enemy soldiers had gone home on leave. As if that’s equivalent to terrorist headquarters in hospitals and a 400-mile, terrorist-only tunnel system beneath cities.
Amnesty even criticizes Israel for evacuating civilians from active war zones. This, too, becomes evidence of “genocidal intent” because it displaces the civilians. But Amnesty also criticizes Israel as genocidal in cases where it didn’t evacuate civilians. The game is to twist international law until Israel—or the U.S.—has no way to fight against terrorists.
Not one of the groups yelling genocide calls on Egypt to let women and children escape to safety by opening its border with Gaza. Uniquely in this conflict, they insist that civilians be penned in the war zone. They do so because they know there isn’t an Israeli genocide but rather unintended civilian casualties, which can be used against Israel.
