EMET condemns in the harshest of terms Amnesty International’s newest report on Israel, entitled “ISRAEL’S APARTHEID AGAINST PALESTINIANS: CRUEL SYSTEM OF DOMINATION AND CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.” Based on this report, it is clear that Israel’s biggest sin is simply its existence, a horribly antisemitic double standard that Amnesty International would surely not apply to any other state.
Amnesty International’s report bears little resemblance to reality and ignores the high quality of life that Arabs enjoy in Israel. A December 2021 poll found that a 93% of Arab residents of Jerusalem prefer Israeli government to the Palestinian authority.
The report’s executive summary begins by discussing the May 2021 war launched by Hamas. It ignores Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s incitement to violence and falsely claims that Israel “arbitrarily arrested peaceful demonstrators.” These “peaceful demonstrators” were in fact throwing rocks, destroying property and attacking Jews in the streets. EMET demands that they be held accountable for the tragic consequences of their actions.
Since 1948, the Arab population has seen its health, life expectancy, education and income increase, while infant mortality and illiteracy have declined dramatically. In 1948, 80% of Israeli Arabs were illiterate, as opposed to 15%, just 40 years later in 1988 (Divine, Essential Israel, 2017). Israeli Arabs serve in the Knesset (Israeli parliament), and are actually part of the Cabinet and on the Supreme Court, as well as in other prestigious professions such as doctors, lawyers, high-ranking posts in the military and department heads at universities.
Said Sarah Stern, Founder and President of EMET, “This is a malicious, ludicrous and hateful screed. Anyone familiar with the history of the conflict understands that it is due to the initial failure of the Arab world to accept Jewish presence in the land of Israel. The conflict has continued to this day because the Palestinians have insisted on the ‘right of return’ to all of Israel and do not want a two-state solution, or a Jewish presence anywhere in the land of Israel. If they wanted it, they would have accepted any of the multiple offers in 1937, 1947, 1967, 2000, 2008 or 2020.”
When the Arab world realized that they could not defeat Israel on the battlefield, they decided to slowly and persistently erode Israel’s moral legitimacy in the eyes of the world. They augmented their physical war for the elimination of the state of Israel with an absurd, concocted war on the moral legitimacy of the Jewish state by concocting this lie.
As Colonel Richard Kemp said on a recent EMET webinar, former Chairman of the Soviet KGB Yuri Andropov concocted outrageous claims and said, “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.”
Continued Ms. Stern, “Israel is a vibrant democracy with equal opportunities to all of its citizens. To call Israel an apartheid state is a ludicrous, mendacious lie. In apartheid South Africa, it was considered a crime for a white person to stop to assist a wounded black person. Anyone who lived through apartheid in South Africa knows this outrageous screed is also an insult to what the word ‘apartheid’ actually means.”
