February 1, 2022 (Washington, DC) — Jeff Mendelsohn, Executive Director of Pro-Israel America, issued the following statement on the new Amnesty International report:
“Pro-Israel America strongly condemns Amnesty International’s misguided and inaccurate new report that shamefully smears Israel – a thriving, multiethnic and multicultural democracy that offers all its citizens full political and civil rights – as an ‘apartheid state.’
Amnesty’s outrageous ‘apartheid’ libel is false and unconscionable. The report proposes that Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state and a homeland to the Jewish people is alone an act of ‘apartheid.’ This not only attempts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence, but also minimizes and appropriates the struggles of victims who have witnessed true apartheid in South Africa and other regimes around the world.
One only has to look at what is actually happening on the ground to counter this false narrative. This report’s release coincides with the first ever trip by an Israeli head of state to the United Arab Emirates – another significant step that Israel and Arab states are taking to forge peace and prosperity for all in the Middle East.
Fortunately, the Biden Administration has correctly reaffirmed that describing Israel as an apartheid state is ‘not language that we [the United States] have used, nor would we ever use’ and the vast majority of those in Congress understand that the U.S. and Israel are both forces for good in thew world and stop true apartheid wherever it exists.
We must continue to loudly denounce this continued dangerous antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda along with any other slanderous attempts to villainize and delegitimize the Jewish state.”