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?

The answer is in the world view that guides its decision-making, its appoint­ment of key research­ers and its choice of targets.

In 2009, Robert Bernstein, who founded Human Rights Watch, published a piece in The New York Times that captured what was happening in the human rights community that Bernstein once ably led.

“We sought to draw a sharp line between the demo­crat­ic and non-demo­crat­ic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights,” he wrote. “Now the organ­isa­tion casts aside its important dis­tinc­tion between open and closed societies.”

Bernstein saw the focus was shifting to demo­crat­ic states, soft targets such as Israel, while auto­crat­ic regimes were seen to fit with an anti-Western paradigm. His own organ­isa­tion had “lost critical per­spect­ive on the conflict” to the point that “Israel, the repeated victim of aggres­sion, faces the brunt of its criticism”.

Amnesty has played an outsized role in the decay of the human rights sector, rep­res­ent­ing all of the distorted morality Bernstein warned about. The head of Amnesty’s gender unit, Gita Sahgal, was forced out after she cri­ti­cised Amnesty’s part­ner­ship with con­tro­ver­sial British group Cage, whose director of outreach said the Taliban “should be given the right to celebrate” its conquest of Afgh­anistan and its director of research called the notorious Islamic State exe­cu­tion­er known as Jihadi John a “beautiful young man” who “wouldn’t hurt a fly”. Why the head of Amnesty’s gender unit might feel uncom­fort­able over her organisation’s close ties with Taliban and Islamic State enthu­si­asts is painfully clear.

Sahgal spoke of an “atmo­sphere of terror” inside Amnesty in which debate was sup­pressed and staff were forced to accept the pre­vail­ing dogmas.

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

But it is the inces­tu­ous rela­tion­ships and conflicts of interests running through Amnesty’s work that con­sti­tutes its greatest failing. The research­ers Amnesty hires to write its reports rotate through anti-Western media outlets and activist groups before winding up at Amnesty writing reports against the people they protested against.

Amnesty hired Deborah Hyams as its Israel and the Occupied Palestini­an Ter­rit­or­ies research­er despite Hyams acting as a human shield against Israeli soldiers. Another 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 research­er 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 them as assets.

These failings evade the attention of journ­al­ists who broadcast Amnesty reports as matters of fact, never probing their authors or the method and motives behind their pre­de­ter­mined, ideo­lo­gic­ally driven con­clu­sions.

The apartheid slur notori­ously was used by American activist Al Sharpton against the Jewish community in a speech credited with inciting the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn in 1991. Three days of deadly rioting ensued. The Jewish people know what it means to be slandered; we under­stand the power of words to encourage despic­able deeds. This is why Amnesty’s grave insult cannot be taken lightly.

Alex Ryvchin is co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry.