Amnesty International, the charity that cried ‘genocide.’
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Two days ago I attended a class on an introduction to human rights. At the end of the lesson, we were instructed to open our laptops to Amnesty International’s web page, have a browse, and see what we could pick out; anything interesting, anything surprising, et cetera.
One particular campaign immediately stood out: Amnesty International’s recent campaign and petition on their website, titled End Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, prominently displayed on their website. It, once again, has reignited debates over the credibility and political leanings of international human rights organisations. The first two paragraphs of the web page read:
For over a year, the world has been bearing witness to unfathomable levels of death and destruction in the occupied Gaza Strip (Note: Israel formally pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005.) Israel’s brutal onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of people, wiped out entire families, flattened residential neighbourhoods, destroyed critical infrastructure and forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, over 90% of the population of the Gaza Strip, causing an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.
Amnesty International has investigated Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the evidence it has collected and analysed provides a sufficient basis to conclude that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza following 7 October 2023. Act now and call on Israel to end its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Beside the text of the passage stands a ‘write a message’ petition form with the subject title Urgent Appeal to end the genocide in Gaza, appearing to call upon Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — no Tzadik by any means — to, as the header suggests, end what the rights organisation deems as a genocide.
Yet, this is not the first time it has found itself in the middle of a ruckus about its own false accusations against the Jewish state: the organisation previously accused Israel of apartheid in a 2022 report, an assertion broadly rejected and refused by the UK Foreign Office, the US State Department and multiple other international legal scholars, all arguing that its latest accusations reflect a pattern of disproportionate focus on the sole Jewish nation, whilst minimising or altogether ignoring war crimes committed by Hamas, including the 7.10 attacks, the massacre of over 1,200 Israelis and hostage-taking of 251. Not to mention Hamas’ crimes against its own citizens in Gaza.
Amnesty International released that report in full view of a reality that entirely contradicts its claims. Right now, tens of thousands of Muslims are openly praying in the Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan. In apartheid South Africa, non-whites were barred from particular areas; in Israel, Muslims freely worship at one of Islam’s holiest sites, and share the same hospitals, universities and shopping malls as their Jewish cousins. Arabs have formed their own political parties, some of which have been part of governing coalitions — take, for instance, the United Arab List’s (Ra’am) 2021 joining of an Israeli government. They can serve as Supreme Court Justices — e.g. Salim Joubran, who passed last year, and had sent ex-president Katsav to prison for rape — and as high-ranking officers in the IDF.
Soon after the class that provoked this article, a Sudanese friend of mine who had also read the page came to me to ask my thoughts. After I had answered, he asked, ‘Why is it that when Jews kill Arabs, the world goes crazy, and when Arabs kill each other, nobody hears anything about it?’ Just two days ago Sudan took the UAE to the International Court of Justice over what it describes as ‘complicity in genocide’ against the Masalit group in West Darfur, charging it with backing Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the civil war — I hadn’t even heard of this until I made a Google search this afternoon, and I doubt you had either.
While Sudan’s accusations against the UAE have made little more than a ripple in international discourse, it raises a broader question about how the world defines and responds to genocide, especially when it becomes a question of who killed whom.
The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as an act that aims ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’ It was also made clear by the drafters of the Genocide Convention in 1947 that:
The infliction of losses, even heavy losses, on the civilian population in the course of operations of war, does not as a rule constitute genocide. In modern war belligerents normally destroy factories, means of communication, public buildings, etc. and the civilian population inevitably suffers more or less severe losses. It would of course be desirable to limit such losses. Various measures might be taken to achieve this end, but this question belongs to the field of the regulation of the conditions of war and not to that of genocide.
It is also necessary to look at the validity of the numbers on the death tolls, too: a Washington Institute report found that ‘given the discrepancies in official Palestinian counts and their growing reliance on questionable data from media reports, the credibility gaps revealed […] have become yawning chasms.’ The report reads:
In the first month of the war, the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health (MOH) in Gaza relied on its existing collection system, made up primarily of hospitals and morgues, to certify each death. Starting in early November, however, hospitals in northern Gaza began to shut down or evacuate during the Israeli ground invasion, spurring the MOH to introduce a new, undefined methodology for counting fatalities: media reports. This methodology, which the MOH has rarely acknowledged publicly, accounts for the majority of fatalities reported over the past four months, surpassing the traditional collection system.
A comparison of the two methodologies, using MOH reports and claims published by the Hamas-controlled Government Media Office (GMO), yields wildly different and irreconcilable results, indicating that the media reports methodology is dramatically understating fatalities among adult males, the demographic most likely to be combatants. This undercuts the persistent claim that 72 percent of those killed in Gaza are women and children — a problem that has worsened since it was first noted by a Washington Institute report in January.
Such a contrast in global reactions is painfully laughable — Amnesty International, along with the rest of the international community, claims to uphold universal human rights and oppose all forms of genocide where they happen, and yet their selective outrage is widespread. Their ignorance means that true, brutal genocides barely register in global discourse, but also raises the question of how moral standards and applied and manipulated depending on the political agendas of the organisations and individuals that decry them. Whilst the suffering and death of civilians during times of war is truly an irreversible catastrophe, the misuse of ‘genocide’ dilutes the meaning of the world, distracting from more immediate issues.
As Scott Galloway wrote in his 2022 Medium article ‘The Algebra of Decisions,’ Be loyal to people, not to organizations.
Thanks for reading today’s article, everyone — maybe even give another one a read while you’re at it. I never end up writing exactly the article I set out to create, and I’m sure anyone reading this who’s also written something can agree with me. There is always one more statistic to cite, one more perspective to consider, one more tangent to diverge onto. So, if you think anything should be included, either in an edit to this article or in a future one, do let me know.
It’s also worth saying that articles like this are based on incredibly controversial topics. If you disagree with me, I invite your arguments in the comments.
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Good day — Simon
