Amnesty International USA’s Director Paul O’Brien has drawn criticism — and raised eyebrows — for remarks made during an in-person and virtual event with the Women’s National Democratic Club. O’Brien told his audience that Israel “shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state” and that American Jews agree.

He dismissed their overwhelming and well documented support for Israel. “I actually don’t believe that to be true. I believe my gut tells me that what Jewish people in this country want is to know that there’s a sanctuary that is a safe and sustainable place that the Jews, the Jewish people can call home.”

O’Brien appeared to be describing the secular, “one-state solution” many of Israel’s opponents on the “humanitarian” Left favor. In this vision, a single Palestine would replace Israel and what are now the Palestinian Territories in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. The fact that historical Palestine once included Jordan, a wholly Arab state, is rarely deemed relevant. How such a sanctuary for Jews would survive as a “safe and sustainable place” shared with Israel’s genocidal enemies, O’Brien did not say. 

The Coalition for Jewish Values answered O’Brien’s statements with moral clarity and a much-needed reality check. CJV’s official statement noted, “There are 23 countries where Islam is the state religion, and 21 formally Christian states, but Amnesty only has a problem with the one identified with Jews. O’Brien openly argued that indigenous Jews, exclusively, should be denied self-determination in their indigenous homeland.”

Worse, he claimed that his “gut” tells him what good Jews are thinking, contrary to the many surveys and rabbinic voices proving how wrong he is. For millennia, other bad actors have told Jews what they do and should think. O’Brien is also no different than a white person claiming to speak for Black, Hispanic, Muslim, and other minority groups. This is Jew-hatred, plain and simple, of a piece with Amnesty’s slur of “apartheid” against the only ethnically diverse country, the only one with a substantial Jewish population, in the Middle East.

Managing Director Rabbi Menken went on to say that “in its current form,” Amnesty International “is not a human rights organization but an Antisemitic hate group.”

In a March 25 letter to American lawmakers, O’Brien made something of an apology. “I regret representing the views of the Jewish people. What I should have said is that my understanding from having visited Israel often and listened to many Jewish American and Israeli human rights activists is that I share a commitment to human rights and social justice for all with Jewish Americans and Israelis.”

Nevertheless, O’Brien then attempted to characterize his previous statements as critique of Israel’s 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, “even though he made no mention of the law when saying the country should not exist.”

The same apology also doubled down on the controversial Amnesty International report that characterized Israel as a racist state engaged in “apartheid” against Palestinian Arabs.

In its coverage, World Israel News referred back to CJV’s initial response to O’Brien’s statements. At the time, CJV condemned those statements in a press release that set the record straight, just as it did following the release of Amnesty’s latest, libelous report.

O’Brien’s remarks and equivocating apology merely confirm what any informed observer already knows. As Managing Director Rabbi Menken noted at the time, “He merely said the quiet part out loud.”