Crime and the Criminal #2: Ten Reasons Israel is Guilty of the Crime of Apartheid

Amnesty International is the latest human rights group to accuse Israel of apartheid

“Israel is not the nation-state of all of its citizens. Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people and them alone," Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a 1976 interview, the future prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, warned that if Israel held on to the Palestinian territories it conquered during the Six Day War, it would eventually turn into an apartheid state.

Over four decades later, Rabin’s prediction has come true, according to the respected human rights organization Amnesty International.

Following similar reports issued by Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, Amnesty International is the latest NGO to accuse Israel of committing the crime of apartheid.  

In a nearly 300-page report released today, Amnesty concludes Israel is maintaining “a system of oppression and domination” over Palestinians, involving “forcible transfer, administrative detention, torture, unlawful killings and serious injuries, and the denial of basic rights and freedoms." 

The organization claims that, taken together, its findings meet the legal definition of apartheid.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the crime of apartheid is defined as “inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” 

While many associate apartheid only with South Africa, the crime of apartheid is a universal legal definition applicable to other countries, if it fits.

“Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General. “Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem, Hebron or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights.”

“We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act.”

The reaction of the Israeli government has been both furious and predictable. Instead of responding to the substance of the report, the Israelis have resorted to their usual tactic of weaponizing charges of antisemitism to whitewash Israeli crimes.

“Amnesty’s report effectively serves as a green light to harm not only Israel, but Jews around the world,” a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry said in a statement.

“Its extremist language and distortion of historical context were designed to demonize Israel and pour fuel onto the fire of antisemitism.”

When Amnesty labelled Myanmar’s treatment of Rohingya Muslims as “apartheid,” no one called them anti-Buddhist. 

No one calls the organization “anti-Muslim” when it issues scathing reports about Iran’s human rights violations.  

And what about the 25% of Jewish-Americans (38% under 40) who believe Israel is an apartheid state, according to a poll conducted last summer by the Jewish Electorate Institute?

Or the two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa, Ilan Baruch and Alon Liel, who recently wrote: “The Bantustans of South Africa under the apartheid regime and the map of the occupied Palestinian territories today are predicated on the same idea of concentrating the ‘undesirable’ population in as small an area as possible, in a series of non-contiguous enclaves.” 

Or Israel's former Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp, who in October wrote a column for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz entitled “The Time Has Come to Admit: Israel Is an Apartheid Regime.” 

Jew haters all? Or merely self-hating Jews?

If not apartheid, what else would you call a country that categorizes the population under its control along ethno-religious lines, segregates the population based on this categorisation into different geographical areas, and imposes a system of laws and policies that favor one ethno-religious group over another?

Anyway, here’s ten reasons Israel is an apartheid regime.

1. Military law governs Palestinians living in the West Bank. Civil law governs Jewish settlers. Two systems of justice, separate and unequal. That's apartheid. 

2. Israel controls the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. While Palestinians within Israel can vote for the government that controls their lives, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians can’t. That’s apartheid.

3. The Israel Land Authority manages 93 percent of the land within Israel proper. About 80 percent of that land is closed to use by non-Jews, according to human rights organization Adelah. That's apartheid. 

4. Any Jewish person anywhere in the world can emigrate to Israel even if they’ve never set foot in the country. But Palestinians and their descendants expelled from Israel in 1948 by Zionist militias are not allowed to return. That's apartheid. 

5. An Israeli Jew who marries an American Christian may bring the spouse to Israel, but an Israeli Arab who marries a West Bank Palestinian may not. That's apartheid. 

6. Jewish residential councils within Israel proper may reject applications for housing from Palestinian citizens of Israel because they are “unsuitable to the community’s social life." Such blatant housing discrimination is legal in Israel. That's apartheid. 

7. Creating separate settlements for Jews in the Occupied Territories, and denying building permits to Palestinians because they're not Jewish. That's apartheid. 

8. Under Israeli law, Palestinians whose homes Israel confiscated when the country formed in 1948 can not reclaim their property. But Jews who owned homes in East Jerusalem prior to 1948 can reclaim their property. That's apartheid.

9. The Israeli government controls the water supply in the West Bank. It allows settlers to use four times as much water per capita as their Palestinian neighbors. The Palestinians barely have enough water to irrigate their crops. That's apartheid.

10. Israel’s Nation-State Law says Israel is the nation-state of Jews, and Jews only, even though 20 percent of Israelis are not Jewish. Imagine if the US Congress passed a law saying that the United States is the nation-state of white Christians and white Christians only. Jewish Americans would go nuts, and rightly so. That's apartheid.

You can read the Amnesty International report here: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/