Amnesty International suspends defiant Israel branch for ‘undermining’ its mission
Rights organization accuses local mission of ‘endemic anti-Palestinian racism’ and threatening organization’s ‘credibility, integrity’; freeze to remain in place for two years
Amnesty International has reportedly suspended its Israel branch for not toeing the movement’s line that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and accused the Israel branch of “anti-Palestinian racism,” the New York Post reported.
The outlet on Tuesday cited a January 6 letter it said Amnesty sent to members in which the human rights group’s interim international chairman, Tiumalu Lauvale Peter Fa’afiu, said the Israel branch had undermined the organization’s mission.
The suspension will last two years while a review panel will decide whether to reinstate Amnesty International Israel or make the ban permanent, the report said. Israel can appeal the suspension.
The Israeli branch has been operating since 1964, three years after the umbrella organization was set up.
The development came after the local branch rejected a report from Amnesty International last month that accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. In 2022 it also criticized an Amnesty report that said Israel was practicing apartheid against Palestinians.
Fa’afiu reportedly wrote that Amnesty Israel’s rejections of the two reports “publicly undermine the findings and recommendations” and “have been deeply prejudicial to Amnesty’s human rights mission, threatening our credibility, integrity and operational coherence.”
“We take this action in response to evidence of endemic anti-Palestinian racism within AI Israel, which violates core human rights principles and amnesty values,” he wrote.
There was no immediate comment from Amnesty Israel.
The suspension faced criticism within Amnesty International, the Ynet news outlet reported.
Unnamed sources in the organization claimed that the accusations of racism were planned and that management put a disproportionate focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The StopAntisemitism advocacy group slammed the move, telling the Post that Amnesty has become “distorted from their original missions.”
“Why are they fixated on vilifying the world’s only Jewish state for defending itself during wartime while turning a blind eye to genuine atrocities unfolding in China, Iran, and Sudan?” the group said in a statement.
The group called for Congress and the International Revenue Service to consider revoking Amnesty’s tax exemptions.
In early December, Amnesty released a report on alleged genocide in Gaza against the background of the ongoing war there that started on October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian terror group Hamas led a devastating attack on Israel in which attackers killed 1,200 people and abducted 251.
The local branch said last month it was not involved in the research, funding, or writing of the Amnesty International report and that it “does not accept the claim that genocide has been proven to be taking place in the Gaza Strip and does not accept the operative findings of the report.”
Amnesty Israel said that although the death and destruction in Gaza had reached “catastrophic proportions,” its own analysis did not find that Israel’s actions met the definition of genocide.
It asserted, however, that Israel’s actions in the war against Hamas “may amount to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.”
In a separate statement obtained by the Haaretz newspaper, several members of Amnesty International Israel and Jewish members of Amnesty International went one step further and accused the report of producing an “artificial analysis” of the situation in the Gaza Strip.
“From the outset, the report was referred to in international correspondence as the ‘genocide report,’ even when the research was still in its initial stages,” Haaretz cited the Amnesty members as saying.
They accused the report of having been “motivated by a desire to support a popular narrative among Amnesty International’s target audience” that stemmed from “an atmosphere within Amnesty International of minimizing the seriousness of the October 7 massacre. It is a failure – and sometimes even a refusal – to address the Israeli victims in a personal and humane manner.”
The statement said efforts by Jewish staff to raise these concerns with Amnesty International were ignored.
The Amnesty International report generated strong reverberations inside Amnesty Israel, with four of its nine-member board of management having resigned in recent days, according to Zman Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew-language sister website.
According to the Zman report, three of the board members resigned on the grounds that the organization’s representation of Palestinian voices was insufficient, while the fourth board member stepped down on the grounds that Israel’s perspective was not adequately represented within the organization.
