On December 5, the activist organization Amnesty International is set to release a report accusing Israel of committing “genocide.” The charge is not merely false, it is a complete inversion of the truth. It is both baseless and malicious, relying on disinformation and invented legal standards to deny the Jewish state its right to self-defense following Hamas’s genocidal attack on October 7, 2023.
Provided below is information that both journalists and the broader public should be aware of when assessing Amnesty’s claims. The information reflects a lack of credibility of both Amnesty International and its charge of genocide.
Amnesty’s Lack of Credibility
- Reliance on Disinformation: Amnesty has been known to have made numerous false claims to support its allegations against Israel. Worse, it has refused to acknowledge or correct its objectively false claims when directly confronted with the errors. For example, in the spring of 2023, when confronted with evidence of a particularly egregious error in Amnesty’s “apartheid” report, a senior manager declined to act on the information because doing so wouldn’t “contribute to helping to end Israeli apartheid.” Notably, he wasn’t the first Amnesty official to respond with inaction after being directly confronted about the critical error.
- Faulty Legal Interpretations: Amnesty uses legalese to give its accusations a veneer of credibility. But many of Amnesty’s legal interpretations are new and controversial, often handcrafted to uniquely apply to Israel. More importantly, their interpretations lack authoritativeness. Amnesty presents the law it wants to exist, not the law as it actually exists. An August 2022 report by an independent legal review panel exposed these same issues in relation to Amnesty’s attack on Ukraine’s conduct during its defensive operations against Russia. According to the panel, the narrative built by Amnesty, which “was not in the position to independently verify the facts,” was “ambiguous, imprecise, and in some respects legally questionable.”
- Partisan Activism: Amnesty’s anti-Israel bias is well-established. Amnesty USA director Paul O’Brien has even openly stated that Israel “shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state.” The organization regularly advocates for the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Though it campaigns against other forms of discrimination, it has repeatedly refused to address antisemitism except to attack the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. Its social media accounts regularly level baseless allegations against Israel.
The “Genocide” Libel
- Reliance on Misleading Quotes: The crime of genocide requires a specific element of intent: an intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. Israel’s conduct during its defensive war demonstrates a complete absence of any such intent. Military experts from around the world have repeatedly attested to the fact that the measures employed by the Israel Defense Forces to reduce harm to civilians is, in many ways, unparalleled. According to John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, “Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” As recently articulated by eleven retired senior military officers and top legal experts from seven different nations, “we do not believe the evidence of actual operational practice in any way corroborates the accusation of policies…to intentionally attack civilians.” To overcome the lack of substantive evidence, anti-Israel activists have resorted to fabricated and misleadingly clipped quotes. In the words of Malcolm N. Shaw, an eminent expert in the field of international law, “to produce random quotes that are not in conformity with government policy is described as misleading at best.”
- Casualties Reflect Complexity of Urban Warfare, not “Genocide”: Civilian casualties are a horrific but inevitable consequence of war. Israel did not start this war. Furthermore, Israel has done more to reduce harm to Palestinian civilians than Gaza’s own leadership, which has deliberately built tunnels underneath civilian areas and turned hospitals and schools into military targets. Meanwhile, Israel has developed innovative techniques to reduce civilian harm in this complex combat environment and has urged civilians – who Amnesty accuses Israel of deliberately killing – to evacuate away from combat zones. In the words of seven former prosecutors of Nazi war crimes: “Israel has, in fact, done more than any other military has ever done to minimize civilian casualties during large-scale urban warfare, even sacrificing the lives of many of its own soldiers in the process.” Conveniently, Israel’s precautionary measures – which again exceed most, if not all, western militaries – are ignored by its detractors, as is Hamas’s legal responsibility for harm caused by its policy and practice of human shielding. Instead, they exhibit “a tendency to engage in factual cherry picking and to ignore ‘inconvenient facts’ when engaging in legal analysis of complex facts,” in the words of eminent legal scholars Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany. While there have undoubtedly been many civilian casualties it is notable that the data produced by Hamas and repeated by activist organizations and media outlets have been repeatedly exposed as unreliable.
- There is no “Famine”: Another baseless allegation used by activists to support the “genocide” libel is that Israel has intentionally caused famine in the Gaza Strip. These claims are easily refuted. That Israel has facilitated the entry of nearly 1.2 million tons of aid, including nearly 900,000 tons of food, demonstrates precisely the opposite intent. Claims of an ongoing or imminent “famine,” which relied on incomplete data and faulty assumptions, have been debunked.
Amnesty International is simply not a credible organization when it comes to Israel. Given its history, every allegation it makes must be thoroughly scrutinized. Journalists must exercise caution before uncritically echoing Amnesty’s libels. As written in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, “The public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources.”