While Alex Ryvchin is undoubtedly entitled to his opinion and to disagree with Amnesty International’s report, his article “No amnesty for NGO’s false claims of Israeli apartheid” (2/2) contains serious claims which are not based in fact.
Opponents of the disturbing findings in Amnesty International’s landmark report Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System Of Domination And Crime Against Humanity, including Ryvchin, who dismiss it as a slur do so without engaging with the content of the report. To be accused of a crime against humanity is confronting, yet when credible organisations like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and Israel-based B’Tslem and Yesh Din raise this claim, we do so on the basis of a compelling body of evidence.
Anecdotes of people having positive personal experiences are not equal to compelling evidence, our evidence on which these findings are based, have been complied over four years and reviewed by experts in apartheid and international law, which show systemic discrimination documented over many years.
The charge of apartheid as described in international law has also been made by Amnesty in Myanmar. To suggest that describing the state of Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinian people is anti-Semitic is disingenuous and again refuses to engage with the substance of the report.
Apartheid is sometimes used only to describe the South African regime form which the term derived. However, apartheid is defined in three international human rights treaties: Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Apartheid Convention, and the Rome Statute – as well as in Australian law.
The report does not at any point or in any way question the right of the state of Israel to exist. Amnesty works fearlessly in other areas around the world where self-determination is a contested issue such as Xinjiang and Kashmir, and Amnesty does not take a position on self-determination.
Amnesty International’s research, campaigns, advocacy, and statements pertaining to Israel are focused on the actions of the Israeli authorities – they are not, and never will be, a condemnation of Judaism or the Jewish people. Anti-Semitism is antithetical to everything Amnesty represents as a human rights organisation.
Sam Klintworth, national director, Amnesty International Australia
Read this letter from The Australian.