2 weeks Ago By Special to National Post
A report from Amnesty International released last Thursday attempts to show that the Jewish state is guilty of the crime of genocide. Yet in the end, it only exposes the deep biases of its authors, who work hard to turn anodyne statements by Israeli leaders into evidence of the deep and abiding racism that can fuel a genocide. From the beginning, hatred has shaped the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
During the Second World War, Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini worked closely with Nazi leaders to promote their antisemitic propaganda. Last year, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed that Hitler did not persecute the Jews “for being Jews,” but because they were usurious moneylenders — a claim he also made in 2018. Hamas brings to the table its own brand of violent antisemitism.
Its 1988 charter cites the conspiracy theories of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to justify its call for destroying the Jewish state. Its suicide bombings have shown that it considers Jewish lives to be disposable. That same logic animated the October 7 massacre.
If Hamas had the means at its disposal, there would have been a genocide. And what of Israeli antagonism toward Palestinians? The documentation of lethal hatred is indispensable to Amnesty’s case against Israel because the legal definition of genocide focuses on the alleged perpetrator’s intent. As the report observes, “The key determination to be made” is whether the statements of Israeli leaders, together with their actions, “are indicative of genocidal intent.
” On this critical point, Amnesty’s case falls apart. It struggles to portray the words of Israeli leaders as evidence of murderous intent. For example, the report observes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed the current conflict as a struggle between “the children of light” and the “children of darkness.
” Netanyahu also said that this is a war between “humanity and the law of the jungle,” and that Israel is fighting for the whole civilized world. Amnesty insists these generic figures of speech are “racist and dehumanizing metaphors.” Former defence minister Yoav Gallant came closer to saying something offensive when, two days after the massacre, he said that Israel was at war with “human animals.
” Amnesty insists that Gallant was applying this term to all Palestinians, yet in context, his meaning is uncertain. The report observes that a day later, a similar phrase was used by Maj.-Gen.
Ghassan Alian, head of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, although in that case, he was clearly referring to Palestinian terrorists who were responsible for killing civilians. Several days after Gallant made his comments about human animals, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said of October 7: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.
” Yet during the same press conference, Herzog rejected the implication that all Palestinians are legitimate targets and said there are in fact many innocents in Gaza. These slender reeds are the basis on which Amnesty concludes that after October 7, “senior Israeli military and government officials intensified their calls for the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, using racist and dehumanizing language.” The weakness of Amnesty’s case extends to its portrayal of Israel’s actions, not just its intent.
The report dedicates 75 pages to showing that Israel’s alleged obstruction of humanitarian aid and other necessities amounts to inflicting on Palestinians “conditions of life calculated to bring about (their) physical destruction.” If proven, the charge of deliberate starvation at scale would meet the legal threshold of genocide. What the report does not say at any point in its 296 pages is that over 59,000 trucks have delivered nearly 1.
2-million tons of goods to Gaza since the war began. These goods can only reach their destination with the permission of Israeli authorities. Amnesty dedicates a dozen pages to various calculations about the flow of aid and its sufficiency, but never makes the scale of the deliveries clear to the reader.
Critically, the report does not reveal that the United Nations-backed famine monitor known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, found a sharp decline in “catastrophic” food insecurity as the war progressed, concurrent with an acceleration of aid deliveries. While 30 per cent of Gaza residents endured that level of deprivation in March, the figure fell to just six per cent in October. Amnesty’s report frequently cites IPC findings and refers to the organization as “the world’s foremost expert group assessing the risks of famine,” but sidesteps the IPC’s crucial finding that hunger diminished.
While Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health claims the war has taken more than 40,000 lives , it only attributes 41 deaths to malnutrition. Yet Amnesty still sees a genocide. The report also condemns frequent Israeli orders for Gazan civilians to evacuate areas of intense fighting.
These, it claims, are not efforts to protect those civilians from the effects of battle, but a form of “forcible transfer” that contributes to inflicting “conditions of life calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.” Even when Israel tries to help, Amnesty discovers genocide. The report observes that Israeli forces communicated evacuation orders “using an interactive map of Gaza that divided it into more than 600 numbered blocks and was accessible through a QR code.
” Does this initiative lead Amnesty to pause and reconsider its view of Israel’s malign motives? No, because the contents of the map were “often confusing and contradicted orders distributed through leaflets or social media posts.” Then, in a surreal moment, Amnesty suggests Israel could have allowed the civilian population of Gaza to enter Israel itself and remain there for the duration of the war. The authors seem completely unaware of the risk that this would lead to even more violence.
Despite the report’s impressive length, Amnesty’s case against Israel is flimsy. It mainly shows how analysts can project their preferred conclusions onto evidence that contradicts what they wish to see. Ultimately, the report trivializes genocide and the Jewish experience of that crime 80 years ago.
There are no gas chambers in Gaza, except in the fantasies of the men who carried out the October 7 massacre. National Post David Adesnik is vice-president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies..
