Amnesty report alleging Israeli apartheid deserves a hearing

Two years ago this week, the former South African president FW de Klerk’s foundation asserted that apartheid was not a crime against humanity and that claims that is was were an “agitprop” project initiated by the Soviets and their ANC/SACP allies “to stigmatise white South Africans by associating them with genuine crimes against humanity – which have generally included totalitarian repression and the slaughter of millions of people”.

To his credit, de Klerk and his Foundation apologized and unreservedly withdrew the statement a short time later.

There are overtones of the same sentiments in the initial response from the government of Israel and several Jewish organisations around the world to the lengthy and reasoned 220-page report, “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity,” published by Amnesty International this week, some responding even before the report was released.

Amnesty has been branded “left wing”, “anti-Semitic” and as having “jumped on the bandwagon” of Human Rights Watch and Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which reached the same conclusions last year.

Alex Kane: Donaldson embarks on a huge political and electoral gamble

---

Stephen Donnelly may be having his own Zappone moment

---

The Irish Times view on build-to-rent flats: out of favour

---

The Irish Times view on Stormont: the DUP plays a dangerous game

---

I fully understand why, without looking at the facts found in the report, a finding of apartheid against the state of Israel would upset many people

The clear and unequivocal statements in the report, repeated by Amnesty International’s secretary general Agnes Callamard (author of the damning report in June 2019 against Saudi Arabia on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in their Turkish Consulate in October 2018) at the press conference in Jerusalem that Amnesty recognizes the right of self-determination of the Jewish people; the right of existence of the State of Israel; and condemning anti-Semitism always and everywhere, have been drowned out by professed outrage.

That outrage is at the suggestion that Israeli laws, practices and policies could rise to the level of the legal definition of apartheid in the 1973 UN Convention on Apartheid and the 2002 Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

I fully understand why, without looking at the facts found in the report, a finding of apartheid against the state of Israel would upset many people. We tend to associate apartheid exclusively with South Africa. But the South African regime and most white South Africans prior to 1994 also rejected the apartheid label. As did the Government of Myanmar – including as it then did, the now-imprisoned leader, Aung San Suu Kyi in relation to the report and finding of apartheid on its treatment of the Rohingya.

Unreserved support

I unreservedly support the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. I unreservedly condemn the attacks on Israel and on Jewish people by Hamas and other neighbouring Arab States. I unreservedly support the right of Israel to exist and to continue as a sovereign independent state. But just because someone or some organization criticises the policies and practices of a government or a state – any government or state – and concludes (based on four years of intense research and forensic investigation) that the policies and practices rise to the legal definition of apartheid, does not make one anti-Semitic.

In early July 1976, a few days after completing my Leaving Certificate and ‘Matric’, I flew to Israel with two secondary school classmates to work on a Kibbutz. We were young and idealistic and in search of the adventure that we believed could be found in a community that operated on different and ‘socialist’ principles. We worked as volunteers on Kibbutz Beit Hashitta in the Beit Shean valley between Nazareth and Galilee for the summer.

Every morning my friend and I, who worked moving irrigation pipes in the extensive cotton fields, passed what looked like the ruins of a village at the top of the hill above the Kibbutz. Like one of the ‘famine villages’ in the west of Ireland. There was no explanation available about it and I didn’t pursue my enquiries. We had a wonderful time that summer, made many friends, and I have returned to the Kibbutz and to Israel on three subsequent occasions.

The last of these visits was in January 2018, when I returned to Israel to present the large Aubusson tapestry project, entitled ‘El Holocausto’, to Yad Vashem and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. I had commissioned the tapestry through Art for Amnesty for Amnesty International in memory of all those who had been murdered in the Holocaust.

A chance encounter with her grandfather and questions about the origin of a scar on his cheek led to her discovery

I wanted to stay on the Kibbutz if it, like many other actual and former kibbutzim, had a guest house. In researching online whether it had, I came across the reference to a book called Losing Israel by Jasmine Donahaye, the granddaughter of two of the founders of Kibbutz Beit Hashitta. A chance encounter with her grandfather and questions about the origin of a scar on his cheek led to her discovery that the land on which the kibbutz operated was obtained by driving Palestinian tenants off that land in the 1930s and again in 1948.

The ruined village that I passed in the jeep on my way to work in the cotton fields each morning was not an abandoned village but one from which the residents had been forcibly removed. Some of the descendants of its former residents live as refugees in Jenin in the West Bank.

Had I known then what I now know about the origins of the kibbutz that I enthusiastically visited and worked on with my friends in 1976, my attitude to working on it would, I hope, have been very different.

Justice requires change and compromise, and a willingness to recognise wrongs, historical and continuing

We in Ireland know as well as any the necessity of “sharing the land” with those who are of different faiths and have different allegiances. I want, as do most Israelis and Palestinians, peace in their land. But it must be peace based on justice. And justice requires change and compromise, and a willingness to recognise wrongs, historical and continuing.

I would urge everyone to read the Amnesty report, or at least the 32-page executive summary (which can be found on the amnesty.org website) before reaching any conclusions about the validity of its findings or the soundness of the underlying facts.

Bill Shipsey is a retired barrister and the founder of Art for Amnesty.