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Words have meaning, and it is terrible to see the meanings of words twisted to advance a hate-filled agenda. On Tuesday, Amnesty International-UK released a nearly 300-page “report” on Israel, accusing Israel of “apartheid” against Palestinians. (The cover of the report, above, and Amnesty's press release on the report, here, give you the flavor of it.)

There is a lot to push back on in the Amnesty document, and many expert and eloquent voices took up the challenge. Here are just two examples.

The Wall Street Journal’s editors wrote:

The Amnesty report is a long indictment of Israel that attempts to show it is an apartheid state in how it treats Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. “Israel has established and maintained an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination of the Palestinian population for the benefit of Jewish Israelis—wherever it has exercised control over Palestinians’ lives since 1948,” says the report summary.

Note that mention of 1948, which is the year Israel was founded. The Amnesty report isn’t one more denunciation of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, or its housing policies in Jerusalem, though all of that is included. It also isn’t an attack on one Israeli government or another. The report is a denunciation of the very existence of Israel as a refuge for the Jewish people.

The report treats Israel’s founding as the original sin from which all other offenses flow. In the 27-page executive summary alone, we counted at least 26 references to 1948 or 1947-1949. Amnesty’s message is that Israel was created as an apartheid state and continues as such today.

Elliott Abrams comments:

…Another good example is Gaza. Israel left the territory in 2005 — removing every single Israeli settler, every soldier, and every military base. Yet AI [Amnesty International] refers to it as “occupied” by Israel about a hundred times in this document. If keeping the border closed to prevent infiltration by terrorists constitutes “occupation” of Gaza, then Gaza is occupied by Egypt as well — but that is a point AI does not wish to make.

What about the terrible conditions under which AI says Israeli Arabs live? The report’s authors somehow manage to avoid mentioning that while Arabs are 20 percent of all Israelis, they are 35 percent of Israeli pharmacists. Already in 2015, 16 percent of all medical students in the country were Arab; at the Technion medical school, perhaps Israel’s most prestigious, Arabs comprised 38 percent of students by 2015, and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, they comprised 31 percent. Today, an Arab party is part of Israel’s governing coalition for the first time in the country’s history — hardly a sign of unbreakable apartheid and oppression.

RJC National Chairman Senator Norm Coleman responded to the report by saying:

The report bristles with weaponized omissions. Despite Israel’s enemies being absolutely clear about their intentions, Hamas is mentioned only 26 times in 280 pages; rockets are mentioned 6 times; Islamic Jihad not at all; and suicide bomb/bomber/bombings also not at all. This antisemitic, fundamentally biased, and untruthful attack is likely to further endanger Jewish people around the world.

The report appears intended to derail the growing, peaceful cooperation between Israel and its regional neighbors since the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020. The report and Amnesty International-UK should be condemned by everyone. The Republican Jewish Coalition condemns both and will continue to do so.

Further reading:

Israel Kasnett: Legal experts expose biased research, reliance on terror organizations in Amnesty International report

Yosef Haddad: Amnesty tries to distort my Arab identity and dismantle Israel

The distortion of the meaning of another word caused a tempest this week. In comments Whoopi Goldberg made on The View television show on Monday, about the Holocaust-themed graphic novel Maus, she expressed the view, common in progressive circles, that racism is solely white oppression of people of color. For that reason, she doesn’t consider the Holocaust to be an example of racism, but rather white people being awful to other white people. She doubled down on that idea in an interview with Stephen Colbert that day, although she did issue an apology on Twitter for the offense she caused.

There was outrage from the Jewish community over Whoopi’s remarks. Anyone with any knowledge of Nazism and the Holocaust understands how inaccurate and damaging her comments were. As RJC Political Director Sam Markstein told Fox News: “Whoopi Goldberg, as usual, has no idea what she’s talking about. Hitler and the Nazis viewed Jews as an inferior race, unworthy of life, resulting in the Holocaust.”

Ben Shapiro explains what’s going on here:

The question must be asked, then: What, precisely, did Goldberg think she was doing? The answer is that she believed she was upholding the intersectional theory of race and racism. That theory holds that society is structured in a hierarchy of victimized and victimizing groups; that groups that are disproportionately successful are victimizers, and that groups that are disproportionately less successful are victimized.

Jews are disproportionately successful; thus, they are white… [This means] that Jews cannot be considered victims of antisemitism. They are highly successful; they are white. Thus, they cannot be members of a victimized minority.

This is why the mainstream left is so reluctant to recognize the antisemitism of Hamas… It is why the mainstream left is complicit in the lie that the only true antisemitism springs from white supremacists, ignoring actual acts of Jew-hatred by members of minority populations. The intersectional left’s conspiracy theory—that a cabal of white victimizers (including Jews, and now, Asians) control society for its own benefit—inherently crosses streams with antisemitism.

Goldberg’s comments aren’t an aberration. They’re merely the latest iteration of a pernicious and perverse theory of power in politics—a conspiracy theory about groups that succeed and the systems in which they succeed.

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) is seeking an Outreach Associate to assist with the accelerated growth of membership and to support programming and events in California. Candidates must be organized, motivated, and detail-oriented. This position is based in Los Angeles, CA.

For details about the position and how to apply, click here.

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