Amnesty International’s recently-released report on Israel as an “apartheid” state has backfired. More on this welcome outcome can be found here: “How Amnesty’s anti-Israel apartheid report backfired – opinion,” by Jordan Cope, Jerusalem Post, February 19, 2022:

On February 1, Amnesty International accused Israel of apartheid. However blatantly false the charge – as even noted by the head of Israel’s leading Islamist party – the allegation exposes more about Amnesty’s hypocrisy, incompetence, and anti-peace narrative than it does about reality in Israel.

Context is important. Though Amnesty claims its apartheid report “took four years” to complete, its timing is awfully suspect. The report emerged just a year after the latest peace deal under the Abraham Accords, and it begins with a discussion about events from 2021.

Amnesty does not support the accords and the peace and cooperation they have forged between Israel and its new Arab partners. While Amnesty has yet to applaud the accords’ achievements, one Amnesty publication has asserted that the “so-called normalization” efforts “cannot be understood as peace deals in the context of Israel and Palestine.”

Amnesty released its report when it did because it wanted to stop the momentum for more Arab states to join the Abraham Accords. For Amnesty doesn’t want Israel to be accepted by its Arab neighbors; it wants the Palestinians to remain at the center of Arab and Muslim concerns. It hoped with its report to so blacken Israel’s image that no Arab regime would now dare to join the Abraham Accords. It hasn’t worked out that way.

Not a single Arab state has praised Amnesty’s report on “apartheid” Israel; how that must offend Amnesty’s Secretary-General Agnès Callamard and its Special Adviser on the Middle East, Philip Luther, the people most responsible for the report.

Amnesty seemingly does not champion peace for Israel and its neighbors. It has likely cried apartheid in a desperate attempt to frustrate the momentum of the accords, which have only solidified Israel’s rightful place in the Middle East.

Only such a motive could explain Amnesty’s recent decision to label Israel as an apartheid state from its founding in 1948, targeting Israel’s very right to exist and priming Israeli officials for future demonization and prosecutions in the International Criminal Court.

“Apartheid” is the epithet of the hour in the attempt by that worldwide army of Israel-haters to undermine the Jewish state. It’s a word plucked from a very different time and place: South Africa before 1994. It is grotesque to call Israel an “apartheid state.” Callamard and Luther know perfectly well that in Israel, Arabs sit in the Knesset, serve on the Supreme Court, go abroad as diplomats.

The chairman of Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, is an Arab. Jews and Arabs work together in the same offices and factories. Jewish and Arab medical personnel provide medical care to Jewish and Arab patients. Jews and Arabs play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras. The captain of Israel’s national soccer team is an Arab. Jews and Arabs co-own restaurants and clothing stores and computer shops. Jews and Arabs work together in high-tech start-ups. The only difference in the legal treatment of Jews and Arabs is that Jews must, while Arabs may, join the IDF.

However calculated its motives may have been, Amnesty’s efforts have backfired, sowing a spotlight under which it has seared. The results have been astonishing, ranging from a leading Amnesty director accidentally undermining his organization’s apartheid allegation, to democracies openly rejecting Amnesty’s findings (and even warning the group not to fan the flames of antisemitism), to Amnesty reportedly demonstrating internalized racism and speech suppression.

Amnesty was no doubt shocked at the outraged response to its report. The U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., Germany, Czechia, Austria, are among the states that rejected outright the claim of “apartheid.” It must also have been deeply disappointed that no country praised the report, though Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were well-pleased. In major newspapers, such as the Wall St. Journal, and the New York Post, editorials on the report were generally scathing.

What’s more, Amnesty has drawn unwanted attention to itself as an organization. Critics of the Amnesty report brought up for discussion a 2019 report on the NGO that had found that Amnesty International had a “toxic” working environment, with incidences of bullying, public humiliation, and discrimination. The “discrimination” included instances of anti-black racism, use of the N-word, and expressions of contempt for people “from the southern hemisphere.”

Another internal report, prepared in 2021, came to much the same conclusion:

Amnesty International has a culture of white privilege with incidents of overt racism including senior staff using the N-word and micro-aggressive behavior such as the touching of black colleagues’ hair, according to an internal review into its secretariat.

It came as eight current and former employees of Amnesty International UK (AIUK) described their own experiences of racial discrimination and issued a statement calling on senior figures to stand down.

One of the whistleblowers, Katherine Odukoya, said: “We joined Amnesty hoping to campaign against human rights abuses but were instead let down through realising that the organisation actually helped perpetuate them.”…

And then there was another charge against Amnesty International that has now been receiving renewed attention: the very high salaries of the two dozen senior staff members, that average $150,000 a year, and rise to twice that – salaries that are far out of whack with what other NGOs provide.

UNSURPRISINGLY, Amnesty’s credibility as an organization has since suffered in the democratic world. Seven democracies with better human rights records than most governments around the world – Australia, Austria, Czechia, Germany, UK and US and Canada – have all outspokenly rejected Amnesty’s findings of apartheid….

The reality is that 20 percent of Israel’s population are Arabs, who enjoy equality under the law, affirmative action programs, and positions in Israel’s parliament and Supreme Court. An Arab Israeli judge, and later to be Supreme Court justice, even once sentenced an Israeli president (a Jew) to prison.

Israel is the furthest thing from an apartheid state; and while Amnesty blames Israel for Palestinian misfortune, nearly all Palestinians remain under the governance of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, or Hamas in Gaza.

95% of the Palestinians in the West Bank are ruled by the Palestinian Authority; 100% of the Palestinians in Gaza are ruled by Hamas. Israel cannot be blamed for the mismanagement, corruption, nepotism, and theft that characterize the rule of both the P.A. and Hamas

So when activist Yoseph Haddad, an Arab citizen of Israel, was invited to debate an Amnesty panelist, Amnesty allegedly refused to participate, asking for a Jew instead. If true, the gesture could reflect what appears to be Amnesty’s racism, intellectual dishonesty, and will to stifle reality….

Amnesty doesn’t want an Israeli Arab to present the case for Israel, with his own testimony about how he, as an Arab, has been treated fairly in this supposedly “apartheid” state. It would be too devastating – better to insist on an Israeli Jew, whose defense of Israel can be more easily discounted.

Amnesty has come out of this moral mess of its own making with its standing in the NGO world much diminished. Never before have so many important countries denounced its findings; never before has not a single country praised its handiwork. And those who feel only well-deserved antipathy toward Amnesty International have taken the occasion to remind the world of two studies of the organization, an external one in 2019 and an internal one in 2021, that reported evidence of“systemic racism,” including use of the N-word and black staff members being treated with contumely.

Can Amnesty recover from this degringolade? Only if it replaces the senior staff responsible for this latst report, including both Agnes Callamard and Philip Luther, with new personnel who are at long last willing to treat the Jewish state with the only thing its supporters ask for – a modicum of fairness.