How perfect was it that Amnesty International’s report on Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza landed on the same day that the war in Syria got even bloodier. As Islamist rebels swarmed Hama in the west of Syria, a city of a million souls, days before they seized Damascus itself, the virtuous of Amnesty had only one thing on their minds: Israel. It’s official: nothing, not even the return of carnage to Syria, can dislodge the activist set’s obsession with the Jewish State.
Rarely has the Israel myopia of the campaigning classes been so starkly exposed
Rarely has the Israel myopia of the campaigning classes been so starkly exposed. Five hundred thousand people have perished in the Syria calamity since it started in 2011. Many millions have been forcibly displaced, fleeing towns turned to rubble by the warring forces of Islamist militants and Assad’s heavies and their Russian backers. Yet look to the pious left and all you’ll hear is: ‘Did you see what the IDF did in Khan Younis this week?!’
Amnesty’s report is titled ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. That it was published on the day Hama fell to a movement that makes al-Qaeda look milquetoast raises tough questions for Amnesty. Primarily this: why is it a ‘genocide’ when Israel fights Hamas but not when various factions in Syria try to slay their way to power? Why is the Gaza war, with its alleged death toll of 44,000, a modern-day holocaust, but the Syria war, in which half a million lives have been extinguished, just a war?
How striking that of all the wars of recent times, including wars whose death toll dwarfs Gaza’s, it is only Israel’s pursuit of the army of anti-Semites that attacked it on 7 October that is so hotly talked up as ‘genocide’. Four hundred thousand died in the war in Yemen, some from bombs, others in famine, yet no G-word for them. Millions perished in the Congo wars of recent decades yet I don’t recall Western influencers hitting the streets to wave swastikas and say ‘They’re just like the Nazis!’.
Yet the minute the Jewish nation pushed back against the militants who raped and murdered more than a thousand of its people, the cry went up: ‘GENOCIDE.’ Sometimes it feels like Jew-taunting. The great Howard Jacobson once asked why activists love to ‘call the Israelis Nazis’ and to ‘liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto’ when there’s an untold number of wars from history they could reference instead. It’s because, he said, the very aim is ‘to wound Jews’, to ‘punish them with their own grief’.
This is the inescapable conclusion now: that the words ‘genocide’, ‘Nazis’ and ‘Hitler’ are used against the Jewish State more than any other state precisely because people know those words hurt Jews.
One is reminded that, back in March, activists from Amnesty UK descended on the Israeli Embassy in London and put up street signs saying ‘Genocide Avenue’. Look, I know sympathising with Israelis is very much out of style, but I invite you to wonder how the embassy staff will have felt when they saw that word emblazoned outside their offices. When the word that describes the greatest crime known to man, a crime that devoured so many of their forefathers, was pasted on the street where they work. And only on their street. Not on the street where the Russian Embassy is based, just a stone’s throw away. Only Israel commits genocide.
Activists from Amnesty UK descended on the Israeli Embassy in London
Amnesty’s report is a moral void. The very first sentence will leave you agog at how far from moral reason Amnesty has drifted. ‘On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip of unprecedented magnitude, scale and duration’, it says. Didn’t something else happen on 7 October 2023? I don’t know – the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust?
Then there’s the report’s handwringing over ‘narrow’ definitions of the word genocide. Sometimes there is an ‘overly cramped interpretation’ of the G-word, Amnesty moans, which can ‘effectively preclude a finding of genocide in a context of armed conflict’. Is it just me or does Amnesty sound nervous? At some level these people know full well Israel is engaged in ‘armed conflict’, not ‘genocide’. It seems they want a looser, broader definition of that crime against humanity so that even something as rational and just as Israel’s pursuit of the racist militants who slaughtered its citizens might be damned as ‘genocidal’.
I’m starting to think Amnesty is a menace to humanity. It bemoans Israel’s war on the neo-fascism of Hamas. It accused Kurds of committing ‘war crimes’ in their valiant war on Isis. It slammed the Ukrainians who have risen up against the neo-imperial aggression of mighty Russia for ‘putting civilians in harm’s way’. Amnesty is the school snitch of global affairs. Brave people rise up against foreign invasion or Islamist supremacy or militant anti-Semitism and there’s Amnesty, every time, with its clipboards, saying: ‘Are you following all the rules?’
They need to back off. Stick to holding candlelit vigils in your local park and let the courageous of Israel, Kurdistan and elsewhere get on with the rather more serious business of fighting the forces of darkness.
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