Responding to today’s Amnesty International report, “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity,” CJV Managing Director Rabbi Yaakov Menken issued the following statement on behalf of the organization:

The Amnesty International report, which we have seen and examined, is openly antisemitic. No one should pretend it is about a political dispute when it is rife with hatred against individual Jews.
 
The report begins with a reference to “Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian residential neighbourhood near the Old City.” Amnesty fails to note that the neighborhood’s original name is Shimon HaTzaddik, that Jews built the homes there, that the legal, Jewish residents were ethnically cleansed out by the Jordanian Army in 1948, and that the Arab squatters are refusing to pay rent for homes they illegally occupy. No legitimate human rights organization would omit these facts.
 
The report refers to Israel’s 1967 “military occupation” after the Six Day War without noting, again, that Jews were returning to land from which they were ethnically cleansed by the Jordanian and Egyptian armies, and that the Arab armies’ declared intent was not merely to destroy the country but to massacre its Jewish inhabitants. The report similarly omits that Hamas is recognized by the U.S. and the European Union as a terrorist organization, and that it has antisemitic genocide written into its charter—which is why Hamas welcomed this report. No legitimate human rights organization would omit these facts, either.
 
As used in the report, even the dozens of references to the “Palestinian people” are antisemitic: they intermix all the diverse backgrounds of those whose families ever resided in British Mandatory Palestine, except Jews. Such a concocted notion of “peoplehood,” one defined only by the ethnicity it excludes, demonstrates obvious bigotry.
 
This report provides further proof that Amnesty International is not a human rights organization at all, but an antisemitic hate group, and anyone reading this report will be subjected to a litany of shameless lies.