(December 23, 2024, Washington, DC) EMET expresses its disappointment in a letter led by Reps. Jason Crow (D-CO), Madeleine Dean (D-PA) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) and signed by 74 other congressional democrats urging the Biden administration to conduct a “full assessment” of whether Israel has remained in compliance with U.S. arms sales law and potentially seeking to impose a partial arms embargo against the Jewish State.
The letter accuses Israel of supplying insufficient humanitarian aid to Gaza, causing the population to face a “dire famine.” The letter was based upon the inflated statistics of the Hamas controlled Ministry of Health. The Gaza Health Ministry fails to distinguish between armed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorists who waged war against Israel and innocent civilians. One has no idea what percentage of those that the Gazan Health Ministry has reported as fatalities are actual Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists who are actively engaging in a war against Israel’s very right to exist.
Hamas initiated this war on October 7th 2023, by sending in more than 2,000 terrorists into Israel proper. One has to wonder what the United States would do if an equal proportion of armed terrorists raped men and women, strangled parents in front of their children and burned children in front of their parents.
What would be significantly more objective is if their methodology demanded a verification from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) or the Israeli government. The Israeli government has long been known for the prosecution of soldiers that that violate the strict rules of conduct of the IDF. Hamas and PIJ, which hide behind innocent civilians, considers high Palestinian fatalities a victory. While Israel, a Western democracy, considers high Palestinian fatalities as a tragedy.
It is a known fact that for the last 15 months, the Gazan Health Ministry has inflated these numbers. The most recent numbers from the Hamas controlled Gazan Health Ministry are 45,000, which most media sources take at face value. In fact, compared to any other nation that has had to fight in an urban setting, Israel’s casualties are exceedingly low. As Andrew Fox of the Henry Jackson Society has reported,“people who have died due to cancer, have been listed as being killed by the IDF because of the war. Grown men have been listed as young girls. The methodology is highly erroneous.”
According to official data released in late November, Israel has released into the Gaza strip almost 900 kilotons of food in 40,000 trucks over the past year.
Moreover, the accusations in the letter are based off the May 10th State Department NSM-20 report, which itself cited unnamed NGOs and United Nations agencies. The exact wording of the report is that there was a “potential risk of famine.” Using seven-month-old anonymous accusations in a rapidly developing conflict is misleading and dishonest, especially considering that Israel has boosted aid to the strip multiple times since the report was released.
Says EMET Founder and President Sarah Stern, “While it is no surprise that Israel is being held to standards expected of no other country by international organizations like the United Nations and enemies of the Jewish state, this is far from the first time that the Israel-obsessed Amnesty International and HRW have applied antisemitic double standards towards the state of Israel. Both organizations have long drifted from their values, corroded by the rot of antisemitism. However, we are very disappointed in the U.S. representatives that have launched such baseless accusations at our ally Israel while it is fighting a seven-front existential war. We call on the Biden administration to ignore this letter.”
“Additionally, EMET condemns Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for accusing Israel of genocide. Amnesty International, which was the first human rights organization to take this step, admitted to changing the definition of genocide from the clearly defined Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention to accuse Israel of it. Genocide, according to the 1948 Genocide Convention is defined as “the intention to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” If Israel were committing genocide against the Palestinians, why has the Palestinian population grown from 1.4 million in 1948 to approximately 14 million today? We at EMET see this for what it is – another blood libel aimed at discrediting the Jewish state. Amnesty International’s own Israel office rejected the report, claiming the authors of reaching a “predetermined conclusion. By this new definition of genocide, the United States would be guilty of genocide in most of its military engagements including the Iraq wars, the Vietnam War and World War II.”
EMET is a Washington-based think tank and policy institute specializing in the Middle East.
