Barbara Kay: The once mighty Amnesty International has sunk to irrelevancy
I can’t remember the exact date, now decades ago, that I cancelled my monthly donation to AI Canada, only that it was due to AI’s rabid obsession with Israel, and its continual harping on the fallacious trope of Israel as an “apartheid” state.Irish charity gets ‘reminder’ from charities regulator over its anti-Israel activity
AI’s “researchers” on the Israel file have a record of anti-Israel activism and make no effort to hide it. For years, the “halo” effect of its past integrity protected AI from being criticized about its extreme bias on this front, but none of the charity’s disproportionate focus on Israel went unnoticed by NGO Monitor.
In a 2015 monograph, NGO Monitor detailed Amnesty’s “financial mismanagement; repeated examples of ‘lawfare’; systematic flaws in the reporting of human rights abuses; limited understanding of armed conflict leading to erroneous claims and incorrect analysis; and violation of the universality of human rights, including a consistent institutionalized bias against Israel through double-standards.”
Suffice to say that many of Richard Gladstone’s allegations against Israel in his own infamous report on the 2014 Hamas-Israel conflict — which he later publicly repudiated — were “based upon false claims proffered by Amnesty.”
There is no law that human rights organizations must exist in perpetuity. AI has done great work, and continues to do good work, but once a charity’s reputation for consistent integrity has been deeply contaminated in one area, as AI’s has, it has lost the moral high ground it once commanded.
In any case, the world has moved on, and AI is no longer needed. Scores of NGOs now inhabit the human rights terrain that AI tilled. The internet offers more revelations on human rights abuse in a day than AI once did in a year.
Sixty years ago, AI’s literal prisoners of conscience languished in filthy prisons or suffered torture for their courage in defying tyranny. By painful contrast, in 2020, along with other equally unsound NGOs, Amnesty Ireland signed a letter urging politicians to “no longer provide legitimate representation” to women holding “critical” views on gender ideology, which the letter equates with “bigoted beliefs that are aligned with far right ideologies.”
In my youth, I was buoyed by AI’s heroic defence of the right of South African dissidents to protest their lack of political representation. In my old age, I am horrified to witness AI calling for the removal of political-representation rights from gender-ideology dissidents. AI Ireland has clearly lost the plot. But limbs take their cue from the brain. This organism is rotting from the head down.
For too long, Trócaire was allowed to act with impunity regarding its anti-Israel political advocacy. That is until someone within the organization thought it would be a good idea to post Palestinian flags to Irish households as part of its Christmas 2021 campaign. It turned out to be a step too far.Stephen Daisley: Why won’t the UK recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital?
On Sunday, June 5th, the Irish edition of the Sunday Times revealed that Trócaire had finally fallen foul of the Irish charities regulator. The article stated that Trócaire had received a ‘reminder’ about its political activity. The letter from the regulator was prompted by two formal complaints about Trócaire’s recent campaigns, relating to the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.
One of the complainants said he had received an unsolicited mailshot from Trócaire containing a Palestinian flag, along with a request to “display the flag overleaf inside your home to show solidarity with the children, women and men of Gaza and Palestine.” The complainant went on to say that “it is particularly reprehensible this is done at Christmas, the season of goodwill, when the same flag is flown over Gaza by Hamas, a violent Islamist, misogynistic, anti-Jewish cult pledged to wipe the world’s only Jewish state off the map.”
Trócaire means “compassion” in the Irish language, but as the overseas development agency of the Irish Catholic Church, its words and actions are nothing but a clanging cymbal if its compassion is not also seen to extend to the people of Israel. In a conflict as deep-seated and volatile as the Israeli-Palestinian one is, words and actions matter, and government-funded institutions like Trócaire have a responsibility not to add fuel to the fire.
In 2020, Trócaire received €21.4 million from Irish Aid, and while no one can deny that Trócaire does a lot of good across the world, it needs to decide whether it is a charity or a political lobby group with a strong anti-Israel bias. It cannot be both. The slap on the wrist from the charities regulator was long overdue.
The UK’s policy on Jerusalem has failed. It is not a prerequisite to peace but a hindrance, a well-intentioned bit of imperial fixing and post-imperial guilt which has calcified into catechism. The UK’s policy does not recognise Jerusalem because recognising Jerusalem is not the UK's policy. There is no rationale beyond that.
The signing of an FTA would be a prime opportunity to reset British policy on Israel. It would give the next prime minister a chance to break with the impotence and ineffectuality of the past. The lobby for the past – Foreign Office civil servants and diplomats – would be furious. No wonder: for once they would be implementing government policy on the Middle East rather than deciding it. All the same, a bit a ministerial bravery would be worth it.
If we are going to enhance our trade with Israel, we should afford it the dignity and respect of recognising its capital city. Israel does not dispute Westminster sovereignty over Scotland or Northern Ireland and Westminster should treat Israel in kind. Recognising Jerusalem would not prevent us from objecting to Israel’s rule over Judea and Samaria, over which Israel itself does not assert de jure sovereignty, or any aspects of that rule. Nor would it foreclose on territorial changes in any part of Jerusalem in future talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel has demonstrated time and again its willingness to cede territory in pursuit of peace (e.g. Sinai, Hebron, Gaza). It takes a certain Whitehall arrogance to think British recognition of Jerusalem would discourage the Palestinians from their national struggle or Israel from a land-for-peace policy it has followed for four decades.
Recognition is not about pre-empting final status arrangements, imposing British preferences, or inserting ourselves in a far-off conflict. It is about recognising facts on the ground. As the United States said when it moved its embassy to Jerusalem, the decision was about ‘principled realism, which begins with an honest acknowledgment of plain facts’. Similar realism, principled or otherwise, has been shown by Taiwan, Nauru, Honduras, Guatemala, and Kosovo, as well as Russia and Australia, which have both recognised West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The UK should recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, quaint though this may sound, because it is the truth and, where possible, our policy should be based in truth, or at least not based in harmful, unproductive fictions like corpus separatum. The UK should re-designate its unaccredited Jerusalem consulate as its embassy to Israel. It should do so as a sign of good will to a friendly nation which shares intelligence that helps us break up London terror plots and whose pharmaceutical giant Teva supplies one in every six medicines prescribed in the UK. We should recognise Jerusalem because negotiating a trade deal with a country while pretending it doesn't have a capital city is as cowardly as it is absurd.