Amnesty International is among the premier human rights organizations in the world. Its pronouncements shape public opinion, while councils of state feel obliged if not to heed them at any rate to respond. A movement for justice aspiring to reach a broad public and inflect state policy can ill afford to ignore Amnesty if and when it goes astray. It is the contention of this monograph that Amnesty has indeed lost its way, and it is the intention of this monograph to document this proposition, in the hope that Amnesty will perform—or its grassroots membership will compel it to perform—a midcourse correction.

In recent years, Amnesty International has issued meticulously documented, legally unflinching human rights reports on the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example, Operation “Cast Lead”: 22 days of death and destruction , a searing indictment of Israel’s 2008-9 assault on Gaza. But this has not always been the case. For many decades, this venerable human rights organization effectively gave Israel a free pass on its pervasive torture practices in the occupied Palestinian territories . Judging by the reports it issued after Israel’s summer 2014 assault on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, Amnesty is regressing to its earlier apologetics. For those who have come to rely on and cite Amnesty as a source of accurate human rights reportage, this development is troubling and deeply frustrating. The primary purpose of this monograph is not to account for Amnesty’s apparent backpedaling, although some speculations on this score will be ventured in the conclusion, but to thoroughly document it, focusing in particular on Amnesty’s comprehensive indictment of Hamas , Unlawful and Deadly: Rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian armed groups during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict .

SPURIOUS BALANCE

Table 1 presents the raw data from which a human rights assessment of Operation Protective Edge (hereafter: OPE) necessarily begins .

TABLE 1 Civilian Losses in Operation Protective Edge Total fatalities (of whom children) Civilians (% of total fatalities) Combatants (% of total fatalities) Direct damage to civilian infrastructure (in dollars) Civilian homes destroyed/rendered uninhabitable Israel 73 (1) 6** (8) 67 (92) 55,000,000 1*** Gaza* 2,200 (550) 1,560 (70) 640 (30) 4,000,000,000 18,000****

* Gaza figures are rounded out. Throughout this monograph, larger numbers are similarly rounded out to the nearest ten, hundred or thousand.

Gaza figures are rounded out. Throughout this monograph, larger numbers are similarly rounded out to the nearest ten, hundred or thousand. ** One civilian was a Thai guest worker.

One civilian was a Thai guest worker. *** 11 others suffered some damage.

11 others suffered some damage. **** 38,000 others suffered some damage.

“On both sides,” Amnesty observes in Unlawful and Deadly, “civilians once again bore the brunt of the third full-scale war in less than six years.” Although arguably true , this statement obscures the yawning gap separating the magnitude of suffering inflicted on Gazan as compared to Israeli civilians . It is hard to come up with a more palpable instance of a quantitative difference turning into a qualitative one than the single Israeli child versus the 550 Gazan children killed, and it doesn’t diminish the sanctity of every life to take note that, if the death of one Israeli child is terrible, then, on the same calculus, the child deaths in Gaza are 550 times as terrible. An international Medical Fact-Finding Mission, recruited by the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights and comprised of eminent medical practitioners, concluded its report on OPE with this caveat: “While not wishing to devalue in any way the traumatic effects of the war on Israeli civilians, these pale in comparison with the consequences of the massive destruction wreaked on Gaza.” Even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who in the past has disgraced his office with apologetics on Israel’s behalf , carefully distinguished between Israel’s lethal attacks on UN facilities during OPE, which “I deplore,” and Hamas’s misuse of UN facilities, about which “I am dismayed.” One searches in vain for a comparable acknowledgment or nuance by Amnesty.

In keeping with its pretense of evenhandedness, Amnesty conveys the impression that Israel and Hamas were equally guilty of breaching the laws of war. It issued a pair of postwar reports documenting Israel’s crimes and a pair of reports documenting Hamas’s crimes (four altogether), while, amazingly, it devoted, all told, many more pages to indicting Hamas (107) than Israel (78) . In Operation “Cast Lead,” Israel bore the brunt of Amnesty’s indictment (60 versus 13 pages), making this earlier report’s relative space allocations more, if still far from fully, commensurate with the death and destruction inflicted by each side . The introduction to each of its postwar reports on OPE methodically balances the distribution of guilt. As if that weren’t problematic enough, Unlawful and Deadlydetails the death of the single Israeli child killed by a Hamas attack across more than two pages. Were it truly committed to effecting—as against affecting—balance, shouldn’t Amnesty have devoted 1,100 pages to the children in Gaza who were killed? Amnesty even suggests that Hamas was the more manifestly culpable party to the conflict. Thus, Unlawful and Deadly’s conclusion unequivocally deplores Hamas’s “flagrant disregard for international humanitarian law,” whereas one of Amnesty’s reciprocal reports, Families under the Rubble: Israeli attacks on inhabited homes, cautiously concludes that the destruction wrought—18,000 Gazan homes were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, leaving 110,000 people homeless—“raise[s] difficult questions for the Israeli government which they have so far failed to answer. ” It is, of course, conceivable that Hamas committed as many war crimes as Israel, if not more, during OPE, but, prima facie, that would be a most anomalous conclusion. In both absolute and relative terms, the scales of guilt appear to tilt heavily to the Israeli side: Hamas killed 73 Israelis of whom only 8 percent were civilians, whereas Israel killed 2,200 Gazans of whom fully 70 percent were civilians; the damage inflicted on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure ($4 billion) exceeded by a factor of 70 the damage inflicted on Israel’s infrastructure ($55 million), while the ratio of civilian dwellings destroyed by Israel versus Hamas stood at 18,000:1. The intriguing question is, how does Amnesty manage to turn this wildly imbalanced balance sheet into a “balanced” indictment of both parties to the conflict?

References

2009.

Norman G. Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish romance with Israel is coming to an end (New York: 2012), p. 97.

Hamas is here used to denote all armed groups in Gaza.

2015.

For background to OPE, see Norman G. Finkelstein, Method and Madness: The hidden story of Israel’s assaults on Gaza (New York: 2014).

Most of the Israeli data in this monograph draws from State of Israel, The 2014 Gaza Conflict, 7 July-26 August 2014 (May 2015). Itreports that total compensation for direct damages to Israeli civilians will reach $40 million, while the state will spend an additiona $15 million to repair public infrastructure that was damaged (paras. 112, 223).

The casualty figures and breakdowns for Gaza are based on UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Fragmented Lives (March 2015). The major Gaza-based human rights organizations (Al Mezan, Palestinian Center for Human Rights) put the number of civilians killed at 1,600-1,700. Israel’s 2014 Gaza Conflict alleged that, of the 1,700 Gazan deaths it has thus fartabulated from a total of 2,125, 940 (44 percent) were Hamas “militants,” 760 (36 percent) were civilians, and 420 (20 percent) were “yet to be categorized.” It also states that “in all but a few rare instances, women, children under the age of 16, and the elderly were automatically categorized as ‘uninvolved’” in its calculations. Setting aside all the other absurdities in Israel’s bookkeeping, according to OCHA, the number of Gazan women and children killed—that is, not including any adult males—already totaled 850. (The one slight discrepancy is that OCHA reckoned a child as under 17 years of age.) The Israeli report faults OCHA for basing its combatant/civilian breakdown on “daily fatality lists issued by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health,” which, it continues, “do not identify whether the deceased was a militant.” It’s hard to figure how OCHA could have relied on the Ministry’s breakdown if the Ministry didn’t give a breakdown. See 2014 Gaza Conflict, p. 56n165; Annex—Palestinian Fatality Figures in the 2014 Gaza Conflict, paras. 9, 13, 26-27.

State of Palestine, The National Early Recovery and Reconstruction Plan for Gaza (October 2014), p. 9.

On the other hand, only eight percent of total Israeli fatalities were civilians.

In the last report it released, “Strangling Necks”: Abductions, torture and summary killings of Palestinians by Hamas forces during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict (2015), Amnesty does briefly mention that, “The extent of the casualties and destruction in Gaza wrought by Israeli forces far exceeded those caused by Palestinian attacks on Israel, reflecting Israel’s far greater firepower, among other factors.”

Jutta Bachmann et al., Gaza 2014: Findings of an independent medical fact-finding mission(2015), p. 101. (Hereafter: Medical Fact-Finding Mission)

Finkelstein, Method, pp. 101-20.

Ban Ki-moon’s remarks are appended to the summary of the final report of a UN Board of Inquiry he commissioned to investigate “certain incidents that occurred in the Gaza Strip between 8 July 2014 and 26 August 2014.” (Hereafter: UN Board of Inquiry)

In addition to Unlawful and Deadly and “Strangling Necks,” Amnesty issued Families under the Rubble: Israeli attacks on inhabited homes (2014), and “Nothing Is Immune”: Israel’s destruction of landmark buildings in Gaza (2014). It bears noting that these four reports were released during the critical window of opportunity between the end of OPE and the issuance of the UN Human Rights Council report on OPE in June 2015. Whatever Amnesty releases after the UN report will have little or no political impact. As it happens, the UN Report did make extensive use of Amnesty’s quartet of publications, a topic to which this writer will return in a future monograph.

A precise juxtaposition casts an even darker shadow on Amnesty’s space allocations: in absolute numbers, the scale of civilian death and destruction inflicted by Israel during Protective Edge was much more massive than during Cast Lead, whereas in the case of Hamas it was roughly the same.

On the other hand, “Strangling Necks” does categorically state, “Israeli military forces committed war crimes and other grave violations of international law during Operation Protective Edge.” Human Rights Watch (HRW) has also been much quicker to condemn Hamas than Israel. “It’s obviously easier to denounce as a war crime, say, Hamas’s efforts to shoot rockets into civilian areas,” HRW executive director Kenneth Roth commented during OPE. “That’s, you know, blatantly obvious. It doesn’t take a huge investigation to figure that one out. Israel, it does take more of an investigation” (http://m.democracynow.org/stories/9979).