Feb 5, 2022: According to a report by Al Jazeera, lawmakeers in the US Congress have rejected Amnesty International report calling actions by Israel in Palestine, apartheid.
In the latest bipartisan consensus to emerge on Capitol Hill, US lawmakers from both major parties, including powerful legislators and heads of key committees in the House of Representatives and Senate, have released statements rejecting Amnesty International report calling Israel’s actions in Palestine apartheid.
According to James Zogby of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington-based think tank, “They want to nip this in the bud, but the bud has already broken ground and developed roots, and it’s going to be a losing battle on their part,” “They’ve decided to just focus on the use of the word ‘apartheid’ because that’s the only case they can make … ‘How dare you use apartheid to describe Israel.’”
Analysts say this response from the US congress illustrates the level of support Israel enjoys in Washington despite mounting allegations of abuse – but they do not reduce the validity of the rights group’s report.
In its report made public on February 1, Amnesty said that Israel was committing apartheid against Palestinians inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) as well as within Israel. Human Rights Watch, the Israeli rights group B’Tselem and the Palestinian rights groups have all reached the same conclusion.
In a swift response to the report, nine centrist House Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, called it “baseless”, “biased” and “steeped in antisemitism”, saying it was “part of Amnesty’s broad, decades-long campaign to criminalize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state”.
Meanwhile, Lee Zeldin, a Republican said, “Amnesty International is a so-called ‘human rights organization’ that routinely hurls false accusations of oppression against Israel, ignores violent attacks on Israel from its hostile neighbors and fans the flames of antisemitism around the world,”
The Israeli government itself had dubbed the report false, biased and antisemitic even before it got published.
Palestinian rights supporters have pointed out that South African anti-apartheid leaders, including the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu have themselves said the fate of the Palestinians is akin to that of Black South Africans.
In response to the concerns shared by the US Congress over the report, Amnesty International said, “The US Government is uniquely placed to meaningfully pressure Israeli authorities to repeal discriminatory laws and policies, issue reparations where appropriate, and uphold its obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law,”
Meanwhile, a handful of progressive Democrats endorsed the report via social media posts, including Congresswomen Betty McCullum, Corey Bush, Elhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Palestinian rights activists were counting on the rise of progressives, who have sought to raise human rights issues within the Democratic Party to shake Washington’s unconditional support for Israel.
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