Much will be said and written about the new report by Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al accusing Israel of “apartheid” and “crimes against humanity.” Amnesty’s sym­path­isers in the human rights community and liberal press have reliably boosted the story, reporting Amnesty’s pro­nounce­ments as state­ments of fact and not figments of activism. These accus­a­tions are not difficult to rebut. Israeli democracy is self-evident. There are Arabs in the Israeli Par­lia­ment, Arabs in the coalition gov­ern­ment, Arabs on the Supreme Court. But while such slurs cannot go unanswered, the spirited defences, the rebuttals, the forensic takedowns play directly into Amnesty’s hands.

There is an old story, of dubious origins, con­cern­ing Lyndon Johnson. The President is said to have directed his campaign manager to accuse his opponent of intimate relations with livestock. “We can’t do that, it isn’t true,” the campaign manager insisted. “I know,” replied LBJ, “but I want to hear him deny it.” A more elegant expos­i­tion of the same theme is to be found in Jewish folklore. It is said that an antisemite likes to accuse a Jew of stealing not because he thinks he stole something but because he enjoys watching him turn out his pockets.

Apartheid is an egregious crime, an abom­in­a­tion. It 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, voting pro­hib­i­tion, are the mani­fest­a­tions of this crime. Speak to any South African expat­ri­ate and they will regale you with the full indignity, inhu­man­ity of the system that once gripped that country.

Amnesty knows well such accus­a­tions have no relevance in the theatre of the Israeli-Palestini­an conflict. It knows that the Arabs that live within Israel’s inter­na­tion­ally recog­nised borders are integ­rated, valued Israelis with full legal and civil rights. It knows also that those Palestini­ans who live in the West Bank do not enjoy those same rights because they are not citizens of Israel. They aspire to their own state. Indeed, the official position of the Palestini­an Authority is that such a state already exists. Why would citizens of the claimed State of Palestine have civil rights in a foreign country?

The answer to why Amnesty has non­ethe­less levelled these charges is to be found in the worldview that guides Amnesty’s decision-making, its appoint­ment of key research­ers and its choice of targets.

In 2009, Robert Bernstein who founded another NGO giant, Human Rights Watch captured the essence of what was happening in the human rights community that Bernstein once ably 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 casts aside its important dis­tinc­tion between open and closed societies.” Bernstein saw the focus was shifting to demo­crat­ic states, soft targets like Israel, while auto­crat­ic regimes were much harder to invest­ig­ate, held to a lower standard and treated sym­path­et­ic­ally as they fit within an anti-western paradigm. Bernstein charged that the organ­isa­tion he founded 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. Amnesty’s own head of gender issues unit accused the organ­iz­a­tion of an “atmo­sphere of terror” in which debate is sup­pressed and staff are forced to accept the pre­vail­ing dogmas.

These pre­vail­ing dogmas don’t much include support for the Jewish community, seen as too priv­ileged and too white to justify sparing scarce solid­ar­ity. In 2015, amidst a spate of dev­ast­at­ing antisemitic attacks in Europe including the shooting of Jewish school­chil­dren in Toulouse, the deadly Hyper­cach­er kosher super­mar­ket siege and the Brussels Jewish museum shooting, Amnesty’s British wing voted down a motion to campaign against antisemitism. The organ­iz­a­tion claimed it did not “support campaigns with a single focus”, dubious indeed given its anti-Islamo­pho­bia campaigns and obsessive pursuit of Israel.

In the wake of Amnesty’s report, the concern for the Jewish world, is that we will see further hatred and violence. After all, the apartheid slur has a dark history. Rev. Al Sharpton accused the Jewish community of apartheid in a speech credited with inciting the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn in 1991. Three days of deadly rioting ensued. The accus­a­tion is laced with history, invoking the sorrow of black sub­jug­a­tion, white supremacy, daily humi­li­ations and the rage of injustice. Sharpton knew this. Amnesty knows this too.

Amnesty has now forced the Jewish world to deny that its people are capable of com­mit­ting the crime of apartheid, to deny that the very creation of a Jewish State is a racist under­tak­ing and a cosmic injustice for which the Jewish world must repent or face boycotts and further mar­gin­al­isa­tion. The choice before the Jewish people and their allies is whether to persist with those denials, stand before their sinister accusers with pockets turned out, or to stand upright in dignity.

Alex Ryvchin is the Co-CEO of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry