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While essentially unreported in the United States, and chastised when it was, the human rights group Amnesty International said last week that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians meets the internationally accepted definition of apartheid.
This is not the first time Israel has been criticized for its treatment of Palestinians. (See: “ISRAEL ACCUSED OF APARTHEID BY HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH.”) Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth told The New York Times in May 2021 that the “oppression of Palestinians there has reached a threshold and a performance that meets the definitions of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.”
The paper reported at the time that Palestinians have been making the claim about the conditions there since the 1960s. President Jimmy Carter agreed with this back in 2006, and there is a growing number of Jewish human-rights groups that also make the claim. Jerusalem-based B’Tselem also made the claim.
“This trifecta of Israeli, American, and British documentation will prove an extremely important breakthrough for Palestinian human rights in terms of its timing, precedence, scope, legality, globality, boldness and ramifications,” Marwan Bishara, a senior political analyst, wrote in Al Jazeera after the Amnesty’s 211-page report came out.
A Financial Times report pointed out that Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, warned that Israel risked becoming an apartheid state unless peace was made with the Palestinians.
The London-based human-rights group based its findings on a five-year analysis of the law that governs millions living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the FT reported. The paper said there are no new allegations against Israel, but called the policy Israel’s effort to perpetuate a Jewish hegemony at the expense of the Arab population.
“Israel has established and maintained an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination of the Palestinian population for the benefit of Jewish Israelis—wherever it has exercised control over Palestinians’ lives since 1948,” Amnesty’s report summary said.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Amnesty also called on the United Nations to sanction Israel, and the International Criminal Court to investigate and hold Israelis criminally responsible.
The Financial Times reported that the Israeli government shot back at the claim and said the report will “pour fuel onto the fire of anti-Semitism.”
Fourteen human rights organizations based in Israel have come to Amnesty International, RTÉ, an Irish news outlet reported.
They said: “We wholeheartedly reject the idea that Amnesty International’s report is baseless, singles out Israel or displays antisemitic animus. However, we are particularly concerned by the Israeli government’s extremely irresponsible allegation of antisemitism.”
TRENDPOST: Israel took control of the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war. Since then, in addition to destroying Palestinian houses and buildings on the land they seized, they have been, and continue, to build massive “settlements.”
As reported by Bloomberg in January 2020:
“Almost a tenth of Israel’s Jews live in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, outside their country’s recognized borders. The population of Jewish settlers in the West Bank has grown four times faster than Israel’s itself since 1995. Settlers regard themselves as inhabiting land that is rightfully theirs. A different view is held by the International Court of Justice, a branch of the United Nations, which Israel regards as biased against it. The court concluded in a 2004 opinion that Jewish settlements in what it calls occupied Palestinian territory are illegal.”
Under international law, Israeli settlements are illegal. They violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 that states, “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
The U.N. Security Council, the U.N. General Assembly, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Court of Justice, and the High Contracting Parties to the Convention have all affirmed the Fourth Geneva Convention applies, that this is occupied territory, and Israeli settlements there are illegal.
As for Israel’s “settlement” intentions, they were made clear by one of the nation’s respected leaders:
“We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise solution. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism.”
— Chief of Intelligence General Yehoshafat Harkabi, Ma’ariv, 2 November 1973