Ir Amim

Activities

• Activities include “Monitoring” and “exposing” Israeli government actions in Jerusalem, “policy and legal advocacy,” and running highly politicized tours of Jerusalem and the security barrier.
• Although it has been described as “work[ing] toward coexistence in Jerusalem,” an Ir Amim official was quoted as saying that the group was “seeking to advance a political agenda, and was not an organization geared to promote coexistence.”
• Ir Amim frequently accuses Israel of attempting to “Judaize” Jerusalem and promotes the Palestinian narrative on the city, including claims that “government powers are being handed over to the settler organizations” and archeological digs have become an important “tool in the fight for control” over Jerusalem.
• Maintains that the security barrier “extracts neighborhoods from the city with the goal of reducing the portion of Palestinians” and that the “barrier’s demographic rationale therefore outweighs its security rationale.” It further maintains, “Erecting the barrier within this framework is one more tool for Israel’s ‘divide and rule’ policy, as a result of which Palestinian Jerusalem has been shattered to pieces.” These allegations omit the context of Palestinian terror attacks and Israeli national security concerns.
• In June 2024, following the ICC Prosecutor announcement to seek arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant, alongside three Hamas leaders, Ir Amim published a joint report claiming, “The requested warrants against Netanyahu and Galant enumerate the crimes of starvation, extermination and deliberate attacks against civilian population. This is a far-reaching step, but an important and necessary one given the scale and severity of the crimes of which they are suspected. Though we regret the circumstances that led to this dire situation, we welcome the existence of international systems of justice and law and support the steps taken by them to intervene and to stop the occurrence of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
• In June 2023, Ir Amim, alongside 16 Israeli NGOs, published a joint report titled “State of the Occupation – Year 56: A Joint Situation Report” alleging that “that after 56 years of occupation, Israel’s actions in the West Bank today meet the criteria of apartheid.” According to the NGOs, “The current government’s steps, motivated by its stated Jewish supremacy ideology, will also deepen the apartheid regime governing nearly all aspects of oPt Palestinians’ lives.”
• In May 2023, Ir Amim was a signatory on a statement blaming Israel for the death of Khader Adnan following his 86-day-long hunger strike and refusal to receive medical treatment from the Israeli Prisons Service. According to the statement, “Israel’s unjust system of arrests and detention are part and parcel of the policies used by Israel to maintain its occupation and apartheid regime.”
  • The statement erased Adnan’s leadership in  Palestinian Islamic Jihad who was indicted for membership in a terror group, supporting a terrorist organization, and incitement.
• In December 2022, Ir Amim was a signatory on a statement claiming that the “occupation and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories have made Jewish supremacy the de facto law of the land and the new government seeks to adopt this into their official policy.”
• In March 2022, Ir Amim Director of International Relations and Advocacy Amy Cohen participated in a conference held by the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) on the “Impact of Forced Displacement on Palestinian Women.”
• In January 2022, Ir Amim was a signatory on a statement condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. The statement called on the donors of the designated NGOs to “maintain and even increase their funding…Defunding the designated NGOs based on unsubstantiated allegations and designations will cause irreparable damage to Palestinian civil society at large and would undermine decades of humanitarian and human rights work.”
  • In October 2021, Ir Amim was a signatory on a statement referring to the designations as a “draconian measure that criminalizes critical human rights work.”
• In May 2021, Ir Amim shared on its website an article published in the Irish Journal titled “Jerusalem expulsions are a microcosm of Israel’s apartheid – justice requires action,” which called for the Irish government to “study” Human Rights Watch’s report accusing Israel of apartheid and “act upon its recommendations.”
  • HRW’s report denied Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state by alleging Israel has committed crimes of apartheid and reduced all security policies to “demographic objectives.” The report recommended “Impos[ing] targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against officials and entities” as well as “Condition[ing] arms sales and military and security assistance to Israel.” (Read NGO Monitor’s analysis “HRW’s ‘Apartheid’ Publication: Demonization, BDS, and Lawfare.”)
  • HRW also promoted artificial and manufactured definitions of apartheid to extend the ongoing campaigns that seek to delegitimize and demonize Israel. (Read NGO Monitor’s Policy Paper “False Knowledge as Power: Deconstructing Definitions of Apartheid that Delegitimise the Jewish State”)
• In November 2019, following the decision to erect a cable car in and around the Old City of Jerusalem, Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher with Ir Amim, stated that the “project has political layers aimed at giving legitimacy to settlers in the area… The project is a way to whitewash Israel’s taking of areas in Silwan to use for archaeological and touristic reasons.”
• In January 2019, following then Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan celebrating an increase of Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount, Ir Amim posted on Facebook, “Really, Erdan? In this you are proud, in the strengthening of the movements of the temple? In political support on the most sleepy fringes of the far right? Those who want to blow up the Dome of the Rock, build a third temple, return to the Judaism of sacrificial offerings and re-establish the Sanhedrin? Have you made the police a tool of these delusional movements and for that you are proud?” (emphasis added).
• In May 2018, in response to the announcement that the United States would be moving its embassy to Jerusalem, Ir Amim Director of Policy Advocacy Oshrat Maimon called it a “predatory, forceful and unilateral step.”
• In February 2017, Ir Amim and Bimkom wrote a report titled “Deliberately Planned: A Policy to Thwart Planning in the Palestinian Neighborhoods of Jerusalem,” placing sole responsibility on Israel for the conflict and accusing the Israeli authorities of “deliberately suppress[ing] the growth and development of the Palestinian community.”
  • The report was funded by the Netherlands and the German Federal Foreign Office.
• In an interview (published September 15, 2013) with the highly politicized +972 Magazine, Yudith Oppenheimer, executive director of Ir Amim, claimed that “the construction of national parks that impose a very strict, nationalist Jewish narrative” is “imposing an Israeli presence and narrative on the Old City and its surroundings and trying to eliminate the Palestinian presence” in Jerusalem.
• In May 2010, David Horovitz, then editor of the Jerusalem Post, wrote that the Jerusalem Moments film series, produced by Ir Amim, “contained just about every imaginable one-sided, context-deficient, unbalanced misrepresentation of Israel rolled into one nasty package…a relentless Palestinian Israel-bashing, interspersed with near-relentless Israeli Israel-bashing.”
• An Ir Amim blog entry in the Huffington Post (April 27, 2010), appeals to the United States government to, “Threaten [Israel] with severing diplomatic ties. Threaten us with cutting back on, or even cutting off, the annual support package. Bludgeon us over the head and force us to wise up.”