Amnesty International report an exercise in hypocrisy

A patient comes to a psychiatrist complaining that he suffers from an inferiority complex. After a period of intense analysis, the psychiatrist tells the patient: "I have a diagnosis. You do not suffer from an inferiority complex — you are inferior!"

We Israelis are not paranoid. Much of the world is truly out to "get us." Witness the Amnesty International report accusing Israel of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Some would say that America's carpet bombing of Fallujah — where half the city was destroyed and untold civilian life was lost — was a war crime. What about the brutality that has infested too much of the African continent? More to the point, what of the Palestinian intentional murder of innocent Israelis — or, ironically, the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group's report of systemized torture and killing of Palestinians by the Palestinian Authority? Why not use similarly loaded language when addressing their human rights abuses?

What is so troubling about Amnesty's report is what was so troubling about the recent Presbyterian church's National Assembly edict claiming that the "root of all evil is the occupation." Having just returned from a whirlwind lecture tour in the United States, I met with numerous Presbyterian churches. Not once did I encounter agreement from a local Presbytery with the National Assembly's statement. Nevertheless, they all wanted to know why Jews were so troubled. It is the same reason that we are so exasperated by the Amnesty International report.

I explained to the Presbyterians that they completely missed the Israeli narrative, the Jewish narrative. And it is for this reason that we are so upset by their prejudicial statement as well as so aggravated by the outrageousness of Amnesty International using such language as "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity," labeling Israel as guilty of both — thus putting Jews in the same bed with Nazis, for whom these harsh words were first coined.

It is amazing how one can start out with a perfectly logical formula and misapply it so that it becomes a ridiculous piece of mischievous and ultimately dangerous nonsense. Things equal to the same thing are not equal to each other. Granted, Nazis and Jews are both members of the human race, but they are not interchangeable, as the language formulated in evaluating Israel's behavior in the territories suggests. Even the untrained eye cannot help but see this noxious comparison.

And so, we are not paranoid — because neither the Presbyterians nor the authors of the Amnesty report have the slightest sensitivity to our narrative. It is not one that takes us back to the Crusades or the Inquisition, nor to the pogroms, nor to sixty years ago during the Holocaust. It is not even one that recounts eight Arab armies invading Israel after its establishment under the auspices of the United Nations.

What is our narrative? It is America going to war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 with Iraq, and Scuds landing in Tel Aviv, not in Des Moines, Iowa.

Ours is the narrative of August 1993: In the euphoria of the Oslo accords, when attending a U.N. conference in Dakar, Senegal, I heard Ekrema Sabri give a speech on the subject of Africa and the question of Israel and Palestine. Then the chief preacher of the al-Aksa mosque and now the head of the Wakf in Jerusalem (appointed by the late Yasser Arafat), Sabri's words recalled the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

It is the narrative of Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris, quoted two weeks ago on the Palestinian Authority's official TV station, saying: "The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews — even the stones and trees that were harmed by them. Listen to the prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits the Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew."

Finally, it is the narrative of a terrorist entering a Jewish home and shooting at point-blank range two young children in the head. The root of that evil is not the occupation, but the nightmare that we Israelis live with — that the Arab nations are really out to destroy us.

If the world is to judge Israel, it must do so according to universal standards. Let us Israelis judge ourselves against the heritage of Jewish values. We will admit that we come up painfully short of what our history and literature demands of us. It is only in the international field of moral behavior that the Presbyterians and the folks at Amnesty International have any right to judge us.

More significantly, if our critics are truly intent on having Israel address some of its admittedly grievous behavior, they do themselves and ultimately Israel a dreadful disservice by their blatant abuse of such language as "crimes against humanity." After all, no one has suffered greater because of "crimes against humanity" than we Jews. No, we are not paranoid — the world does seem out to get us. Before judging us, the world would do well to understand our narrative and to acknowledge our never-ending nightmare.




Rabbi David J. Forman is a founder of Israeli Rabbis for Human Rights.