Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2022, pp. 32-33, 47
Special Report
By Dr. M. Reza Behnam
FOR MORE THAN SEVEN decades, Israel has been able to silence international criticism as it birthed a state system constructed on the institutionalization of oppression and removal of the Indigenous Palestinian population.
All the while, the global community has stood by as Israel perfected its draconian apartheid system and as it continues to violate, with impunity, the very laws the United Nations has instituted to ensure international public order.
Major human rights organizations, however, have become less hesitant to call for an end to Israel’s occupation and colonization of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Although Israel’s crimes against humanity and breaches of international law have been chronicled for decades, it took the language of “apartheid” to force the world’s attention.
The 1976 U.N. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court described apartheid as a crime against humanity; and like colonialism, a violation of international law.
In 2009, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa released a document titled, “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A re-assessment of Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law.” The report confirmed that the three pillars of South African apartheid are being practiced by Israel in the occupied territories.
According to the Council, a troika of key features highlight Israeli apartheid: 1) discriminatory laws and policies that afford preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews; 2) strategic fragmentation of Palestinian territories for the purposes of segregation and domination; 3) “security” laws, policies and practices to reinforce and maintain control over Palestinians.
In 2017, the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) published a report titled, “Israeli Practices Toward the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid.” It was the first time a U.N. body had clearly charged Israel with imposing an apartheid regime on the Palestinians. Additionally, the authors, Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, emphasized that since the 1970s, the United Nations and world public opinion consider apartheid to be “second only to genocide in the hierarchy of criminality.”
Under pressure from the United States and Israel, Secretary General António Guterres denounced the ESCWA’s official report and removed it from the Commission’s website.
For years, Palestinian human rights organizations such as Al-Haq as well as Israeli groups B’Tselem and Yesh Din have documented Israeli crimes against Palestinians. They have been largely ignored.
In a September 2020 legal opinion, Yesh Din judged that, “…in addition to colonizing the occupied territory,” Israel had gone to great lengths “to cement its domination over the occupied residents and ensure their inferior status.”
In January 2021, B’Tselem described “a regime of Jewish supremacy” over Palestinians that amounted to apartheid. In that same year, Human Rights Watch in its report, “A Threshold Crossed,” described Israel as an apartheid state guilty of crimes against humanity under international law.
The U.K.-headquartered Amnesty International is the latest rights advocate to chronicle Israel’s human rights offenses. In February 2022, Amnesty released a meticulously documented investigation titled, “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity.”
The document, which took more than four years to complete, states unequivocally that Israel is guilty of the international crime of apartheid—a crime against humanity of the greatest magnitude.
Amnesty challenged some of the popular notions that Israel has deceptively promulgated. It renders false, for example, the widely accepted Israeli myth that there is a “conflict” between two peoples with equal resources and claims. According to its findings, Israel’s colonization of Palestine should be described for what it really is—a struggle between the colonizer and colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed.
The report also discredits the concept of Israel as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Attention is paid to the fact that Israel is an exclusionary Jewish state that has created a national political identity based on religious beliefs, and that it “…considers and treats Palestinians as an inferior non-Jewish racial group.” Former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said as much in his March 2019 speech, affirming, Israel is “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.”
Although the United States is not directly named, Amnesty’s judgments unnerved many in Washington, DC with statements such as, “Apartheid has no place in the world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history.”
According to international law, states are legally obligated to take action to combat apartheid wherever it is committed and to punish its perpetrators. In addition to their obligations under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, all states are legally bound—under what is known as third state responsibility—to take action against any state that commits serious violations of international law.
After Amnesty released its findings in February, it became apparent that the corporate media would give little time or attention to the evidence presented; a silence it has maintained for years. The U.S. news industry prides itself on exposing human rights abusers around the world, but they consistently eschew Israel. They focus instead on the violations of U.S. competitors, like China, or military regimes, such as Myanmar.
Unable to challenge the evidence, Israel’s supporters attacked the integrity of the organization and its authors.
Like the media, the White House, members of Congress and pro-Israel groups made haste to delegitimize Amnesty and its report.
President Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed human rights president with a long history of ignoring Israel’s crimes, had little to say other than to reject Amnesty’s claims out of hand.
Selective condemnation was on full display during a speech by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on March 21, 2022. In it, he officially declared the crimes against the Rohingya people by the Myanmar military as genocide.
Ironically, Blinken stated that he reached the decision based on facts prepared by the State Department and from impartial sources, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Predictably, the findings of both human rights organizations regarding Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people elicited no State Department indictment.
There is nothing in Amnesty’s analysis that is untrue. Unable to challenge the evidence, Israel’s supporters attacked the integrity of the organization and its authors. And to hinder debate, they leveled false but obligatory accusations of anti-Semitism.
Fourteen human rights organizations based in Israel signed a statement, on Feb. 3, 2022, condemning the vicious attacks on Amnesty and its findings, emphasizing that debate was not only legitimate but absolutely necessary.
The group was particularly distressed by the regime’s “…irresponsible allegation of anti-Semitism.” They expressed concern that the struggle against anti-Semitism was being weakened by Israel’s routine use of the accusation for political ends. And that to avoid debate, the allegation had become the “…standard and ongoing practice of successive Israeli governments and their echo chambers overseas.”
For decades, Israel has been able to manage perceptions and silence critics. It has developed a successful strategy of falsely equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and portraying Judaism and Zionism as synonymous.
South African warriors against apartheid, the late President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, were not immune from allegations of anti-Semitism. In a 2011 interview, Tutu averred that the situation endured by the Palestinians is “in many instances worse” than it had been in South Africa.
The latest report on Israel’s human rights violations confirms what others have said. In his March 2022 report, Professor Michael Lynk, who stepped down on May 1 from his post as U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, states, “Israel’s occupation has been conducted in profound defiance of international law and hundreds of United Nations resolutions, with scant pushback from the international community…It insists that the laws of occupation and human rights do not apply to its regime.”
International law is very clear. The acquisition of territory by war or force is forbidden by the 1945 Charter of the United Nations and by the 1949 U.N. Declaration on Rights and Duties of States. Thus, Israel has never had any legal sovereign rights over the Palestinian lands it seized in its 1948 and 1967 wars.
Israel maintains its apartheid system because of the “iron clad” support and “eternal friendship” that American politicians express toward it. This sentiment was illustrated in a February 2022 speech before the Israeli Knesset by Nancy Pelosi, second in the U.S. presidential line of succession and Speaker of the House of Representatives. At the Knesset, Pelosi stated that she has long considered the establishment of Israel to be “the greatest political achievement of the 20th century.” It was obvious from the speaker’s glaring remarks, that the evidence detailed in the Amnesty report mattered little to her.
U.S. and Israeli pressure have managed to suppress the many reports that have charged Israel with apartheid. The Israeli regime has sustained its oppressive system and escaped consequences because of the might of the United States. The Palestinians have, therefore, been forced to armed struggle. According to the United Nations, armed struggle is the legitimate right of the colonized against the colonizer; not an act of terrorism as the Israelis claim.
Israel’s apartheid practices, racist laws and squatter-colonialism have made Palestinians prisoners in their own land. Israelis will never be at peace until they recognize the bankruptcy of Zionism and the violence it breeds.
Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.
