Calling Israel ‘Apartheid’ Doesn't Help Palestinians or Jews
Amnesty International's new report gets the facts right and the label wrong, ensuring a fruitless debate.
Not helping.
Photographer: Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images
On Tuesday, Amnesty International became the fourth major human-rights group to accuse Israel of creating and maintaining an "apartheid" system to control Palestinians. This provoked a torrent of outrage from Israeli officials, pro-Israel groups and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides. Almost all of them accused Amnesty of anti-Semitism.
Yair Lapid, Israel's foreign minister, said that “if Israel wasn’t a Jewish state, no one would dare make such a claim against it.” The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the report "denies Israel’s right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”