by Michael Powell, The Atlantic
Organizations that explicitly valued impartiality and independence have become stridently critical of Israel.
The demonstration in London was like so many others in the past year and a half. A swell of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, tens of thousands of them, banged drums and chanted against Israel. Although this march in early October observed the one-year anniversary of the day Hamas militants broke a cease-fire by invading Israeli territory, the marchers paid no heed to the civilians who were murdered or kidnapped.
The U.K. chapter of the world’s largest human-rights organization, Amnesty International, echoed the marchers’ point of view. The official Amnesty UK account on X promoted a video of an unnamed young female protester clad in a red shirt and a keffiyeh. She peered into the camera and said: “Don’t let anyone tell you this all started on the seventh of October, 2023.”
The video showed a demonstrator’s placard: It’s been 76 years & 364 days—a reference to events that culminated in the founding of Israel in the late 1940s. The implication: Israel, a member state of the United Nations, has no right to exist. The clip, which Amnesty UK captioned “It didn’t start one year ago,” drew 9.7 million views. Amnesty employees around the world shared it.
The social-media promotion of this march marked an astonishing shift for one of the world’s most prominent human-rights organizations. Amnesty’s handbook declares that it is “independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it necessarily support the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect.”
Amnesty’s goal was to serve as an advocate for victims and prisoners of conscience, and to stand apart from the polarized politics of the Cold War. The same ethos influenced the founders of Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders. As the latter group proclaims on its website: “We are independent, impartial, and neutral.”