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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Amnesty International’s Big Lie About Israel – Part 1

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Because the organization is determined to denigrate and delegitimize the Jewish state, its only choice is to misrepresent facts, laws and definitions.

By: Alex Safian

Amnesty International has a long history of leveling maliciously false charges against Israel and its leader, Agnès Callamard, had to apologize after her bizarre anti-Israel tweets were publicized. So it’s only fitting that in its latest report (which won’t be publicly released until Feb. 1), alleging Israel is an apartheid and illegitimate state, the very first line is a blatant and malicious lie.

It contains a quotation of Benjamin Netanyahu, mangled so that it seems to support such charges: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens… [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.”

“Message posted online in March 2019 by Israel’s then prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,” says the report. Amnesty repeats this claim on page 51, citing an Instagram post by Netanyahu.

Why is Amnesty’s quotation a lie? Because this is what the then-premier actually said about the nation-state issue, responding to a post by Israeli actress and model Rotem Sela:

“Dear Rotem, an important correction: Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People—and them alone. As you wrote, there’s no problem with the Arab citizens of Israel—they have the same rights as us all and the Likud government has invested in the Arab sector more than any other government” (emphasis added).

That is, to indict Israel as apartheid, Amnesty must omit the next line of Netanyahu’s post, in which he makes it clear Israel is not apartheid, and that Arab citizens can and do have equal rights. Like the professional propagandists that they are, they simply omitted what was inconvenient.

If—in the first line of their report—Amnesty International can’t even quote a short statement correctly and in context, how can anyone trust them on more arcane or involved issues, turning on critical points of fact or law?

The short answer is that on Israel, Amnesty International can’t be trusted, on issues large or small.

And Amnesty’s entire report is like this—making up some new false charges and recycling a huge number of old, debunked propaganda.

Before going into the details of the report, it’s important to look at the report’s context, not just what it includes but what it omits. Shockingly, there is no mention of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And searching for the words “terror” or “bombing” or “suicide” or “stab” or “stabbing” reveals that in the entire 211-page report there is not a single mention of any particular Palestinian terrorist attack against Israelis, just a throwaway sentence the purpose of which is to set up criticism of Israel’s efforts to defend its civilians against terrorist attacks.

For example, Amnesty neglects to mention the horrific Passover bombing on May 27, 2002, in which 30 people were killed and 140 were wounded by a Palestinian suicide bomber. Also omitted is the suicide bombing of the Sbarro Pizzeria in Jerusalem on Aug. 9, 2001, in which 15 people were killed, including seven children. Also omitted is the attack on Dec. 1, 2001 at the Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were killed and 180 wounded. Also omitted is the attack on a passenger bus the next day in Haifa, killing 15 and wounding 40. (For a partial list of such bombings see “Suicide and Other Bombing Attacks in Israel Since the Declaration of Principles.”)

These attacks, and many more just like them, were the reason for the construction of the security barrier and other security measures that Amnesty uses to malign Israel as apartheid, but for some reason the group does not see fit to even allude to them. It is simply amazing that an organization ostensibly devoted to “human rights” would work so hard to dehumanize these victims of Palestinian terrorism, in effect to bury them a second time.

Passing now to the specifics of Amnesty’s numerous charges, it should be clear that only some of the main points can be covered, and that if a specific charge is not refuted here, that doesn’t mean it is true and can’t be refuted—indeed, many more details refuting the apartheid charge against Israel can be found in “Deconstructing ‘Israeli Apartheid’” and in the site Apartheid Week.

Finally, Amnesty should forthrightly apologize for all its report’s numerous errors and false charges, and in each case should correct the record.

Now for the details:

In the section “Dispossession Of Land And Property,” Amnesty claims:

“In 1948, Jewish individuals and institutions owned around 6.5% of mandate Palestine, while Palestinians owned about 90% of the privately owned land there. Within just over 70 years the situation has been reversed” (p 14).

First, let’s note Amnesty’s rhetorical trick here of referring to “mandate Palestine.” This seems intended to lead the uninitiated to believe there was a country of Palestine, rather than the usual and correct historical usage which would be “Mandate Palestine,” or the “Palestine Mandate,” or the “British Mandate of Palestine.”

And in a further trick, this time of arithmetic, Amnesty cites Palestinian land ownership as the percentage of private land in the Palestine Mandate, but Jewish ownership as the percentage of land in the Palestine Mandate. This will obviously magnify Palestinian ownership to the detriment of the Jews.

Again, Amnesty’s professional propagandists spare no effort to tilt against the Jews.

Contrary to Amnesty’s portrayal, about half of the land that became Israel in 1948 was the Negev desert, and in Mandate Palestine, and before that under Ottoman Turkish rule—and in most countries today, including the United States—deserts belong to the government. For example, in Nevada the U.S. government alone owns 84.9 percent of the land, not counting the additional land owned by the state and local governments. Even in California, Federal lands total 45.8 percent.

As in Nevada, under the Ottoman Land Code desert areas were classified as Mewat (“dead land”) and were the property of the Sultan. The Ottoman Land Code was maintained by the British when they established the British Mandate of Palestine in 1922, with the role of the Sultan passing to the British government in the person of the High Commissioner.

What about land outside the desert? Did the Arabs own whatever the Jews didn’t own there? Again, no—most of that land was agricultural land, and under the Ottoman Land Code was almost entirely Miri land, or the land of the Emir (the ruler). The farmers who worked this land did not own it, they merely got the right to use it (usufruct) from the state in return for paying taxes on what they produced from it. As long as they were using that land productively and paying taxes, no one else could use it.

So that takes care of the desert and most agricultural land—what about the rest? The land use records from the British Mandate authorities reveal that Arabs owned, at most, 14% of the remaining land (and probably quite a bit less since this figure still includes some Miri land used by Arab farmers), while Jews privately owned 8.6% (not counting Miri land).

So most of the land that Amnesty charges Israel took from Palestinians was never private Palestinian land in the first place, and could not have been taken from anyone because it was state land. (For more details see here, here and here.)

As for Amnesty’s claim that the land ownership situation has been “reversed,” on the contrary: today Israeli Arabs own a disproportionately large 50% of the private land in Israel, despite being just 20% of the population.

Amnesty claims further Israeli land discrimination:

“Parallel to direct land expropriation by the Israeli government, all pre-1948 Jewish properties in annexed East Jerusalem held by the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property were transferred to the Israeli Custodian General under an amendment to the 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters Law. The law allowed the original Jewish owner, or their lawful heirs, to request the Custodian General to release such properties back to them. It applies only to Jewish property owners, not to Palestinians whose properties in West Jerusalem were confiscated after 1948, and is a clearly discriminatory compensation scheme” (p 14).

Contrary to Amnesty’s charges about absentee property, there is nothing unusual about abandoned property passing into state ownership. Israel inherited the relevant laws, and the office of the Custodian of Absentee Property, from the British Mandate, as did Jordan, which called its version the Custodian of Enemy Property.

Since the absent Palestinian owners were mostly residing in enemy states, they couldn’t, for example, pay property taxes (certainly the Arab states would not have permitted them to send any money to Israel). So they would have lost the property for non-payment of taxes. Instead of simply taking the property in this way, Israel protected the Palestinian owner’s interest by turning the property over to the Israeli Custodian, who, if he sold the property, held the value of the property in trust for the registered owner (with adjustments for inflation and interest).

Contrary to Amnesty, Arabs who lost property in Israel are eligible to file for compensation from Israel’s Custodian. Palestinians were pressured not to make claims, lest that legitimize Israel’s existence and sovereignty. Still, over the years at least 14,692 claims have been filed, claims have been settled with respect to more than 200,000 dunams (approx. 50,000 acres) of land, more than 10,000,000 shekels ($3.2 million) has been paid in compensation, and more than 54,000 dunams (approx. 12.4 acres) of replacement land in Israel has been given in compensation.

Israel has followed this generous policy despite the fact that not a single penny of compensation has ever been paid to any of the more than 500,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, who were forced by the Arab governments to abandon their homes, businesses and savings.

Finally, it is interesting to note that after 1948 the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property allocated Jewish-owned land for construction of Palestinian refugee camps near Dheisheh, and in Anata and Qalandia (“Arab Building in Jerusalem: 1967—1997,” Israel Kimhi, p48-49, and also, from the leaked Palestine papers, “NSU Draft Memo Re: Rights of Jews Within the OPT Acquired pre-1967”).

Again, contrary to Amnesty, none of this Jewish-owned land taken by the Jordanian Custodian and used to build refugee camps can be returned to the original Jewish owners.

To sum this up, Jewish property in Jerusalem taken and held by the Jordanian Custodian after 1948 can be returned to the original Jewish owners, and property owned by Arab residents of Jerusalem and held by the Israeli Custodian can be returned to the original Arab owners. If the land was transferred by the Custodian to new owners, the value of the land is held by the Custodian in trust for the original owners, and the original Palestinian owners can file to receive that compensation. If the land was used for farming, equivalent land can be given instead, as detailed above.

(JNS.org)

(To Be Continued Next Week)

Alex Safian is associate director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

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