Israeli Apartheid Report: Can a Critic of Israel not be Anti-Semitic?

Israeli government: The Israeli NGO B'Tselem, the American NGO Human Rights Watch, the UN, and Amnesty International, are all ANTISEMITES.

This would be funny if it were not true. But it is true, and ridiculous.

As Amnesty International prepares to publish its "Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity”report, the Israeli government has lashed out against the authors of the Israeli Apartheid report, namely the Israeli NGO B'Tselem, the American NGO Human Rights Watch, the UN, and Amnesty International, labeling them Antisemitic. It further asked these groups not to publish the Israeli Apartheid report.

(The full 280-page report can be downloaded from:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/)

Which raises the question: Can Israelis or followers of the Jewish faith be Antisemitic? Or is Israel and its blind supporters hiding their crimes behind the guilt-laden label of antisemitism? Are the crimes committed by Europeans and others over centuries against the Jewish people, leading up to the Holocaust, merely a cheap argument to be used against anyone who dares level a rebuke of Israel's inhuman conduct in its treatment of the Palestinian people?

The report accuses Israel of the international crime of apartheid based on its nearly 55-year military occupation of lands belonging to the Palestinian people, the majority of whom are refugees inside Israel proper, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in the neighboring countries of Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. The report also highlights Israel's abhorrent treatment of its own Arab minority.

Israeli Minister Yair Lapid said in a statement issued Monday that Amnesty “is just another radical organization which echoes propaganda, without seriously checking the facts," and that it “echoes the same lies shared by terrorist organizations.” He further said that “Israel isn’t perfect, but [it is] a democracy committed to international law, open to criticism, with a free press and a strong and independent judicial system".

One wonders how a commitment to international law translates into stealing occupied land, evicting occupied the Palestinian people from its ancestral lands, bulldozing people's homes and denying them  permits to expand their existing homes and villages, while at the same time granting those very same lands and homes to foreign occupying colonial racists without any historical ties to the land. 

One wonders how is Israel open to criticism, when any such criticism of Israel's forced de-arabization of Jerusalem and the West Bank and its dehumanization of the Palestinian people by confining them and walling them off like animals, becomes an act of Antisemitism?

To add insult to injury, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Amnesty's report “denies the state of Israel’s right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people.[...] Its extremist language and distortion of historical context were designed to demonize Israel and pour fuel onto the fire of antisemitism.” 

One wonders how can a democracy be Jewish, or Muslim, or Christian, or Hindu, or affiliated with any such exclusive group as a religion? Is there any country on earth that claims to be a democracy whilst defining itself exclusively by a religious affiliation?  

Neither Human Rights Watch nor B’Tselem compared Israel to South Africa, where an apartheid system based on white supremacy and racial segregation was in place from 1948 until the early 1990s. Instead, they evaluate Israel’s policies based on international conventions like the Rome Statute, which defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.” They argue that Israel’s various policies in the territories under its control are aimed at preserving a Jewish majority in as much of the land as possible by systematically denying basic rights to Palestinians. Israel says its policies are aimed at ensuring the survival and security of the world’s only Jewish state.

The International Criminal Court is already investigating potential war crimes committed by the State of Israel and by Palestinian militant groups (who are not a State) in the occupied territories. After last year’s Gaza war, the U.N. Human Rights Council set up a permanent commission of inquiry to investigate abuses in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, including “systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity.”

For far too long, Israel has exploited the Holocaust and the centuries-long mistreatment of Jewish people across Europe as an excuse to, in turn, mistreat the Palestinian people and commit a slow-simmering genocide against them. Zionist mouthpieces across the media unleash claims that the Palestinian people never existed and that they are squatters who infiltrated "Israel" from the neighboring countries, when the undeniable facts of history are the complete opposite. 2,000 years ago, the Jews of Palestine became Christians with the advent of Christianity under the Roman occupation, then they became Muslims following the Muslim Arab conquest in the 8th century. This means that today's Palestinians are the original Jewish inhabitants of Palestine. No historical record exists that documents a massive Jewish migration out of Bronze Age Palestine after the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 AD. Today's Israelis are for the most part recent Eastern European converts to Judaism who have no historical well-founded claims to Palestine, other than the colonial drive of 19th century European Jewish racists - just like their French, British, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish colonial counterparts. 

By the way, I am a Semite and proud of it.

Hanibaal