The first jolt came in 2020, when the Israeli jurist organization Yesh Din used the term “apartheid” to describe a self-proclaimed democratic system which, until now, had passed through the filaments of objective political analysis. In near proximity came another Israeli NGO, B’Tselem, to further the critique in January 2021 by estimating that it was time to say “no to apartheid from the shores of the Jordan to that of the Mediterranean”. The two NGOs wer followed in April 2021 by Human Rights Watch (HRW). However, the organization spoke of apartheid only for the occupied territories and Gaza, setting aside the specific discriminations of the Israeli Palestinians. The report published by Amnesty International on Tuesday, February 1, 2022 – and of which Orient XXI got the scoop – goes much further and uses the term “apartheid” for all Palestinians, regardless of their place of residence and their status.
For the first time, Amnesty International (AI), one of the world’s most important human rights organisations, one of the most careful also about the choice of words to describe situations, considers that “the apartheid of Israel against the Palestinian population is a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity”, in a report which should make noise, published this Tuesday, February 1, 2022. The text will also be a landmark, because it deals without distinction with the situation of Palestinian men and women “living in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT), as well as displaced refugees in other countries”.
This refusal to segment the Palestinians into sections, to consider that their interests would have ended up diverging according to their place of residence is a considerable revolution in the language of the international humanitarian-diplomatic community. It draws on the longstanding arguments of many Palestinians (and many others) about the unity of a people fractured by the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Reset the counter to zero
This dense document describes Israeli oppression and the mechanics of Palestinian domination. Dozens of interviews, hundreds of documents essentially analyzed over the period 2017-2021, months of preparation in the greatest secrecy: the Amnesty report brings about an important political change. It also offers a considerable amount of information on the realities experienced by Palestinians, whether they are in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, Haifa… And most often goes back to the origins of the state. of Israel to better understand the roots of a policy whose continuum had already been highlighted by several historians of all backgrounds in recent years. Again, Amnesty International resets the counter to zero.
“What is happening is exactly the opposite of what they imagined,” Yuli Novak, executive director of Breaking The Silence, an organization of Israeli army veterans that collects witness statements in regard to abuses committed by soldiers in the occupied territories told me presciently in the spring of 2016.. The reports of Breaking The Silence, as well as those of other Israeli and Palestinian NGOs, have moreover helped the work of Amnesty International researchers.
What is happening is quite simply that Israeli soft power (and its many allies from all walks of life and all continents, from Los Angeles to Dubai) has failed to stifle dissenting voices in Palestine first, but also in Israel, among the Jews as among the Arabs. On the contrary, the voice of protest continues. With this new very firm commitment from AI, the use of the word apartheid in relation to Israel will cease to be subjected to intense pounding, even if it seems overly optimistic, especially in France. Nevertheless, it is a great leap forward that Amnesty puts forward on the world stage.
A crime against humanity
Its 211-pages report analyzes administrative detentions, seizures of land and real estate, unlawful killings, forced transfers, restrictions of movement, obstacles to education. It is based on numerous documented examples, in several places in the country, in the Jordan Valley, in Gaza. It gathers a lot of information, which has allowed the organization to carry out a meticulous inventory of the system put in place by Israel. It is a question of identifying as many “constituent factors” of an apartheid system under international law. For Amnesty, “this system is perpetuated by violations which constitute the crime against humanity of apartheid as defined in the Rome Statute and the Convention on Apartheid”. Agnès Callamard, new secretary general of the human rights organization since 2021, drives the point home:
“Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime. Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights.”
“Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice”.
A system in place since 1948
The report details what Amnesty means by the “apartheid system”, and on this specific point it is worth quoting at length:
“The apartheid system began with the creation of Israel in May 1948 and was built and maintained over decades by successive Israeli governments in all territories they controlled, regardless of the political party in power at the time. Israel has subjected different groups of Palestinians to different sets of discriminatory and exclusionary laws, policies and practices at different times, in response to the territorial gains it made first in 1948 and then in 1967, when it annexed East Jerusalem and occupied the rest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Over the decades, Israeli demographic and geopolitical considerations have shaped policies toward Palestinians in each of these territorial areas.
Although Israel’s apartheid system manifests itself in different ways in the various areas under its effective control, it still has the same goal of oppressing and dominating the Palestinians for the benefit of Jewish Israeli civilians, who are privileged by law, regardless of their place of residence. It is designed to maintain an overwhelming Jewish majority having access to and benefiting from the maximum territory and land acquired or controlled, while limiting the right of Palestinians to challenge the dispossession of their land and property. This system has been applied wherever Israel has exercised effective control over territories and lands or the exercise of Palestinian rights. It is embodied in law, policy and practice, and is reflected in the narrative of the state from its inception to the present day. “
Racial discrimination and second-class citizenship
The report obviously returns to the overall discriminations of a system whose variable geometry is ultimately only an adjustment factor.
One and the same system, based for AI on racial discrimination and second-class citizenship status. This downgrading is obviously accompanied by dispossession, and the report returns to “the large-scale implementation of cruel land seizures against the Palestinian population”, and the demolition “since 1948” of hundreds of Palestinian houses and buildings. It also talks about those families from Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem being harassed by settlers who are taking over their homes “with the full support of the Israeli government.”
Amnesty calls on all countries that have good relations with Israel “including some Arab and African states” to no longer support an apartheid system. To get out of this “system”, now documented by Amnesty; “the international reaction to apartheid must no longer be confined to generic condemnations and red herrings. We must attack the roots of the system, otherwise the Palestinian and Israeli populations will remain trapped in the endless cycle of violence that has wiped out so many lives,” concludes Agnès Callamard.
Adapted from: https://orientxxi.info/magazine/amnesty-international-disseque-l-apartheid-d-israel,5346
Translated from the French by PAJU
