Syria, which has killed half a million of its own citizens? No. Iran, which executes protesters? Guess again.
China, which keeps whole ethnic groups in concentration camps? Not even close. North Korea, which is one giant concentration camp? You’re still cold.
Russia, which poisons dissidents like rats, but with stronger substances than rat poison? And which imprisons thousands on trumped-up charges and then tortures and rapes them in prisons? Getting colder.
Belarus, which is even worse? Freezing cold. Kazakhstan, whose chosen response to demonstrations is the command to fire at will? That’s it, no more guesses. You failed.
According to Amnesty International, the most egregious offender is the “apartheid state” of Israel. And she can get into AI’s good books only by committing national suicide.
Such are the conclusions to be drawn from AI’s report that devoted 211 pages to exposing the beastliness of the Jewish state. In fact, as far as AI is concerned, the very fact that it is indeed constituted as a Jewish state exposes its evil nature.
To satisfy the exacting requirements AI applies to human rights, Israel should fling her doors wide open to admit “millions of Palestinians”, meaning Arabs (Israeli Jews have nothing to do with Palestine, and never mind the Old Testament or history books).
This is the exact wording: “Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who were displaced in the 1947-49 and 1967 conflicts, continue to be denied the right to return to their former places of residence. Israel’s exclusion of refugees is a flagrant violation of international law which has left millions in a perpetual limbo of forced displacement.”
For the sake of balance, it would have been nice to remind grateful readers of the nature of the two conflicts that had such dire consequences. In both cases, Arab states joined forces to “drive Israel into the sea”, which is another way of saying “killing every Jew there”.
To the victor the spoils and all that. If the Arabs had the military skills to match their fanatical hatred of Jews, not a single Israeli would have survived. As it was, the Jewish state lived on and even managed to create a little buffer protecting itself from its murderous neighbours.
It’s true that Israel tries “to minimise the Palestinian presence and access to land” within its borders, and I’m sure the Israelis are mortified at AI’s rebuke of that iniquity. And they are even more heartbroken about their inability to correct the injustice while still remaining a Jewish state where Jews won’t be massacred.
As it is, there are 1,900,000 Arabs in Israel, about 21 per cent of the population. They enjoy greater political liberties than Arabs do in any other country of the Middle East, and in fact the Arab party is a key member of Israel’s ruling coalition.
That’s not good enough, says AI. Israel “must recognise the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived, and provide victims of human rights violations and crimes against humanity with full reparations.”
Well, there’s the rub. You see, Israel is a Western-type democracy, the only one in the region. If she were to comply with AI’s demand, the demographic shift would be such that Israel would no longer be a Jewish state.
An Arab-dominated Knesset would vote for some sort of Arab mandate over Greater Palestine, Islamic states would move in, and every Jew slow to flee would be murdered. Who would pay the reparations then? But at least AI would be happy: the cause of human rights would have been served.
“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalised and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people,” says Agnès Callamard, Secretary-General of Amnesty International. Trying to survive is clearly not a sufficient justification.
Far be it from me to accuse Dr Callamard of anti-Semitism. No doubt she is driven by such noble motives as compassion and a quest for justice. It’s in that spirit that in 2013 she publicly accused Israel of murdering Yasser Arafat. If she genuinely believes that, then the massacre of 8,000,000 Israeli Jews would be fair retribution for the demise of that giant of a man.
Since those objectionable Hebrews refuse to accept the suicide pact, they must be punished accordingly. AI calls for an arms embargo against Israel, and for her leaders to be charged with war crimes.
As for the thousands of rockets ‘Palestinians’ fire at Israeli villages in a steady barrage, the report explains that those poor people are “fighting against occupation”, while “certain excesses on the part of the Palestinian administration and armed groups are not the subject of this report.”
All perfectly objective then, the problem is covered in a reasonable and balanced fashion. The overall style and method of argument fall somewhere between Der Stürmer, c. 1940 and Pravda, c. 1970. Yet the report falls short of those publications in graphic standards.
They both enlivened their coverage of Jewish beastliness with cartoons showing disgusting hook-nosed ghouls devouring their victims. Der Stürmer served its anti-Semitism neat, calling a Jew a Jew, while Pravda preferred the seemingly milder term ‘Zionists’. But the cartoons were the same.
Israel is a human construct and, as such, prone to human folly. We are not in this world blessed with perfect governments or institutions. Hence neither Zionism nor Israel should be off limits for criticism, and I’m sure there is much to criticise there.
Hence it’s wrong to equate such criticism with anti-Semitism. However, a simple empirical observation shows that most people who denounce Israel with sustained vigour are indeed anti-Semites.
As the authors of this Amnesty International diatribe clearly are.
Certain groups are not allowed to stand up for (or defend) themselves. Israelis are obviously one such group. Another one: white males. And this week, of course: Canadian truck drivers.
The arguments will be:
1. Israel must behave better because it is better. Other nations ruled by dictators you cannot expect good behavior from them. Criticism does nothing. Even can make things worse.
2. Even if the 20 % or so Arab citizens of Israel are well treated, so what. If you treat a captive zoo animal well, it is still a captive.
Such will be and are the arguments.
1. The first argument is indeed popular, but it’s downright racist. The same thing used to be said about South Africa, where the blacks didn’t have exactly the same rights. In the rest of Africa, places like Burundi or Rwanda, blacks were killing other blacks in their millions — but hey, what do you expect from them. SA whites, on the other hand, ought to know better. In the next breath, those who put forth that argument accused SA of racism.
2. They aren’t captive. They can leave at any moment. Neither are they zoo animals. As voters, whose party is part of the ruling coalition, they are among the zoo keepers/
What you have to understand is that Western ‘liberals’ view the whole Zionist project as Jewish National Socialism. The Jews that survived the Holocaust lived long enough to become the villains, they were infected by the contagion of their oppressor and carried it to the middle-east, where it mutated and began to show the most appalling symptoms. They should have all moved to the States and become vaguely neurotic writers like Philip Roth or overtly neurotic film maker’s like Woody Allen.
This is how those Amnesty types think.
How important is American support for the Jewish state? Seeing what America has become in the past few years can Israel continue to rely on it as a trustworthy ally?
The answers are: very and I hope so (as distinct from ‘definitely’). America may well become a fickle ally at some point. If a massive Arab invasion happens then, Israel will have to go nuclear.
Israel rightly refuses to be destroyed by hostile immigration. The UK, on the other other hand….
At least in our case the destruction will take longer.