On February 3, Amnesty International – the world’s biggest and most respected human rights organizations – published a long and detailed report about Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.  It used the A-word to describe the big picture of relations between Jews and Arabs between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.

Presenting Israel as an apartheid state is highly controversial. The report was greeted by Palestinians and their supporters and angrily condemned by the Israeli government and citizens. Jews across the world viewed it as biased and one-sided and an unacceptable expression of antisemitism.

Israel’s foreign minister, Yair Lapid, rejected the 200-plus page document as “divorced from reality”, saying: “Amnesty quotes lies spread by terrorist organizations.” He also directly accused AI of antisemitism. “I hate to use the argument that if Israel were not a Jewish state, nobody in Amnesty would dare argue against it, but in this case, there is no other possibility,” he added.

Amnesty’s report was the latest in a series by international NGOs. The most important previous one was issued by Human Rights Watch in 2021 though HRW used the term apartheid only in relation to the occupied territories and not pre-1967 Israel within the Green Line borders. That one was preceded by the left-wing Israeli group B’Tselem several months earlier.

“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,” declared Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, as she rejected claims of antisemitism. “Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid.”

This is not a new accusation. But it remains, as ever, divisive, toxic and a vivid reminder of radically different narratives and practical approaches to this most intractable of conflicts. Apartheid is defined as a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Court and is largely associated with South Africa.

The report was welcomed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which said it hoped it would open the way to prosecution of Israel at the International Criminal Court. “The state of Palestine welcomes the report on Israel’s apartheid regime and racist policies and practices against the Palestinian people,” the PA foreign ministry said.

Amnesty’s approach is not perfect as there is no real differentiation between the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel (currently 21% of the population) and the Palestinians in the occupied territories, who live in very different circumstances.

 B’Tselem drew criticism when it asserted that Israeli policies had been designed to enforce “Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”. That was part of a growing international trend to redefine the Israeli-Palestine conflict as a struggle for equal rights rather than simply a territorial dispute.

While Palestinians who remained inside Israel lived under military rule until shortly before the 1967 war, those Palestinians now have citizenship, including the right to vote, but still face social and economic discrimination in areas such as the job and housing markets.

Defenders of Israel like to point out that there is one Arab party and a few ministers in the current coalition government as well as Supreme Court judges despite the 2018 nation-state law which defines Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people and downgraded the legal status of Arabic compared to Hebrew.

By contrast Palestinians in the West Bank live – despite a degree of political autonomy  under the PA - under Israeli military rule, which includes exposure to the Israeli military justice system, while Jewish settlers on the West Bank are dealt with under Israeli civil law.

The government of Naftali Bennett, committed to “shrinking the conflict” with the Palestinians, was criticized for failing to simply ignore the Amnesty report, preparing to vilify it in advance. Lapid criticized it even before the report was officially published.

Dovish critics say use of the ultra-charged term “apartheid” also has the potential to undermine anti-occupation work by offering the right wing a path to redirect the public conversation away from genuine human rights abuses and into more convenient territory,  i.e. antisemitism. That is precisely what has happened in this case.

Previous Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert also warned that carrying on with the status quo Israel risks being defined as an apartheid state. In 2006 the former US president Jimmy Carter, published a book entitled Peace or Apartheid.

Gideon Levy, the leftist Haaretz columnist, wrote the following in response to the AI report: “The world will say apartheid, Israel will say antisemitism. But the evidence will keep piling up. What is written in the report does not stem from antisemitism, but will help strengthen it.”

Americans for Peace Now got it exactly right: “In such circumstances one should not be surprised when international human rights organizations and the international community treat all the territories under Israel rule – on both sides of the Green Line - as a single political unit. The Amnesty International report should serve as yet another alarm bell and a call to action.”

 

By Ian Black