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Comment by defaultprimate | Hacker News Reader

Israel is nowhere close to an apartheid state

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29556722

Ask yourself how many Jews live in and could safely become sociopolitically engaged in surrounding Arab nations. It's mind blowing to me that Israel is targeted with this kind of rhetoric without relative comparison to surrounding nations. It's mentioned only in passing in the article as if it's no big deal, when it's critically important to the geopolitical examination of the region.

Not to mention the PLA and Hamas literally want to genocide the Jews and have repeatedly rejected more than fair solutions.

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> It's mind blowing to me that Israel is targeted with this kind of rhetoric without relative comparison to surrounding nations

> Not to mention the PLA and Hamas literally want to genocide the Jews and have repeatedly rejected more than fair solutions.

This reads as whataboutism to me.

Israel is held to higher standards in the west and in particular the US because it is an extremely close ally and unquestionable support for Israel is treated at a litmus test for public life.

What is deemed as “fair” is dependent upon one’s point of view. And while I can sit here and defend hamas, I am not aware of the PLA advocating anything genocidal at any point in the past.

The original PLO charter called for the explicit and complete destruction of Israel.

Objective rebuttal to today's report follows

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-amnesty-report-on-israel-aff...

Calling for the destruction of a political entity is not the same thing as calling for the genocide of the population that is governed by said entity.

Despite what Israel’s advocates say, objecting to a particular political arrangement for the territory that is Israel/Palestine is not inherently anti Semitic nor anything close to advocating genocide.

Personally I don’t like the idea of ethno-religious nation states.

Context and consensus is that "elimination of Israel" was obviously not purely as a political entity. Leaders of the PLO have plainly called for the elimination of the Jews, as previous source and following outlines.

I'm no fan of ethnic theocracies either, and it turns out Israel is the only nation that isn't one in the middle east.

http://internationalwallofprayer.org/A-077-The-Infamous-PLO-...

Your source says nothing of any PLO leaders calling for the wholesale elimination of Jews from Palestine, only Zionism, ie Jewish colonization of the territory of Palestine/Israel. It says it could be considered a call for genocide, except it wasn’t. The original charter explicitly characterized Palestinian Jews as Palestinians who would be a part of their desired state of Palestine.

It was a nationalist document, not a religious one. The Islamic bent of the conflict only came later as political Islam grew in response to conflict with the west.

> I'm no fan of ethnic theocracies either, and it turns out Israel is the only nation that isn't one in the middle east.

Again, whataboutism. Israel is a self proclaimed Jewish state. That’s what Zionism is. You can’t just hand wave that away.

You didn't read them very closely or pay attention to quotes by Yasser Arafat and his successor or associates. What do you propose the Jews do? Allow another totalitarian theocratic ethnostate to inhabit the land and disperse among the western civilizations? Can you understand why that may be something to be wary of for them as an ethnic group? Or should they continue to be the only free, secular, democratic melting pot in the middle east? None of the things they're accused of to earn the label "apartheid" are based in fact.

I looked again, and there aren’t any quotes from Arafat?

None of the states that Israel share a border with are theocratic enthostates. Iran? Yes. Lebanon? No.

Again you are playing on the “Arabs are barbarous therefore Israel is good” trope. I am far more bothered by the US alliance with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t make Israel’s action just simply because of the comparison.

Further, at no point have I been proscriptive about what Israel must do here. Due to the century and a half of conflict now, things have gotten extremely difficult and tangled. I do, however, object to what multiple independent western human rights organizations have characterized as apartheid, though.

I would like to see a path towards a solution with one democratic state wherein all of the people inhabiting Israel as well as the occupied territories have full citizenship, and the Jewish population can live in peace and security. I do not see any straight path there, though.

You're right that the border states may not be theoretic ethno states but they are confessionalist states. Palestinian refuges have less political representation and rights on these border states than Israel as well. They're literally barred from naturalization in Syria and Lebanon.

Israel's actions according to AI aren't actions based in the context of reality. That's the problem. The characterization of apartheid is absurd. Nearby nations treat Palestinians as a lesser class of human. Israel doesn't at all. If the driving concern of the report was the well being of Palestinians, there are numerous facts they could have addressed in the region that wouldn't have required manufactured falsehoods, contextual manipulation, or ignoring terrorism.

As time goes on, more and more point by point callouts of the blatant falsehoods proclaimed throughout the report will occur, but the NGO-Monitor one is a great place to start.

https://www.ngo-monitor.org/reports/amnesty-apartheid-analys...

Do you have any sources that attempt to be unbiased rather than unabashedly pro Israel?

I can’t take this seriously otherwise.

Do you have any that attempt to be unbiased, or hell, objective, that accuse Israel of being apartheid? I don't even care if they're biased if they're objective. The NGO monitor is point by point, sourced, objective rebuttals. If that's not good enough for you, that's a personal problem with objectivity that you can sort out yourself.

Amnesty International is neither unbiased nor objective. They've long been staunchly anti Israel with no objective basis. It shouldn't be a surprise that it's pro Israel sources providing objectively sourced rebuttals to the report. AI can be anti Israel all they want if their accusations stand up to even the most basic scrutiny or historical fact, but they don't. They're laughably and blatantly manipulative, deceitful, lies by omission, or just plain lies. There's nothing wrong with bias if you utilize verifiable facts in your arguments. Do you dismiss the arguments and points of black BLM supporters because you don't take black unabashedly pro black people seriously?

> The NGO monitor is point by point, sourced, objective rebuttals.

Sourced, objective rebuttals you say. Let’s take a look at their issues under “methodology”:

“Amnesty’s methodology section is opaque and inconsistent with internationally recognized fact-finding standards.” [0]

The source in that passage leads to a book

* Best Practices for Human Rights and Humanitarian NGO Fact-Finding (Nijhoff Law Specials) by Gerald M. Steinberg, Anne Herzberg, Jordan Berman (2012) Paperback*

Who is the lead author, Gerald Steinberg? It would appear to be the president of NGO monitor. (Ann herzberg is also on their staff) [1]

Unfortunately I don’t have the ability to exhaustively research all of their sources, but this is hardly credible.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Practices-Humanitarian-Fact-Finding...

[1] https://www.ngo-monitor.org/about/staff/

What objections do you have to the evidence presented and logic used?

Again I'll ask, do you dismiss black BLM supporters on the basis that because they're unabashedly pro-black, they can't present objective, unbiased evidence and arguments for their support?

You held them up because they “source” their piece and we’re “objective”.

Sourcing yourself is not sourcing. Citing yourself is not objective.

Your standards for unbiased and objective are seriously questionable:

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-undisguised-agenda/

Quick Google searches without vetting the assertions made by an author are not good practice

She regularly lies by omission, and also leads the New Israel Fund, one of Adalah's chief financial supporters.

https://www.camera.org/article/yehudit-karp-erases-history-o...

Adalah also defends known Hamas leadership and has absurd amounts of documentation regarding its true, more nefarious purposes. That's why it's met with suspicion and not seen as a champion of civil rights.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-court-nixes-rec...

https://israelbehindthenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/I...

It's not just Amnesty calling out apartheid Israel: Amnesty's report came out after Israeli human rights advocacy organizations published their reports:

1. 18 months after Yesh Din's "The Occupation of the West Bank and the Crime of Apartheid: Legal Opinion,"

2. A year after B'tselem's "A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid."

3. Eight months after Human Rights Watch published "A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution."

4. Five years after experts commissioned by the UN's Economic and Social Commission of West Asia had authored "Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid"

We can even count Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu calling out Israeli apartheid.

None of these criticisms were related to Judaism.

Are they all antisemitic?

This entire piece is just a series of ad hominem attacks and ranting about how this is all just a continuation of Soviet plots to discredit Israel. It doesn’t even attempt to address the facts on the ground from the report.

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