Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. Every week, he deciphers the news for FigaroVox. He publishes
Manual of resistance to far-left fascism
(New editions of Passy, 2021).
Three reasons made me obliged to take up the pen to evoke the latest infamy of Amnesty.
The first is to denounce a calumny.
The one committed by Amnesty International on February 1 which accuses, in a report embellished with often dishonest photographs, neither more nor less the State of Israel of acts of “apartheid”.
For a reasoned and documented denunciation, I cannot highly recommend the edifying reading of the article published in
Le Point
of February 10 by Luc de Barochez.
"The charge may be damning"
writes the journalist,
"it is factually erroneous, morally unjust and politically counterproductive".
"The trickery" is exposed by Amnesty itself, which acknowledges on page 14 of its report in English that the treatment of the Arabs of Palestine by Israel is neither
"identical"
nor even
"comparable"
to the degrading way in which blacks were processed in South Africa.
Luc de Barochez is therefore reduced to wondering why even the Kurds in Turkey or the Uighurs in China are not placed by Amnesty under the same regime of discrimination.
The accusation, thus devoid of any rational factual basis, has only one and unique goal: by its revulsive appellation;
smear, defame, treat the Jewish State for the sole purpose of banishing it from nations.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
The answer is obvious: the desire to disqualify the Jewish state, as it had been by the infamous UN resolution in 1975 - since repealed - equating Zionism with racism, as it had been at the conference of Durban, organized by UNESCO in 2001. As it is daily by the boycott of the products
made in Israel
, organized by officially anti-Zionist associations but under which the journalist sees an
“avatar”
of anti-Semitism.
Luc de Barochez is particularly revolted by the fact that Amnesty does not content itself with evoking the situation of the Arabs in the territories administered by Israel but also that of the Israeli Arabs who would also be living under the apartheid regime.
Extraordinary lie.
The journalist recalls that this minority of 20% of Israelis is represented in the government, in Parliament and in the Supreme Court.
He quotes Issawi Frej, a Muslim minister in the Israeli government and a left-wing activist who condemns the Amnesty report:
"Israel has a lot of problems that need to be solved, in the country and also, obviously in the occupied territories, but Israel is not not an apartheid state
.
Could also have been quoted, Mansour Abbas, head of the United Arab List, member of the current government coalition in power - far from being a soft man - who categorically refutes the infamous name.
But precisely, the accusation, thus devoid of any rational factual basis, has only one and unique goal: by its revulsive appellation;
smear, defame, treat the Jewish State for the sole purpose of banishing it from nations.
Unlike many European countries, the French government did not think it necessary to condemn the Amnesty report.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
It is unfortunately necessary to note that despite the coarseness of the infamous accusation that strikes the State of the Jewish people, the meaningless period that we are going through is not conducive to the healthy reaction, such as we had been able to see it during the infamous UN resolution or during the Durban conference.
This is how we will notice that, contrary to many European countries, the French government did not think it necessary to condemn the Amnesty report.
Yet it was President Emmanuel Macron who noted that the main leaven of this hatred of Jews which is only rising in France - and which is murdering - was hatred of Israel.
Words, in the circumstances, and as often, were not followed by action.
I want to add that if, with good reason, the aforementioned journalist saw the infamous mark of anti-Semitism in the disqualifying and excluding insult, he also saw the mark of wokism there.
Those who read me know that I have long favored the explanation of the hatred of Israel by the hatred of white people.
Israel being the incarnation, hated by internationalist leftism, of a Western nation-state which defends itself tooth and nail.
Read alsoGoldnadel: “When the left silenced anti-Jewish racism”
This modern explanation in no way excludes the explanation by timeless anti-Semitism.
Only the stereotype of the hated Jew has changed: yesterday, a spineless and stateless dog, he became a belligerent Western nationalist.
In short, a white squared.
And why not, in this fantasy setting, a South African substitute, while we're at it?
In my
"New Breviary of Hatred"
(2000), I had the timeless anti-Semite say to the Jew of the present:
"Tell me how you are, I'll tell you how I hate you."
Reason why, the anti-Semite is no longer the same: it is no longer so much the extreme right-hander puffing up the stateless metic, but the extreme left-hander wanting to make the white of the West disappear in a solvent bath.
Here comes the second reason that justifies this chronicle.
The harmful role of leftist NGOs.
Behind these three magic letters are hidden today internationalist organizations that hate borders when they are from the West.
Human Rights Watch, George Soros' Open Society, numerous pro-migrant associations, accomplices of the smugglers, are maneuvering behind a facade of humanist discourse.
We can also cite the Black Lives Matter movement, of which Michel Guerrin recently recalled in
Le Monde
an anti-Semitism... which does not prevent his newspaper from remaining friendly.
Amnesty International has long ceased to be the valiant association whose noble aim was to secure the release of political prisoners.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
We will therefore not forget in this ideological context, Amnesty International, which is no longer the valiant association whose noble goal was to obtain the release of political prisoners.
Its new secretary general, Agnès Callamard, is a committed activist who distinguished herself by falsely accusing Israel of having poisoned Arafat.
Calumny of tradition, vigorously refuted at the time by Souha, the widow of the deceased leader.
But the third reason on which this article is based is the most fundamental.
I have always professed the idea that the essentially territorial conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine would have been resolved long ago if outsiders had not been busy pouring boiling oil on the festering wounds.
I have always maintained that the Arabs of Palestine have an excellent record, marred by their irredentism.
This is not only the result of an exacerbated Islamo-nationalism.
There are more Palestinian activists than Palestinians.
How will an Arab in Palestine, who has every right not to regard Zionism with sympathy, hear the reason for compromise if well-established media organizations try to persuade him that it is a racist movement? who promotes apartheid, therefore legitimately doomed to annihilation?
Amnesty wanted to dishonor Israel?
It was Amnesty that lost the honor.
