(National Review) Elliot Abrams - Amnesty International (AI) has now produced a vicious attack on Israel reminiscent of the Soviet anti-Semitic and anti-Israel tracts from the height of the Cold War in its report, Israel's Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity. If I said that World War II started when "conflict broke out in 1939" rather than saying that it started when the Nazis disassembled Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland, you'd say I was a Nazi propagandist. But that's essentially what AI does in this document. That Israel accepted the UN partition and the Arab states all then attacked it is unmentioned. In 2005, Israel removed every single Israeli civilian, every soldier, and every military base from Gaza, yet AI refers to it as "occupied" by Israel about a hundred times. What about the terrible conditions under which AI says Israeli Arabs live? While Arabs are 20% of all Israelis, they are 35% of Israeli pharmacists. Already in 2015, 16% of all medical students in the country were Arab; at the Technion, Arabs comprised 38% of students by 2015, and at Ben-Gurion University, they comprised 31% - hardly a sign of apartheid and oppression. According to Amnesty, Jews are Israelis; Arabs are "Palestinians." But that is not what Israeli Arabs say: a 2020 poll by the Jewish People Policy Institute reported "a dramatic rise in the share of Arab Israelis who define their primary identity as "Israeli" and a sharp decline in the share who self-identify as "Palestinian." The writer is a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
2022-02-03 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive