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[Excerpt:]

"NGO MONITOR charges that Amnesty deliberately timed its report to coincide with scheduled events on American campuses entitled "Israel’s Control of Water as a Tool of Apartheid and Means of Ethnic Cleansing." These are sponsored by the Palestinian Cultural Academic Boycott of Israel movement. Whether or not that was the case, there is considerable resonance to the accusation by NGO Monitor’s president, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, that Amnesty is "manipulating the water issue while ignoring the complexities of history and law in order to again falsely portray Israel as a brutal regime. Rather than recognize that water supply is a complex regional issue, Amnesty focuses only on Palestinian shortages… The report adopts a painfully simplistic narrative which places blame solely on Israel, to the extent that the Palestinian leadership is absolved of responsibility for the agreements signed under the Oslo framework." While ostensibly pursuing a well-intentioned attempt to improve Palestinian welfare, Amnesty seems more intent on coming up with pretexts to justify its assertion that Israel "denies hundreds of thousands of Palestinians the right to live a normal life, to have adequate food, housing or health, and to economic development." A readiness to first hear, and then take into account, the Israeli side of the vexed water dispute would have enabled a more credible report – and one more likely to have practical impact."