December 5, 2024 — New York, NY
American Jewish Community (AJC) decries a report by Amnesty International that repackages and repeats the baseless and inflammatory charge of genocide that Israel’s enemies have made in the media and international forums for the past year. It not only egregiously distorts the reality of the conflict in Gaza and maligns the legal concept of genocide but will embolden terrorist organizations like Hamas to continue their tactics of exploiting civilians and violating international law.
Amnesty’s report parrots countless false claims originating from Hamas and Hamas-controlled sources in Gaza that consider the Jewish state’s existence an abomination. Lacking access on the ground, the organization disregards the voluminous evidence published by the IDF and others that Hamas has deliberately embedded its operations inside, next to, and underneath nominally civilian areas in Gaza like residential buildings, schools, mosques, and hospitals, and cities, instead determining that Israeli forces were engaged in a widespread campaign of wanton and deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians as such.
Amnesty then pairs unreliable “facts” with a completely distorted legal analysis that denies Israel’s right to exercise self-defense against attacks against it by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in ways required by military necessity, and turning the law of armed conflict on its head. Amnesty perversely characterizes Israel’s actions to defend itself against Hamas’ terrorist infrastructure while facilitating humanitarian corridors, aid deliveries, and evacuation zones for civilians as evidence not of a desire to mitigate harm but rather parts of a genocidal plan.
The term “genocide” has a clear definition under international law, requiring intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part, and international courts have repeatedly affirmed that the bar to establish such intent is extremely high. Israel’s many actions in Gaza that are clearly intended to allow it to fight Hamas while limiting incidental harm to civilians should make it clear to all that its forces act with no such intent, in sharp contrast to Hamas’ deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians on and after October 7, 2023. Yet Amnesty instead distorts the definition of the constituent acts of genocide and the legal standard for establishing genocidal intent to avoid this and other inconvenient facts, manufacturing a vague “holistic approach” to making genocide determinations and reaching its damning conclusion without ever establishing that Israeli forces had any policy to deliberately harm Palestinians as such, much less to destroy the group.
Amnesty’s track record on Israel reveals a troubling pattern of distortion and bias. In 2022, the organization accused Israel of apartheid in a report riddled with historical inaccuracies and antisemitic tropes, even suggesting that Israel’s very creation in 1948 marked the origin of such a system. Amnesty leaders have openly questioned Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and do not recognize Hamas as a terrorist group. Today’s report further undermines Amnesty’s credibility - compounding concerns previously raised following Amnesty’s misguided criticism of Ukraine’s military as it defended itself against Russian aggression and its willingness to align itself with individuals who advocate violence in other contexts.
This report should be seen as yet another politicized effort to isolate and delegitimize Israel, and not a serious human rights analysis from an organization that has put a warped view of politics ahead of the pursuit of human rights.
AJC is the global advocacy organization for the Jewish people. With headquarters in New York, 25 regional offices across the United States, 15 overseas posts, as well as partnerships with 38 Jewish community organizations worldwide, AJC’s mission is to enhance the well-being of the Jewish people and Israel and to advance human rights and democratic values in the United States and around the world. For more, please visit www.ajc.org.
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