he statement and report issued by Amnesty International labeling Israel as an “Apartheid State,” suffers from serious omissions, deliberate obfuscation and is purposefully framed from a myopic perspective. Reading the call to boycott that masquerades as impartial research one would hardly know that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was in the wake, and a consequence, of an all-out attack against Israel in 1967 by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, an attack with the goal of wiping Israel and its people out of existence. Nor would a reader of the statement and report, without prior knowledge, know of the many intifadas originated in the West Bank, launched against Israel from the late 1990’s to date by Palestinian terrorist groups; attacks with the goal of killing Jewish citizens, adults and children alike. This is still the evident aim of many within the Palestinian leadership, which acts without democratic authority, rewards the families of suicide bombers and for whom hate speech is essential.

The statement and report are replete with such omissions of historical events, and their consequences for Israel and its people, that have led to the present state of affairs in Israel and the West Bank. While some issues regarding Israel’s actions and policies in the West Bank are open for legitimate discussion and even criticism, the controls that Israel enforces are in place as a result of the decades of attacks against the Israeli people, Jews and Arabs alike, that were launched from that territory.

The language that Amnesty International deploys, such as “apartheid” not only trivialized the experience of South Africans but fails to appreciate the rampant human rights abuses committed by the Palestinian leadership on its own people. Amnesty International's assertion that Israel itself, independent of the West Bank, is not a genuine democracy, but rather a “Regime,” wrongly seeks to place Israel on the same footing and level as the despotism of Assad to the North, the monarchy of Jordan to the East, and the terrorist-led enclave in the West Bank. While Israel is not a “perfect” democracy, a status that would align Israel with many other democracies, including the United States, it is in fact a working democracy, with robust checks and balances including a fiercely independent judiciary.

Just a few of the facts ignored in the Statement and Report include the following: non-Jewish citizens of Israel have full voting rights; indeed the political party that represents the Arab citizens of Israel is now a member of the majority coalition in the Knesset; a third of the students at Haifa University are non-Jewish, and Arab and Druze citizens represent a significant percentage of the student bodies at other colleges and Universities; Arab doctors and nurses now represent almost a third of the medical profession; the Israeli High Court, which has three non-Jewish Justices, has held that non-Jewish citizens have the same rights to housing and property development as Jewish citizens.

We could go on, but a further irony of the Amnesty International report is that it ignores the reality on the ground, which is that while Hamas and the Palestinian authority hold their subjects hostage, Israel is moving forward with many Arab and Muslim nations to better the lives of all their citizens, thanks to the Abraham Accords. The Amnesty International report is a regressive document, lacking in objectivity and the UK government should consider investigating the charitable status of Amnesty International.