Amnesty International Investigation Concludes Israel Is Committing Genocide

[al bupp]

From: https://zeteo.com/p/amnesty-concludes-israel-genocide-gaza

Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, Amnesty International said for the first time on Wednesday, calling on countries, especially those with influence over Israel, such as the US and Germany, to take action to bring the violence to an end.

“The Palestinian people will not recover from this in our lifetimes as a people, and we're failing to call it what it is,” Amnesty International executive director Paul O’Brien told Zeteo.

“I think there's this misunderstanding that it's impossible to watch a genocide unfolding before your eyes. But that is precisely what is happening, and I am convinced that we will look back in years to come and say, ‘Why did we not do more earlier?’” he added.

Amnesty International reached its conclusion after examining Israel’s actions and statements over a nine-month period from Oct. 7, 2023, and early July and interviewing more than 200 people, including Palestinian victims of Israeli air strikes, displacement, and detention; local authorities in Gaza; and healthcare and aid workers.

Of course, AM is infamously antisemetic, so we needn't pay any attention to them.

[al bupp]

1. Israel's Claims Are 'Not Credible'

Amnesty’s intensive 296-page report covers everything from airstrikes and aid sieges to agricultural decimation and destruction of cultural and religious sites. On multiple occasions, Amnesty notes, the organization shared its findings with Israeli authorities but received no substantive response.

The Israeli government has repeatedly balked at charges of genocide, claiming it takes great efforts to protect civilians while Hamas deliberately puts Palestinians in danger. The US has made similar defenses, and, when pressed, often defaults to its line that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Amnesty found such claims are “not credible,” saying that the presence of Hamas does not absolve Israel from its obligation to avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks.

From “the clear pattern of causing intergenerational harm by dropping bombs on residential areas at night where children, infants, parents and grandparents are sleeping,” to “the constant forced movements of populations that are already traumatized by having been displaced and then attacking them once they have been moved,” O’Brien said it is “absolutely not the case” that Israel’s violence can be “understood exclusively as an attempt to defeat Hamas.”

[Beastly Boy]

22. Then,

the US claims to the same are not credible (https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sjvqmuynjx)

and Amnesty's own members' claims to the same are not credible (https://www.barrons.com/news/amnesty-israel-branch-rejects-genocide-report-calls-to-probe-serious-crimes-aee7ad58)

But what do they know, right?

[al bupp]

23. Amnesty Israel has no credibility on the topic of genocide in Gaza

from: https://forward.com/opinion/681370/why-i-resigned-as-chairman-of-amnesty-israel/

Entitled: Why I resigned as chairman of Amnesty Israel

After Amnesty International released a report last Thursday calling the war in Gaza a genocide, Amnesty’s Israeli branch quickly issued a statement saying most of its members don’t believe genocide has occurred. Some in Amnesty Israel alleged the report was biased, arguing for a forgone conclusion. Others went further, claiming that the international movement abandoned its commitment to equality in the first place.

But even before the report came out — one week before, to be exact — I resigned my position as chair of the board of Amnesty Israel. I didn’t step down because of the imminent controversy over the conclusions of Amnesty International’s report. I resigned because I could no longer chair a branch that did not treat Palestinians as equal partners, and I could not sign off on a critique of Amnesty International’s report that pretends to be an expert minority opinion, but is instead little more than the expression of an Israeli-Jewish worldview, to the exclusion of Palestinian voices.

Let’s start with the Amnesty International report itself. It was written by a diverse set of legal experts, and was revised multiple times to adhere to stricter standards of proof. It is far from the first report prepared by legal experts to reach the conclusion that genocide occurred, but it is by far the most in-depth legal analysis on the issue. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the report’s conclusions, the critique of it ought to be the kind that is commanded by serious scholarship.

Amnesty Israel’s position on the report was prepared by two Israeli Jewish staff members who are not legal scholars, with external assistance from Israeli legal experts. What Amnesty Israel was lacking in legal expertise it could have perhaps offered with an analysis that is instead rich in its diversity of perspective, having had Palestinian staff and board members working together with the Israeli Jewish ones to write something truly unique on this issue and contribute a perspective that would be difficult for outside experts to replicate. But instead, no Palestinians had any input on Amnesty Israel’s analysis of the genocide report.

There's more at the link.

[Beastly Boy]

24. Daniel Brodsky has no credibility

He is a 24 year old self-described self-employed strategist, fresh out of college with a whole of two years of job experience outside of volunteer work, all of it involving pro-Palestinian advocacy. This includes a whole of eight months working for Amnesty Israel.
https://il.linkedin.com/in/daniil-brodsky-6385091b5

His preamble to the article you linked to is telling: “Israeli human rights groups can’t advocate for Palestinians without Palestinians. ” he is making no secret that he is advocating. For Palestinians. Not even a pretense of impartiality.

Obviously, he has little to contribute to the topic other than his opinion. He has many years ahead of him before he establishes any kind of credibility on any topic. His ability to hold a job doesn’t look promising either.

[al bupp]

25. Why shouldn't he advocate for Palestinians?

Attacking the messenger w/o addressing the issues being raised is a sure sign of a weak argument.

[Beastly Boy]

26. He should if he wants to.

But that makes him a partial advocate, not an impartial arbiter he pretends to be. (Actually he does a shitty job pretending that he is anything other than an agenda- driven activist).

And blatant partiality is exactly what Amnesty Israel criticized in the report issued by their parent organization.

Clearly, being a partial advocate made him ill-suited for the position he held at Amnesty Israel. So did his rather unimpressive credentials and employment record.

[al bupp]

27. If that's true

Then the blatant partiality of the authors of Amnesty Israel's report, which included exactly zero people Palestinian descent, has to also be true.

Referring to what Daniil Brodsky says in his rebuttal to Amnesty Israel's report (linked once more here):

The lack of any Palestinians members being involved in writing it...

" isn’t because there were no Palestinians present. Amnesty Israel had skilled Palestinian staff and board members ready to contribute. It wasn’t because the Palestinians in Amnesty Israel have no legal expertise — after all, the Israeli staff doesn’t either. It’s because, as Palestinian activists and scholars Haneen Maikey and Lana Tatour have pointed out, a common pattern in progressive Israeli spaces is that Palestinians can provide labor, translation, lived experience and trauma to feed the analysis of Israeli Jews, but cannot be equal partners (emphasis mine) who get to do the analysis side by side and set the agenda together."

"Amnesty Israel finds itself in the awkward position of being neither a source of legal expertise, nor providing a diverse human rights perspective of Israelis and Palestians. It is just another place for Israeli Jews to express themselves."

As for Daniil's short tenure at Amnesty Israel, it was cut-off not due to being "ill-suited", unless that's a euphemism for objecting racist practices, but because he resigned, for the reasons laid out in his opinion piece. Arguing that his short tenure there demonstrates his incompetence is a circular and obviously self-serving argument. If Amnesty Israel's wasn't so clearly biased towards the perspective of only Israelis, then he might have remained as their chair of the board for who knows how long. By the way, what do his so-called "rather unimpressive credentials" say about Amnesty Israel in selecting his the chair of their board?

About the partiality of Amnesty Israel, in Daniil's own words:

"When I became chairman of Amnesty Israel in January 2024, there were no Palestinians on the board of managers or in managerial positions on staff. By way of comparison, this is a lower standard than the one found in Israeli public service and government-owned corporations (emphasis mine), which are, according to the attorney general’s guidelines, at least obligated to have a proper representation of Arabs “in all ranks and professions, in every office and auxiliary unit,” including the board of directors."

The "shitty" job that was done was Amnesty Israel's report, which was obviously and partial and "agenda-driven". Again in Daniil's words:

"I insisted on Palestinian representation in managerial roles, but nothing changed. Members of management and the board were reluctant to make the necessary structural adjustments. Staff told me that there was a rule that says a Palestinian staff member must be consulted on issues pertaining to Palestinians, something Amnesty Israel pointed out in their defense recently."

So, it turns out that Amnesty Israel didn't even follow its own rules in writing the report. Seems like evidence of an "agenda-driven" argument to me.

[madaboutharry]

2. Actually, al bupp, Amnesty International has a long and sordid history of demonizing Israel.

It singles Israel out for its most virulent criticism. So yes, it is in fact, infamously antisemitic.

Here is a bit of information from an article written in 2022. A simple google search provides a wealth of information of Amnesty's constant campaign of demonization of the Jewish state.

https://www.ajc.org/news/amnestys-outrageous-lie-its-big-problem-with-jews-and-the-truth-about-israel

[ColinC]

3. Amnesty International is a highly credible human rights organization.

That generally back up their claims with hard facts.

[Beastly Boy]

7. Was a highly credible organization. That was last century.

[ColinC]

16. Just because you don't like what they say doesn't suddenly change their credibility

But alas their concerns over Israel's actions and the evidence they have to support it, also hasn't changed much since the last century.

[Beastly Boy]

19. It's not what I like. It's what they say and how they say it.

And it is not just what they say about Israel.

Their reputation is in tatters. Note the dates of the instances reported in this Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amnesty_International

None of them are older than 20 years.

[peregrinus]

4. Here we go

[al bupp]

5. When all criticism of Israel is deemed antisemitic

It renders the charge meaningless.

The article you shared is interesting, yet in the end it boils down to this at the end:

"Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis," the Amnesty report states.

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination or claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor, constitutes antisemitism.

I hardly think AM is "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination". Rather, it's offering evidence-based assertions that many of ways it chooses to exercise its self-determination (such as whole sale leveling of large areas of Gaza, preventing food & aid deliveries, among others) crosses several lines.

[Beastly Boy]

8. What happens when only certain criticism of Israel is deemed antisemitic, and others are not?

For Instance, what if a certain NGO were to say ""Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis," while disregarding the essentially multicultural permissive nature of Israel and discounting that Israel's control over land (with no distinction to what land the statement refers) equally benefits all Israelis, Jewish or not, and some control of land benefits Israel's minorities more than it does the Jewish majority?

Imagine Amnesty accusing France of committing genocide on the basis of "an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a French demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit the Catholic citizens of France"

Wouldn't that be ridiculous?

Didn't stop Amnesty from getting ridiculous with accusations against Israel, did it?

Would you prefer "patently biased" to "antisemitic"?

[al bupp]

9. I think AM would make similar accusations against any country

that was doing what Israel is to Gaza and the West Bank.

And I suppose that all the hundreds of Jews occupying a parliamentary building in Ottawa to protest the war on Gaza are also antisemitic, no, sorry patently biased:

Link to tweet

[Beastly Boy]

10. I am not holding my breath waiting for Amnesty to hurl an analogous accusation against any other country.

And bringing up a false equivalency instead of addressing my question is not what I expected...

On second thought, yes, this was exactly what I expected.

[al bupp]

15. Since the UK and US give so much to Israel

In both money and weaponry, I think it's justified to hold the country to a higher standard than, say Sudan.

As detailed down thread, it's laughable to assert that Arab Israelis (really Palestinians) have equal rights to Jewish citizens.

[Beastly Boy]

20. Another false equivalency, as expected

Are we now measuring standards that Amnesty applies by the amounts of foreign aid a country receives from the US and Britain?

Oh, and just for kicks anf giggles, try to click on the link to the policies that HRW refers to as discriminatory in the cited article.

Try it, I'll wait.

For reference, this is the link to the HRW article cited down the line:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-land-policies-hem-palestinians

and this is the link to the alleged discriminatory policies HRW based its conclusions on:
https://www.kkl-jnf.org/about-kkl-jnf/kkl-jnf-id/jewish-people-land/

Find any policies there?

[al bupp]

28. Let's see...

The HRW link cites:

* "Decades of [Israeli government] land confiscations and discriminatory planning policies have confined many Palestinian citizens to densely populated towns and villages that have little room to expand"

* "Many small Jewish towns also have admissions committees that effectively bar Palestinians from living there."

* "The Israeli state directly controls 93 percent of the land in the country, including occupied East Jerusalem."

* "Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute 21 percent of the country’s population, but Israeli and Palestinian rights groups estimated in 2017 that less than 3 percent of all land in Israel falls under the jurisdiction of Palestinian municipalities."

* "Beginning in 1948 and in subsequent decades, Israeli authorities seized hundreds of thousands of dunams of land from Palestinians (10 dunams equals 1 hectare). Much of the confiscation took place between 1949, when Israel placed most Palestinians in Israel under military rule, and 1966, when military rule ended."

* "During this period, Israeli authorities confined Palestinians in Israel to dozens of enclaves and severely restricted their movement."

* "Since 1948, the government has authorized the creation of more than 900 “Jewish localities” in Israel, but none for Palestinians except for a handful of government-planned townships and villages in the Negev and Galilee, created largely to concentrate previously dispersed Bedouin communities."

* '" 2003 Israeli government-commissioned report found that 'many Arab towns and villages were surrounded by land designated for purposes such as security zones, Jewish regional councils, national parks and nature reserves or highways, which prevent or impede the possibility of their expansion in the future.'"

* "Israeli law permits towns in the Negev and Galilee (which comprise two-thirds of the land in Israel) with up to 400 households to maintain admissions committees that can reject applicants from living there for being 'not suitable for the social life of the community' or for incompatibility with the 'social-cultural fabric.'"

* “Israeli land policies treat towns inside its own borders in starkly unequal terms based on whether its inhabitants are Jewish or Palestinian”

Any so much more is in there, too. I recommend that everyone gives it a read, as it makes an excellent case for the extensively unequal treatment on non-Jew in Israel when it comes to Israel's land policies.

Furthermore, the empty page at https://www.kkl-jnf.org/ that you point to doesn't mean that what you say HRW based it findings on isn't correct, rather just that the web admins for KKL-JNF likely removed it contents sometime after the HRW report was written.

In fact, the link in the HRW report that cites the KKL-JNF link is only for the report's assertion that the Jewish National Fund, which makes up almost half of the governing the members of the Israel Land Authority (ILA), which manages and allocates 93% state lands has an "explicit mandate is to develop and lease land for Jews and not any other segment of the population." So, the HRW report is hardly based on what we can only guess were the former contents of that single link.

[Avalon Sparks]

11. Actually

It’s because Israel has a long and sordid history of barbaric crimes against humanity.

[Eko]

13. One can easily debunk AJC first point.

"It tries to show that Israeli Arabs, who have full citizenship and alongside Jewish citizens serve as doctors, ambassadors, Supreme Court judges, and in the government coalition, are subject to what Amnesty thinks is “apartheid.” Israeli Arabs make up 20% of the Israeli population."

Israeli law permits towns in the Negev and Galilee (which comprise two-thirds of the land in Israel) with up to 400 households to maintain admissions committees that can reject applicants from living there for being “not suitable for the social life of the community” or for incompatibility with the “social-cultural fabric.” This authority effectively permits the exclusion of Palestinians from small Jewish towns, which Adalah, a human rights group based in Haifa, estimated in 2014 make up 43 percent of all towns in Israel, albeit a far smaller percentage of the country’s population. In a 2015 study, Yosef Jabareen, a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, found that there are more than 900 small Jewish towns, including kibbutzim, across Israel that can restrict who can live there and have no Palestinian citizens living in them.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-land-policies-hem-palestinians

Expansion of ‘admissions committees’ law allows more towns to cherry-pick residents
Passed Tuesday, law enables greater number of close-knit towns to operate panels that rate applicants on ‘sociocultural’ compatibility; NGO argues law encourages discrimination
https://www.timesofisrael.com/expansion-of-admissions-committees-law-allows-more-towns-to-cherry-pick-residents/

Whats that called when you have towns where they can decide you cant live there? And it just so happens there are over 900 of these towns that don't have a single Palestinian in them? Is that a free country? What if there were 900 towns that made up 43% of all towns in America where they can legally decide who can live there and there were not any black people there? What would you call that?
I'd call that Apartheid. It literally translates to separateness.

[DeepWinter]

21. Amnesty International has hated Israel for years, decades

In 2010 Frank Johansson, the chairman of Amnesty International-Finland called Israel a "nilkkimaa", a derogatory term translated as "scum state".

Anything regarding Israel, they are a grocery checkout gossip rag as far as reliability.

[malaise]

6. Duh!

With Western complicity - that is all.

[ZRB]

12. If Israel wanted to commit genocide...

...this would have been over on October 8th, 2023. Israel only exists because of actual, real genocide, making this repeated accusation so incredibly antisemitic. What is happening now is called war, and it ends when Hamas surrenders and releases every last hostage. If Israel is still dropping bombs on that day, maybe some of these discredited individuals and organizations will have a semblance of a point.

[Trish6521]

17. Sorry, it's ethnic cleansing bordering in genocide

It was wrong during the holocaust and it’s wrong in Gaza. Being so blinded by anger and hatred, the Israeli people (mainly the hard right that controls the government) have become similar to those that did them harm.

I will never excuse what Hamas did. Never. But I remember when I was taught about “collective punishment” being wrong. That’s what converts this to ethnic cleansing or genocide .

It is not antisemitic to disagree with Israeli policy. I often disagree with American policy and I’m not anti American,

[Ping Tung]

14. Durned Humanitarian organizations keep on opposing war crimes and genocide.

Tsk. Tsk. How dare they condemn killing thousands of civilians for being civilians.

[David__77]

18. Good