A new report by Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al accuses Israel of “apartheid” in what is the latest strike in a coordin­ated NGO campaign to associate the State of Israel with crimes against humanity. The report follows a release by another human rights giant, Human Rights Watch, in April 2021 based on near identical meth­od­o­logy: rede­fin­ing “apartheid” to little resemble the crimes in South Africa; re-char­ac­ter­iz­ing the Israeli-Palestini­an conflict to fit an oppressor versus oppressed narrative; and dis­fig­ur­ing Jewish-Israelis into a ste­reo­type of greed and cruelty.

The origins of this campaign lie in the NGO forum of the UN World Con­fer­ence against Racism held in Durban, South African in September 2001. The Con­fer­ence is notorious for the racism that marred an event convened for the very purpose of com­batting such conduct. Posters displayed Jewish cari­ca­tures, placards cel­eb­rated Hitler and par­ti­cipants cir­cu­lated copies of the antisemitic fab­ric­a­tion The Secret Protocols of the Elders of Zion. U.S. Con­gress­man Tom Lantos called it “the most sickening display of hate for Jews since the Nazi period.” The UN’s human rights com­mis­sion­er, Mary Robinson, told the BBC “there was a horrible antisemitism present.”

Against this backdrop, the con­fer­ence of over 1,500 rep­res­ent­at­ives of inter­na­tion­al non-gov­ern­ment­al organ­iz­a­tions, adopted a res­ol­u­tion that defined Israel as a “racist, apartheid state” and called for the launch of a “global solid­ar­ity campaign” targeting gov­ern­ments, UN agencies and civil society to achieve the “complete and total isolation of Israel.” Amnesty was a key player in the Durban Con­fer­ence and in the adoption of the res­ol­u­tion and has been at the forefront of the campaign ever since.

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, 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.

Now stand on a street corner in Israel and make up your own mind. Stand for example on the uni­ver­sity campus in the northern city of Haifa, where my family lives, and you will see Arab-Israeli students in hijabs social­iz­ing and studying alongside Jewish-Israeli peers. 41 percent of Haifa Uni­versity’s students are Arab-Israelis. Does that sound like apartheid to you?

Of course, it doesn’t — nor does it sound like apartheid to Israel’s Arab citizens. In a Harvard Uni­ver­sity poll, 77 percent of Israeli Arab citizens said they prefer to live in Israel than in any other country. Israel has over 400 mosques through­out the country.

Ask Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al how many syn­agogues remain in the Arab world.

Amnesty of course knows all this. Why then does it invest enormous resources into pub­lish­ing dangerous lies? The answer is in the worldview that guides the decision-making, the appoint­ment of key research­ers and the choice of targets for groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.

This was most effect­ively explained by Robert Bernstein, who became a legend in the human rights community, first by protest­ing against the Soviet Union for its cen­sor­ship of authors then as CEO of Random House, where he gave Toni Morrison her big break and published dissident authors like Andrei Sakharov and Wei Jingsheng. Back in the 70s, Bernstein started the Fund for Free Expres­sion and Helsinki Watch, which monitored the Soviet regime’s com­pli­ance with its human rights pledges. The groups even­tu­ally became Human Rights Watch, which Bernstein led as founding chairman.

But by 2009, Bernstein began to see the slide of the organ­iz­a­tion and others like it away from giving a voice to those muted by iron curtains and secret police, and toward an increased focus on demo­cra­cies that were easier to access — and popular targets among anti-western ideo­logues. Writing in the New York Times, Bernstein presented an extraordin­ary critique of the organ­iz­a­tion he had founded and led. “We sought to draw a sharp line between the demo­crat­ic and non­demo­crat­ic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights,” Bernstein wrote. “Now the organ­iz­a­tion, with increas­ing frequency, casts aside its important dis­tinc­tion between open and closed societies.”

Leaked emails from Human Rights Watch staff revealed just how systemic this mindset had become. The group’s CEO, Ken Roth, solicited a donation of nearly $500,000 from a Saudi bil­lion­aire on the condition that Human Rights Watch does not invest­ig­ate viol­a­tions of LGBT rights in the Middle East with those funds. The donor Roth had courted had also been found in breach of labour rights, effect­ively enslaving his migrant workers.

Moreover, the group’s once senior Middle East official, Sarah Leah Whitson, also travelled to Saudi Arabia to extract sizable donations on the basis that Human Rights Watch was fighting “battles” with “pro-Israel pressure groups.” As Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in the Atlantic, not only did this appeal to embedded local pre­ju­dices of an all-powerful Jewish lobby, but there was something rather “queasy-making about a human rights organ­iz­a­tion venturing into one of the world’s most anti-demo­crat­ic societies to criticize one of the Middle East’s most demo­crat­ic states.”

Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al has suffered the same fall. In April 2018, Amnesty’s Secretary-General called Israel’s demo­crat­ic­ally-elected gov­ern­ment “rogue.” In 2010, the head of its Finland branch called Israel a “scum state.” Amnesty’s UK Campaign Manager has likened Israel to ISIS and been condemned for his attacks on Jewish Members of Par­lia­ment.

In 2015, Amnesty UK voted down a motion to campaign against antisemitism amid deadly acts against Jews in Europe. The organ­iz­a­tion claimed it did not support campaigns with “a single focus,” dubious indeed given its anti-Islamo­pho­bia campaigns and obsessive pursuit of Israel.

The former head of Amnesty’s gender unit, Gita Sahgal, was suspended from the organ­iz­a­tion and even­tu­ally forced out after she cri­ti­cized Amnesty’s part­ner­ship with the con­tro­ver­sial British group, CAGE, which campaigns for the release of those detained in the war on terror. Moazzam Begg, CAGE’s director of outreach has said that British, American and Aus­trali­an troops were “the bad guys” and that the Taliban “should be given the right to celebrate” its conquest of Afgh­anistan.

Then there’s the research­ers Amnesty hires to write its reports. Amnesty hired Deborah Hyams as its “Israel, Occupied Palestini­an Ter­rit­or­ies” research­er despite Hyams’ earlier record of par­ti­cip­at­ing in protests alongside local activists and acting as a “human shield” against Israeli soldiers. Another senior Amnesty hire, Saleh Hijazi, pre­vi­ously worked for the Palestini­an Authority and was the listed contact for a local NGO whose slogan is “We are Intifada!” Amnesty’s research con­sult­ant, Hind Khoudary publicly declared she wanted Israel “gone.”

Any of these asso­ci­ations should have dis­qual­i­fied these indi­vidu­als from ever touching anything con­cern­ing Israel. Instead, Amnesty prizes and defends them as assets.

The former U.S. diplomat Daniel Moynihan once observed that the most demo­crat­ic states suffer the worst accus­a­tions of human rights abuses because their trans­par­ency makes them so easy to see, report and exploit. They pay for their openness. To defer to Robert Bern­stein’s wisdom once more, only by returning to their “founding mission and the spirit of humility” can these organ­iz­a­tions again serve as a moral force.

Until then, they have no moral authority to comment.

Alex Ryvchin is the Co-CEO of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry and the author The Anti-Israel Agenda – Inside the Political War on the Jewish State.