"Amnesty International’s report labeling Israel an apartheid state seeks to criminalize the existence of the Jewish state as the national homeland for the Jewish people, the Foreign Ministry stated on Monday.
'The report denies Israel’s right to exist of the nation-state of the Jewish people,' the Foreign Ministry said as it called on the British-based group to rescind its 211-page report.
Amnesty’s 'extreme language and distortion of the historical context were intended to demonize Israel and pour fuel into the engines of antisemitism,' the ministry said...
Critics of the report, including the Foreign Ministry, said linking apartheid with the Jewish nature of the State of Israel as inherently antisemitic.
'The purpose' of the report is 'is to characterize the right of Jews to sovereign equality in their historic homeland as a violation of the [international] legal order,' NGO Monitor stated.
'The overarching political objective is to erase and subsume the nation-state of the Jewish people into a single state of Palestine,' it added...
The report, NGOs said, criminalizes Israel as an ethnic Jewish democracy without mentioning or similarly criminalizing Palestinian plans for its own ethnic nationalist democracy...
The report also spoke of Israeli discriminatory practices against its Arab citizens without also mentioning their significant contribution to the Jewish state, the NGOs said, with the ADL noting that Arabic is one of the official languages of the State of Israel.
The Conference of Presidents said the report 'disregards the fact that Israel’s robust democracy grants its Arab citizens full rights and equality, includes an Arab Muslim nationalist party in Israel’s governing coalition, as well as a history of senior Israeli Arab governmental officials, including Supreme Court justices, government ministers, high-level diplomats, military officers and members of Knesset.'
It noted that the initiative to label Israel as an apartheid state comes just as Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan were making peace with it.
Amnesty’s release of its report comes in advance of anticipated action on the matter this year before the UN Human Rights Council, including in the first report this June of the permanent Commission of Inquiry against Israel..."