In December, Amnesty International released a lengthy report alleging that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. When Amnesty’s Israeli branch registered its objections, the organization promptly kicked it out. Elliott Abrams comments:
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) are colossal. In the world of human-rights organizations, which are often small and poorly funded, these two giants dominate access to funding and to media. . . . In 2021, Human Rights Watch had $256 million in assets and revenue of $130 million. It employs more than 500 staff members in 105 locations globally and has an annual budget of $97 million. Amnesty International is even larger, raising $436 million in 2020 and spending $376 million.
Compare that to charities like the International Committee for Tibet, which spent less than $8 million in 2023. But both these colossi have one great prejudice: they seem to hate Israel.
Alluding to the Roman author Juvenal, Abrams asks who exercises oversight over these self-appointed guardians of human rights, which have amassed wealth and prestige. The answer?
No one. Not within those organizations, for fear of being expelled. And not in other human-rights organizations, because staffers will be reluctant to criticize such powerful players—in part because anyone in the field may think he or she might one day seek employment as part of their large (and at the top very well-paid) staffs, and in part because they do not wish to tangle with organizations having such influence.
Gratitude is owed to Amnesty’s Israel branch (or as it is now, Amnesty’s former Israel branch) for speaking out and rejecting biased and unfair reporting. But the fundamental problems remain: the world’s two largest “human rights” organizations by any measure are both deeply hostile to Israel, seem to be beyond effective criticism, and show their hostility repeatedly in a never-ending series of unbalanced and unfair attacks on the Jewish state.
Read more on Pressure Points: https://www.cfr.org/blog/why-amnesty-international-suspended-its-israel-branch