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No amnesty for NGO’s false claims of Israeli apartheid

Amnesty International has released the latest report in a co-­ordinated non-government organisa­tion campaign to associate Israel with apartheid.

Following a process set down by Human Rights Watch, the report redefines apartheid to little resemble the crimes in South Africa and disfigures Jewish-Israelis into a familiar stereotype of greed, cruelty and bloodlust.

Apartheid is a system of legal segregation under which one ethnic group subjugates another, treating citizens of the same state differently based on their ethnicity. Exclusion from schools, professions and public office, segregated toilets and restaurants, and voting prohibition are the manifestations of this crime. Speak to any South African expatriate and they will regale you with the full indignity and inhumanity of the system that once gripped that country.

Stand on a street corner in Israel and make up your own mind. Observe the campuses in Haifa, where my family lives, and see Arab-Israeli students in hijabs socialising and studying alongside Jewish-Israeli peers. Forty-one per cent of Haifa University’s students are Arab-Israelis.

In a Harvard University poll, 77 per cent of Arab citizens said they preferred to live in Israel than in any other country. Israel has more than 400 mosques across the country. Ask Amnesty International how many synagogues remain in the Arab world.

Arab citizens of Israel have little interest in Amnesty’s vainglorious, deceitful pronounce­ments on Israel. They have productive lives to lead in every echelon of society, right up to the Islamist party that sits in Israel’s governing coalition. Amnesty knows all this. Why, then, does it invest enormous resources into publishing dangerous lies?

Read the article by Alex Ryvchin in The Australian.