Editorial Board
WSJ, Dec. 5, 2024
“The report essentially blesses Hamas’s strategy of using human shields.”
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.” …SOURCE