The Biden administration and congressional leaders of both parties have launched a full-frontal assault on the integrity of Amnesty International, the world’s largest human rights organization. This decidedly mainstream nongovernmental organization (NGO) — which is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, boasts more than 10 million members worldwide and is cited frequently by U.S. government agencies — was embraced by most leading Democrats until it released its latest report last week regarding systemic violations of international humanitarian law by Israel, a very close U.S. ally.
The 280-page report systematically examined Israel’s fragmentation of the Palestinian population into zones of control, dispossession of land and property, segregation, restrictions on economic and social rights, home demolitions and forced evictions, family separations, and other human rights violations. It proved that such practices collectively constitute “the” legal definition of apartheid — that is, serious human rights violations “perpetrated in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention to maintain that system.”
Despite the compelling nature of Amnesty’s investigation, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides immediately called the well-researched report “absurd,” and State Department spokesperson Ned Price roundly rejected the report’s conclusion as well, adding “the Jewish people must not be denied their right to self-determination” — even though there was nothing in the report questioning that. Price prevaricatedWhen asked by a reporter why Amnesty was so quick to decry Amnesty’s involvement in this case, but was willing to cite Amnesty authoritatively whenever it criticised Washington,
In the meantime, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) falsely claimed that Amnesty’s detailed report on Israeli violations of international humanitarian law constituted “delegitimizing the existence of the State of Israel” — despite absolutely nothing in the report questioning Israel’s legitimacy in any way.
Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), without offering specifics, accused Amnesty of slander and misinformation, baselessly claiming that the organization was “denying Israel’s right to exist.” The Senate Democrats’ de facto foreign policy spokesman insisted that the Israeli government actually “values human rights,” despite findings to the contrary in countless well-documented reports from Amnesty and other human rights groups.
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-New York), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, claimed that implementing Amnesty International’s recommendations to challenge Israel’s apartheid policies in the West Bank “would threaten Israel’s existence.”
Democratic House Majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) made clear that the Democratic Caucus remained solidly in support of the Israeli government against human rights groups, insisting that Amnesty was “fuel[ing] hatred against Jews” and pledging that, “Our Democratic House Majority will continue to stand with Israel and Jewish communities in efforts to end the spread of misinformation and the vilification of Israel and Jews.”
Other congressional Democrats joined in the attack. A joint statement by Representatives Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), Brad Schneider (D-Illinois), Lois Frankel (D-Florida), Elaine Luria (D-Virginia), Kathy Manning (D-North Carolina), Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey), Dean Phillips (D-Minnesota), Brad Sherman (D-California) and Jake Auchincloss (D-Massachusetts) explicitly denied well-documented Israeli human rights abuses and insisted that Israel was actually a “vibrant democracy where all citizens, regardless of religion or race have rights.” These prominent Democratic lawmakers insisted that “the biased report is steeped in antisemitism,” and claimed that Amnesty’s willingness to criticize well-documented violations of international humanitarian law was part of “Amnesty’s broad, decades-long campaign to criminalize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state.”
Furthermore, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan) called the report “outrageous and anti-Semitic.” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York) referred to the report as a “hysterical demonization of Israel” that would “incite hatred” and “violent antisemitism.” Similarly, Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada accused Amnesty of “fanning the flames of Antisemitism.” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) accused them of “unjust and libelous attacks.” Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) claimed that the report intended to “delegitimize Israel, a robust democracy, and will only serve to fuel rising antisemitism.” Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Florida) claimed the report was designed “to delegitimize” Israel. Rep. Kathleen Rice of New York claimed it would “only serve to incite antisemitism against Jews worldwide.” Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas called the investigation “lies” that would “incite antisemitic behavior against the Jewish people” and “incite violence.”
A review of these statements reveals that the objections were based in part on the accusation that Amnesty had labeled Israel as an “apartheid state” — a phrase that the 280-page report never explicitly used, even as it documented the ways in which Israeli policies toward Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and elsewhere do indeed constitute a form of apartheid.
Many other human rights organizations, including the Human Rights Watch, have been impacted by increasing discrimination against Palestinians in Israeli-controlled areas in recent years. Human Rights Watchand the Israeli group B’Tselem, and former world leaders have also begun to use the term apartheid with regard to Israeli policies. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le DrianAnd former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, among other things.
Despite the claims of a few Democratic critics, there is no comparison with South African apartheid. However, Black South African leaders including the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu President Cyril Ramaphosa, have also acknowledged the accuracy of the apartheid label to describe Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Biden officials and congressional leadership also claimed that Amnesty International was unfairly focusing on Israel for its criticism. In reality, Amnesty International published more than 2,000 reports over the past decade, but only 35 of them were about Israel.
The report contained nothing that was antisemitic. In fact, the report was over a dozen prominent Israeli NGOs have penned a letter defending Amnesty from these spurious charges, noting how “the struggle against antisemitism in the world is being weakened by the unbearable, inaccurate and instrumentalized use to which the antisemitism accusation is lodged for political ends, in order to avoid debate about Israel’s oppressive policies towards the Palestinians.”
These brazen misrepresentations make it unlikely that Congress members or Biden administration officials have actually read the Amnesty Report. What mattered was that it challenged a basic premise of U.S. Middle East policy: that Israel is — as described in the 2016 Democratic platform — a beacon of “democracy, equality, tolerance, and pluralism.” This assertion has for decades been used to justify tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to arm that country’s right-wing governments, block the United Nations Security Council from taking action to resolve the conflict, defend Israeli war crimes, and advance the notion that it is the Palestinians under occupation — not the Israeli occupiers — who are responsible for the failure to reach a negotiated peace settlement.
The report’s section that appears to be referring specifically to the United States may also have caused such a fervent reaction. It reads, “Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people.”
Many leading Democrats have sided with the Republican right in their attacks on Amnesty International because they recognize that the United States is morally and legally responsible for ending its support of violations of international humanitarian laws committed by strategic allies.
Amnesty has been the subject of vitriol from the right wing for decades, going back to its criticisms of U.S. allies like the Shah of Iran and the Thiệu regime in South Vietnam in the 1970s. This intensified in subsequent decades when the organization reported human rights abuses by U.S.-backed Latin American dictatorships and paramilitaries, exposed the massacres by U.S.-backed Indonesian forces in East Timor, criticized torture by U.S. interrogators in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, and documented the large civilian death toll in airstrikes by U.S.-armed Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip and U.S.-armed Saudi forces in Yemen. While Amnesty was at least as critical of repression by Communist regimes and other autocracies outside the U.S. orbit, the organization’s willingness to challenge the official U.S. line regarding friendly dictators was deemed unacceptable.
As a sign of the rightward drift in the Democratic Party’s direction, the Biden administration, congressional Democratic leaders and the Republicans have agreed that research demonstrating violations of international humanitarian laws by U.S. allied countries cannot be tolerated. They have decided to take the political risks of attacking the world’s leading human rights organization and lie about the contents of its reports to justify U.S. complicity in human rights abuses.
Why would so many prominent Democrats risk alienating so many people in their base — including millions of liberals who have long supported Amnesty and other human rights groups — by making demonstrably false charges against this beloved and well-respected NGO? Perhaps they assume that relatively few people will actually read the report and that enough of the public will believe their false claims about it to undermine Amnesty’s reputation for fairness.
Amnesty’s reputation for critiquing human rights abuses across the board has been one of its greatest strengths. The organization has been critical of human rights abuses regardless of the violator’s ideology, geopolitical alignment, ethnicity, religion or anything else. Indeed, Amnesty’s most vehement critics have tended to be from anti-imperialist activists who allege that Amnesty reports about human rights abuses in China, Russia, Belarus, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have been fabricated in order to advance Western interests.
However, Amnesty has been a constant annoyance for successive administrations in relation to arms transfers to dictatorial regimes or other human rights violators. The organization’s reports have fueled movements to end U.S. culpability in war crimes, which threaten the profits of politically influential arms exporters. Perhaps the Biden administration and its supporters are making these false accusations that Amnesty International actually seeks to “delegitimize” or “unfairly single out” Israel in the hopes that it will damage Amnesty’s reputation enough that reports about violations of international humanitarian law by other U.S. allies will not be taken seriously either. If the Biden administration and Democratic congressional leaders can get away with attacking Amnesty International for its criticisms of Israel’s violations of international law, they could also start attacking Amnesty for its criticisms of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and other U.S. allies.
This is a direct attack against the entire human rights community because of Amnesty International’s dominance in the global movement for human rights. Democratic Party leadership is desperate to discredit the reputation of thousands of activists, researchers, and informants who risk their lives to document human right violations around the globe. In order to discredit Amnesty and related global campaigns for human rights, these Democrats are allying with defenders of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other autocracies who share their fear of empirical studies that expose human rights abuses — and, unable to find anything of substance to challenge, they are resorting to misrepresenting and attacking the researchers.
This is indicative of the Democratic Party’s shift to the right on foreign policy in recent decades. Even though Democratic leaders initially refused to sanction white minority-ruled South Africa’s regime, they opposed military aid and voiced their opposition against apartheid. They now support unconditional military aid for Israel, deny that the system imposed upon the occupied West Bank by that right-wing government is an example of apartheid, attack reputable human rights organizations that present evidence to the contrary. With so many people fearful of a Republican takeover in November’s Senate and House, Democrats believe that human rights supporters won’t be able to challenge their war against Amnesty International.
However, this may end up hurting Democratic Party. Biden administration officials, Senate majority leaders, head of the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees and scores of other congressional Democrats joined. Fox News and the Republicans in attacking, misrepresenting and outright lying in an effort to discredit and marginalize one of the world’s foremost human rights organizations, people may start wondering whether they can support both human rights and the Democratic Party.
