Millions of innocent Gazans are in danger. Half are children who’ve lived through five wars already.

By Phyllis Bennis |

( Otherwords) – The violence in the Middle East is bringing horrifying new levels of human suffering to both Israelis and Palestinians. We need an immediate ceasefire right now.

Both sides have committed heinous violations of international law. But if we’re serious about preventing such horrors in the future, we have to go beyond condemnation.

A lesson we ignore at our peril is that oppression undermines not only the rights, dignity, and lives of the oppressed, but eventually the security of the oppressors as well. The apartheid system that’s been suffocating Palestinians for so long is now also undermining the safety of Israeli civilians.

Since 2007, Gazans have lived under siege, prohibited from leaving their open air prison by a high-security militarized wall and platoons of Israeli soldiers.

For the last 16 years, starting long before the latest escalation, access to most goods was banned. Gazans couldn’t even get construction materials to repair the homes, hospitals, water treatment facilities, and places or worship that Israel bombed repeatedly — in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021.

Israel often denied emergency medical permits to leave the Strip, leaving many Gazans to die without care.

Electricity was already limited. A 72-year-old woman in Gaza told a reporter last January, “It is hard to imagine, but we used to experience 24 hours of electricity each day in Gaza; now we are lucky if we get six.” Now there is none.

Water was already unavailable except through expensive purchases from Israeli water companies. And food has long been scarce — by the age of two, 20 percent of Gaza’s children are already stunted.

Now that long-running siege is much worse.

On October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called for a “total siege” of Gaza. “No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it’s all closed,” he said. For Gaza’s already impoverished and malnourished population, that’s not just collective punishment — it’s genocide.

Hospitals are unable to treat patients. Families will starve or die of thirst. Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, filled with patients, wounded, and Gazans seeking shelter from Israeli bombs, was struck on October 17. Hundreds of people were reported killed.

Human rights experts, UN officials, faith leaders, and others warned for years that the systemic oppression which rights groups now identify as apartheid would one day be too much to stand. Resistance was inevitable.

For decades, Palestinian resistance has taken overwhelmingly non-violent forms, including the Great March of Return in 2018-2019, a peaceful Gaza protest that was met with overwhelming lethal violence by Israeli forces.

But the world didn’t answer. When the UN warned in 2012 and 2015 that by 2020 Gaza would be “unlivable” without a “herculean effort” by the international community, the world didn’t respond.

This time the resistance took a violent form, including Hamas targeting civilians in horrifying ways that are illegal under international law. Those illegitimate acts must be condemned. But that cruelty must not be used to justify more brutality against millions of innocent Gazans, half of whom are under 19 and have lived through at least five Israeli wars already.

If we’re serious about preventing violence, we need to change the conditions from which this brutality sprang. Sending more bombs, warplanes, guns and bullets won’t solve the problem.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

American taxpayers have supplied about 20 percent of Israel’s military budget for years. But our government hasn’t put any conditions on how that aid is used — even as Israel enforces a brutal siege and indiscriminately bombs Gaza today.

We need an immediate ceasefire right now. And we need to hold our own government accountable — which includes stopping Washington’s enabling of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

Palestinians have been paying the price for this apartheid system for generations. In the recent attacks, innocent Israelis paid a huge price as well. It’s time to end it, starting with a ceasefire — right now.

 

Phyllis Bennis

Phyllis Bennis is a Middle East expert at the Institute for Policy Studies and an international adviser for Jewish Voice for Peace. This op-ed was adapted from an earlier version at InsideSources.com and distributed by OtherWords.org.

Via Otherwords

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Shireen Abu Akleh was a seasoned al-Jazeera correspondent for the past 25 years. She was known and respected throughout the Arab world for her brave, honest reporting of the Palestinian struggle.

On May 11, she was shot and killed while covering an Israeli raid on the Palestinian refugee camp outside Jenin.

Abu Akleh’s killing in the Israeli-occupied West Bank was shocking, but hardly unusual. According to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, she was the 86th journalist to be killed while covering Israeli oppression since Israel first occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in 1967.

But her killing is part of a longer pattern of Israeli violence and collective punishment — not just against journalists but against all Palestinians — committed with impunity and rationalized by trumped up “security” concerns.

The depth of this abuse was again made shockingly visible after the killing itself, when Israeli police attacked the funeral procession carrying Shireen’s body to the church. They threw Palestinian flags to the ground and violently beat mourners — including the pallbearers, who nearly dropped the casket.

The killing of Shireen and the assault on the funeral procession demonstrated once again the structural nature of Israeli racism and violence against Palestinians. As Amnesty International describes it, Israel’s “regular violations of Palestinians’ rights are not accidental repetitions of offenses, but part of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination.”

There’s no serious question that Abu Akleh was deliberately killed by an Israeli sniper. She was wearing a helmet and a blue protective vest marked “PRESS” and surrounded by other journalists when the group was fired on. She was shot in the head and killed. Another Palestinian journalist was shot and seriously injured.

As so often happens, Israeli officials immediately tried to blame the Palestinians. Israeli officials from Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on down made unconvincing claims that Palestinian gunmen were responsible for the killing. Within hours, fieldworkers for the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem easily refuted the Israeli claims.

By the time Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with his Israeli counterpart Benny Gantz on May 17, Tel Aviv had largely pulled back from its claims of Palestinian culpability. The Israeli press claimed that Gantz had indicated Israel welcomed an investigation of Shireen’s killing.

But that claim (unmentioned in the Pentagon’s read-out of the meeting) flew in the face of reports that Israel had already decided it would not investigate, because questioning Israeli soldiers as potential suspects “would provoke opposition and controversy within the IDF and in Israeli society in general.”

Such a pattern of denial is but one aspect of a broader pattern of oppression that is much more pervasive.

Israel itself makes no secret of this. The country’s own Basic Law of 2018 explicitly gives only Jewish citizens of Israel, not Palestinian citizens, the right of self-determination.

Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, along with B’tselem, have concluded that this pattern constitutes the crime of apartheid. This international crime, and its associated human rights violations and war crimes, has continued for decades while political, diplomatic, economic, and military support from the United States goes forward unconditionally.

Washington sends more than $3.8 billion every year directly to the Israeli military, most of it used to purchase U.S.-made weapons systems, ammunition, and more. This makes the U.S. complicit in Israel’s criminal wrongdoing.

So what needs to happen now?

International engagement is crucial. The International Criminal Court has the authority to add the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh and attacks on Palestinian journalists to its existing investigations of alleged Israeli crimes. A variety of UN bodies could also respond by issuing reports that offer policy recommendations.

Calls for an independent, credible investigation need to include a focus on United States responsibility.

Biden administration officials and some members of Congress have called for an investigation of Abu Akleh’s killing. That’s welcome, but hardly sufficient. Israel has a long history of conducting its own investigations, and virtually all result in impunity for Israeli military forces. High-ranking military officials and political decision makers are never even scrutinized.

We in the United States should insist on more.

Why? Above all, because our own tax dollars pay for 20 percent of Israel’s entire military budget. The bullet or the gun used to kill Shireen could have even been purchased from U.S. weapons manufacturers with our own money.

If that’s the case, we need to know — because U.S. laws prohibit it.

The Leahy Law’s restrictions on military aid is unequivocal: “No assistance shall be furnished,” it says, “to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.”

Credible information, including from Israel’s leading human rights organization and five respected journalists standing with Shireen Abu Akleh when she was killed, indicates she was shot in cold blood. If that isn’t sufficient, the State Department should propose an independent, UN-based fact-finding team to prepare a report.

Militarism is on the rise, both in the U.S. and around the world. Maybe the brutal killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a U.S. citizen as well as a proud Palestinian born in Jerusalem — and the police attack on mourners grieving her death — will provide an impetus toward rethinking Washington’s unconditional support of Israeli lawlessness.

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and serves on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace. She’s the author of Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer.

Richard Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and a former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. He lives in Santa Barbara.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

The international movement for Palestinian rights and justice laid the ground for recent declarations by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. Now we have to follow up.

( Commondreams.org ) – When Amnesty International released its report “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity” earlier the month, it was clearly part of a rapidly expanding trend. Palestinian human rights defenders, members of Congress and faith leaders in the United States, academics, and activists of the Palestinian rights movement around the world have long recognized and condemned Israeli apartheid, and called for accountability.

More recently, influential human rights organizations and experts have produced a spate of reports analyzing and condemning the phenomenon. Amnesty’s report emerged after acclaimed Israeli human rights advocacy organizations published their reports: 18 months after Yesh Din’s “The Occupation of the West Bank and the Crime of Apartheid: Legal Opinion,” and a year after B’tselem’s “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid.” Amnesty’s arrived eight months after Human Rights Watch published “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.”

The precedents had actually been emerging even earlier—almost five years before, experts commissioned by the UN’s Economic and Social Commission of West Asia had authored “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid” (though pressure from Israel’s supporters forced ESCWA to remove the report from its website).

“This slew of recent reports come to the legal conclusion that Israel’s actions of discrimination, dispossession, and more, were carried out for the purpose of ensuring the dominance of one racial or national group over another.”

The reports all build on each other, though their conclusions differ in some specifics, including where in the varied territories it controls Israel’s actions constituted the crime of apartheid, when it started, and more. Yesh Din limited their assessment of apartheid to the West Bank; HRW found the crime of apartheid was being committed in all of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)—meaning Gaza, the West Bank, and occupied East Jerusalem—while inside the 1948 border of Israel the crime was that of persecution. B’tselem went further, holding Israel guilty of the crime of apartheid throughout all of historic Palestine—”from the river to the sea” as the statement goes. The UN’s ESCWA report, written in 2017 by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, went furthest, by including the Palestinian refugees, whose right to return to their homes Israel has long been denied.

But crucially, this slew of recent reports come to the legal conclusion that Israel’s actions of discrimination, dispossession, and more, were carried out for the purpose of ensuring the dominance of one racial or national group over another—for the purpose of empowering Israeli Jews at the expense of Palestinians—and that therefore Israel was committing the crime of apartheid.

The Context

It is also crucial to recognize the degree to which all of the reports reflect the political moment in which they are released. The massive public and media discourse shifts in Europe and especially in the United States towards support for Palestinian rights, even while conditions facing Palestinians on the ground continue to deteriorate without even the pretense of governments exerting diplomatic or economic pressure on Israel, clearly played a role in the timing of the recent reports on apartheid.

In the US, recent polls show huge changes among young people, especially young Jews, among African-Americans, among Democrats—with rising pluralities and even majorities critical of Israel. Some members of Congress, as well as influential movement leaders with broad mainstream influence and access to power, such as Rev. Dr. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, have called explicitly for an end to Israeli apartheid.

The shift is not nearly as strong at the policy level, but even there identifiable changes are underway. The 2018 and 2020 election of new progressive members of Congress, most of them young people of color and overwhelmingly women, explicitly committed to some version of Palestinian rights, has opened up new terms of debate on support for Israel long viewed as unchangeable. A bill by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) aimed at establishing end-use restrictions on US military aid, thus preventing US financial support for Israel’s military detention of Palestinian children, demolition of Palestinian families’ homes and more, has helped to mainstream the importance of treating Israel according to US law, like every other country.

Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza led a group of 25 senators and a separate group of 12 Jewish Democratic members of Congress to challenge the president and demand a ceasefire. At the same time, a cohort of 500+ former Biden campaign staffers rooted the attack in the earliest history of Israel, calling on the president to “work to end the underlying conditions of occupation, blockade, and settlement expansion that led to this exceptionally destructive period in a 73-year history of dispossession and ethnic cleansing.” They went further, recognizing in their letter that “the resulting status quo is one that international and Israeli human rights organizations agree meets the definition of the crime of apartheid under international law.”

Israel is also facing an unprecedented wave of international and particularly US condemnation for its NSO company’s Pegasus spyware—sold to repressive governments around the world and used against human rights defenders, journalists, officials, and others. The White House announcement that it would ban Pegasus, and the New York Times exposé of Israel’s use of the spyware as a foreign policy tool threatens to significantly undermine Israel’s credibility in key business circles.

Predictably, Israel cracked down on human rights defenders—most notably by outlawing six of the most internationally respected Israeli human rights organizations, by the misuse of counterterrorism laws, and by subjecting “Israeli organizations denouncing apartheid … to smears and delegitimization campaigns.” But the goal of Israel’s attack—to get European supporters to cut their vital funding to the six organizations, has so far largely failed, as Israel was unable to produce any credible evidence of their spurious charges.

Amnesty and some of the other human rights organizations had long been known as cautious (many would say overly so) and reluctant to seriously criticize Israel. That began to change in the 1980s and 90s, but it is clear that the discourse-changing factors of the last five or six years made it easier (despite the outraged responses that predictably included false accusations of anti-semitism) for the leaderships of Amnesty and the other organizations to release their unsparing reports. Even more importantly, it made it much more likely that the reports would be heard, taken seriously, and maybe—just maybe—encourage new campaigns for Israeli accountability.

Amnesty’s Particularities

The Amnesty report holds special significance in a number of ways. With its publication, virtually every internationally known and globally powerful human rights organization recognizes Israeli apartheid, and Amnesty is arguably the most influential of them all. It articulates the most expansive definition of Israeli apartheid in terms of when the crime began and where it is being committed. Its report emphasizes the role of demography at the root of Israel’s apartheid methods, underscoring the goal of creating a new state designed to benefit the Jewish residents, then a 30% minority, at the expense of the 70% majority Palestinian population. It identifies several particularly important recommendations for the United States and the UN, rooted in the struggle for accountability. And critically, Amnesty is a campaigning organization, able to mobilize its ten million supporters around the world to fight for the goal of ending Israeli apartheid.

“Every internationally known and globally powerful human rights organization recognizes Israeli apartheid, and Amnesty is arguably the most influential of them all.”

Defining Apartheid: When, Where, and Against Whom?

The official definition of the crime of apartheid is pretty straightforward. The Amnesty report describes it occurring “when serious human rights violations are committed in the context, and with the specific intent, of maintaining a regime or system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory control of one or more racial groups by another.”

Its conclusions as to how, where, when, and against whom Israel’s crime of apartheid is being committed, are expansive. Amnesty recognizes that as a crime against humanity, apartheid is ultimately a crime against people, so its applicability comprises but extends beyond Israeli-controlled territory (including all of Israel and all of the OPT) to include Palestinian refugees scattered around the world in the far-flung Palestinian diaspora, whom Israel prevents from realizing their right to return home. Amnesty also identifies the origins of Israeli apartheid before the 1967 occupation, and even before the 1949 armistice whose ceasefire lines set the earliest Israeli borders. Apartheid, they show, began with the initial declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, when the state of the Jews, not a state for all its citizens, was declared.

Jews Up, Palestinians Down

It is important that the Amnesty report places a special focus on demography—recognizing that the intention of Israel and its institutions from the beginning was to ensure a permanent Jewish majority, regardless of the levels of oppression and violence required to make that happen. That meant the “demography of the newly created state was to be changed to the benefit of Jewish Israelis, while Palestinians—whether inside Israel or, later on, in the OPT—were perceived as a threat to establishing and maintaining a Jewish majority, and as a result were to be expelled, fragmented, segregated, controlled, dispossessed of their land and property and deprived of their economic and social rights.”

The report makes clear that “the racial discrimination against and segregation of Palestinians is the result of deliberate government policy. The regular violations of Palestinians’ rights are not accidental repetitions of offenses, but part of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination.”

The report notes that in 2018 those longstanding apartheid practices became permanent Israeli law, with the passage of the nation-state law as an amendment to Israel’s Basic Law, which serves as its legal foundation or constitution. The law states explicitly that “Israel is the nation State of the Jewish people,” not the state of all its citizens (20% of whom are Palestinian), and that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.”

The report provides extensive examples of the range of Israel’s serious human rights violations whose systemic nature leads to the legal conclusion of apartheid. In discussing Israel’s official goal of creating and maintaining a Jewish majority, one example starts directly with the status of Jerusalem. “Since the 1967 annexation of East Jerusalem,” it says, “Israeli governments have set targets for the demographic ratio of Jews to Palestinians in Jerusalem as a whole and have made it clear through public statements that the denial of economic and social rights to Palestinians in East Jerusalem is an intentional policy to coerce them into leaving the city. Israel’s withdrawal of its settlers from Gaza, while it maintained control over the people in the territory in other ways, was also expressly linked to demographic questions, and a realization that a Jewish majority could not be achieved there. Finally, public materials published by the Israeli government make it obvious that Israel’s long-standing policy to deprive millions of Palestinian refugees of their right to return to their homes is also guided by demographic considerations.”

Accountability

One of the most important consequences of the Amnesty report is its insistence on holding accountable all those responsible for Israel’s apartheid policies. It starts by making clear that “almost all of Israel’s civilian administration and military authorities, as well as governmental and quasi-governmental institutions, are involved in the enforcement of the system of apartheid against Palestinians across Israel and the OPT and against Palestinian refugees and their descendants outside the territory.”

And while holding Israeli officials and institutions responsible, Amnesty also recognizes that “for over seven decades, the international community has stood by as Israel has been given free rein to dispossess, segregate, control, oppress and dominate Palestinians. The numerous UN Security Council resolutions adopted over the years have remained unimplemented with Israel facing no repercussions for actions that have violated international law.”

“One of the most important consequences of the Amnesty report is its insistence on holding accountable all those responsible for Israel’s apartheid policies.”

By refusing to hold Israel accountable, it goes on, “the international community has contributed to undermining the international legal order and has emboldened Israel to continue perpetrating crimes with impunity. In fact, some states have actively supported Israel’s violations by supplying it with arms, equipment and other tools to perpetrate crimes under international law and by providing diplomatic cover, including at the UN Security Council, to shield it from accountability.” Those states have, therefore, “completely failed the Palestinian people and have only exacerbated Palestinians’ lived experience as people with lesser rights and inferior status to Jewish Israelis.”

So What to Do Now?

One of the reasons that Amnesty’s report is so important is that it is a global campaigning organization, with 10 million supporters worldwide. That means it has an enormous potential capacity to mobilize serious campaigns challenging Israeli apartheid, involving both social movements and governments, as well as the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. In the United States, Amnesty chapters are working at over 600 colleges and high schools—in all of which Israeli apartheid and Palestinian rights will now become a regular component of the broad human rights agenda the young activists take up. If Palestinian rights activists partner with anti-racist and immigrant rights campaigners and others to join local Amnesty chapters on campuses and in communities, it will both strengthen those chapters and broaden the ties of solidarity among human rights and other progressive movements.

Amnesty’s report outlines a set of urgent recommendations to Israel, to the US and other governments, to the UN—all aimed at ending Israeli apartheid practices and holding accountable those responsible for them. It calls on Israel to end the practice of apartheid as well as cease discrimination against and persecution of Palestinians (as Human Rights Watch and others do as well). Amnesty then adds a host of specifics about what such a move would require, including recognizing the refugees’ right to return to “homes where they or their families once lived in Israel or the OPT, and to receive restitution and compensation … for the loss of their land and property.”

Amnesty calls for ending Israel’s international access to arms, urging all allied governments, specifically including the United States, “to immediately suspend the direct and indirect supply, sale or transfer of all weapons, munitions and other military and security equipment, including the provision of training and other military and security assistance” to Israel. It calls on the UN Security Council to impose a “comprehensive arms embargo on Israel. The embargo should cover the direct and indirect supply, sale or transfer, including transit and trans-shipment of all weapons, munitions and other military and security equipment, including the provision of training and other military and security assistance.” The Security Council is also urged to either refer the crimes against humanity and other human rights violations against the Palestinians for investigation by the International Criminal Court or to establish “an international tribunal to try alleged perpetrators of international crimes.”

Finally, in a major step, Amnesty also demands that the UN General Assembly re-establish the Special Committee Against Apartheid. The Committee, originally opened in 1962, created the UN Centre Against Apartheid which played a major role in helping to coordinate and provide educational resources for the global anti-apartheid movement throughout the 1970s and 80s. Its mandate would not be limited to Israeli apartheid, but rather would be charged with mobilizing international challenges to all examples of contemporary apartheid; other peoples sometimes described as suffering under apartheid include the Rohingya in Myanmar (whom Amnesty identified as living in conditions of apartheid), the Sahrawi people in Western Sahara, and perhaps others. Numerous Palestinian and international civil society advocates have been pushing for the re-opening of the Committee; that would represent a major step forward in strengthening and providing new credibility and influence for the global anti-apartheid movement, including (though not limited to) the movement for Palestinian rights.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

In the 1980s the great Palestinian intellectual Dr. Naseer Aruri, based in the US, joined the board of Amnesty International USA, with the goal of getting the organization to recognize Palestinian prisoners of conscience and, more broadly, to mobilize against Israel’s ongoing violations of human rights. It took six years. In a statement issued after his death in 2015, the board chair of Amnesty USA recognized Naseer as “a champion for human rights, and never afraid to express a minority view. …[H]is contributions left an important mark on the work we are doing today.” The group’s executive director added, “Naseer will be sorely missed, but his connection to this organization will live on.”

“The expanding story of this new position of human rights principles is a huge victory. It is a story, too, of the role that movements and activists play in moving history forward.”

Amnesty International’s new report represents a major step in a rising global campaign to expose the crime of apartheid being committed against the Palestinian people, and to hold Israel accountable for its violations. The report closes the circle of major human rights organizations finally prepared to take this step. It was not a quick or an easy decision for any of them—and the attacks on their credibility and legitimacy, including through the weaponization of false accusations of anti-semitism, show why.

The expanding story of this new position of human rights principles is a huge victory. It is a story, too, of the role that movements and activists play in moving history forward.

The Amnesty report declares that its research was “guided by a global policy on the human rights violation and crime of apartheid adopted by Amnesty International in July 2017, following recognition that the organization had given insufficient attention to situations of systematic discrimination and oppression around the world.” That is no doubt true. But achieving that shift in priorities, raising the willingness of Amnesty and the other international human rights organizations to name and unequivocally challenge Israeli apartheid, took years of work within and outside Amnesty (and other similar human rights organizations).

Naseer Aruri’s work starting almost 40 years ago played a huge role, as does the work today of Amnesty’s extraordinary team of researchers, writers, lawyers, and others responsible for producing the report. That work too stands on the shoulders of the Palestinian advocates and activists across the global movement for Palestinian rights—and it’s that movement that is now charged with teaching the conclusions, building the new coalitions, and fighting for implementation of the recommendations Amnesty calls for.

Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Via Commondreams.org

The U.S. gives Israel’s military $3.8 billion a year. According to a new Amnesty report, that money funds apartheid.

( Otherwords.org ) – One day last spring, Palestinians in Israel and the occupied West Bank declared a general strike to protest years of repression they faced under Israeli rule.

The nonviolent strike came as Israel attempted to evict seven Palestinian families from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem, part of a longstanding effort to expand illegal Israeli settlements and transfer Jewish settlers to what had been Palestinian land and homes.

How did Israeli forces respond to this peaceful protest?

According to a new report from Amnesty International, they “arbitrarily arrested peaceful demonstrators, threw sound and stun grenades at crowds,” and “dispersed them with excessive force.” They even “fired concussion grenades at worshippers and protesters gathered in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.”

Amnesty is arguably the most influential international human rights organization in the world.

It examines conditions on the ground, applies international law, and issues reports documenting human rights violations by governments all over the world. It then mobilizes its millions of supporters to write letters, send messages, and protest.

Amnesty’s February report on Israel-Palestine goes far beyond what happened last spring. Entitled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians,” its 280 pages dramatically illustrate Israel’s discriminatory treatment of Palestinians in Israel, in the occupied territories, and in exile.

The report finds that Israel has engaged in a “system of oppression and domination” of Palestinians, including through segregation, military rule, and restrictions on Palestinians’ right to political participation. It documents how Israel has dispossessed Palestinians of their land and property and denied Palestinians their economic and social rights, among many other abuses.

According to the report, Israel has done all this “against the Palestinian population with the intent to maintain this system of oppression and domination,” with a goal of “maximizing resources for the benefit of its Jewish population at the expense of Palestinians.”

When it comes to establishing apartheid, intent is key. International law defines apartheid as inhumane acts carried out “for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

In this case, it’s a system of oppression by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians — something Israeli leaders themselves have confirmed. “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” then Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2019. It’s “the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.”

Amnesty isn’t the first to identify and condemn Israeli apartheid. Palestinian human rights defenders, international law and UN experts, members of Congress, faith leaders, and advocates all over the world have applied the apartheid framework to Israeli violations for years.

Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem have each issued recent reports on Israeli apartheid. Amnesty’s report essentially closes the circle. There are no longer any globally known and respected human rights organizations who don’t recognize Israeli apartheid.

But even though the United States has long relied on Amnesty’s research to bolster State Department reports and other findings on human rights, U.S. government officials and their spokespeople rejected this report without even engaging with its research or conclusions.

Perhaps that wasn’t surprising. The U.S. has a long history of supporting Israel regardless of its human rights violations — from giving its military $3.8 billion annually to preventing the United Nations from holding Israel accountable for abuses.

But accountability is exactly what’s needed. U.S. foreign policy everywhere should be based on human rights, international law, and equality for all — including when it comes to Israel. That means treating Israel like any other country and cutting off military aid when it’s used for human rights abuses, something U.S. law already requires.

Amnesty’s newest report provides us with the information we need to fight for exactly that.

Via Otherwords.org

Some in Washington may be so glad to be rid of Netanyahu that they’ll welcome his even more hardline successor.

By Phyllis Bennis | –

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – The new Israeli government takes office already largely paralyzed. With eight diverse parties, they agree only on two things.

One, they want to get rid of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Check — that’s done. Two, given the unlikeliness of reaching agreement on any major policy changes, they all agree that the current situation of occupation and apartheid for Palestinians is quite sustainable for Jewish Israelis.

For now, the status quo will prevail. And that’s a problem.

Despite the presence of centrist, center-left, and one small Palestinian party, power in the new government lies with the far right. New Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a longtime leader of Israel’s illegal settlers, has bragged about being significantly to the right of his far-right mentor, Netanyahu. In 2013 he boasted, “I’ve killed a lot of Arabs in my life, and there’s no problem with that.”

In fact, power in both blocs in the Knesset — the new “change” coalition and Netanyahu’s Likud-led opposition — lies on the right to far-right to fascist-right trajectory of Israeli politics overall. Both blocs support maintaining the status quo regarding Palestinians.

So whatever shifts in language or tone might temporarily emerge from Israel’s post-Netanyahu leaders, there will be no shift in the conditions of life for Palestinians.

No change for those living under military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, no change for those living under the 15-year siege in Gaza and the consequences of Israel’s recent lethal bombardment there, no change for those living as third- or fourth-class citizens inside the 1948 territory of Israel, and no chance for those living as third- or fourth-generation refugees in Palestine’s far-flung diaspora.

Beyond more years of the same oppression, dispossession and apartheid for Palestinians, there’s an additional political danger here. The threat is evident in Washington, among some in the White House and Congress.

While continuing their uncritical support for giving billions of dollars in U.S. aid directly to the Israeli military, uncritically backing Israel in the UN, and protecting Israeli leaders from being held accountable in the International Criminal Court, many in Washington were still embarrassed by Netanyahu. They saw him, accurately, as an Israeli clone of Trump, sharing the former U.S. president’s overt racism, crude Islamophobia, xenophobic nationalism, and straight-up right-wing authoritarianism — not to mention sharing Trump’s disdain for Democrats, the press, and democracy.

Netanyahu, of course, had started down that path decades before Trump’s emergence as a political force. But Trump’s years in office enabled Netanyahu’s power to rise both inside Israel and in regional and even global arenas. Some of those among Washington’s current power brokers and policymakers will likely be so grateful to have Netanyahu out of the way that they’ll welcome Bennett, and his telegenic coalition partner and foreign minister Yair Lapid, as symbols of a new start — a “reboot” of Washington’s relationship with Israel.

And that’s very dangerous. Because this new government has no intention of changing Tel Aviv’s policies based on what the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem calls “a regime of Jewish supremacy” from the river to the sea.

This new government has no intention of ending Israeli efforts to undermine the U.S. return to the Iran nuclear deal, even if war might be the result. These new leaders have no intention of holding themselves accountable for violations of international humanitarian law and human rights in Gaza or elsewhere.

It’s just a few new faces coming to town — starting with the one who brags “I’ve killed a lot of Arabs in my life.” Hopefully there will be enough pressure continuing on those in Washington eager to welcome them to remind them that some of us do have a problem with that.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

MSNBC: “Air Strikes On Day 3 Of New Israeli Government”

In Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, a broad but shaky new “change coalition” claims it’s ready to finally oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the right-wing Likud leader who’s held the office for the last 12 years.

If approved, the new coalition would anoint as prime minister Naftali Bennett, a former Netanyahu ally who supports settlement expansion and annexation of much of the West Bank, and who is significantly further to the right than Netanyahu himself. In theory, if it stays in power for two years, the more centrist Yair Lapid would then take over as prime minister. But that’s a big “if” — and the new coalition may not even survive its initial vote of confidence next week.

More importantly, whoever is the next prime minister, Israel’s politics — particularly on Palestinian rights — have in the last several years shifted dramatically to the right, and it is the far right wing of this new “coalition” that remains the most powerful.

Here are four things to know about the government that could replace Netanyahu…

1. Israel’s emerging anti-Netanyahu coalition may or may not actually take power.

Netanyahu has shown a canny ability and ruthless willingness to use any methods to stay in power — not least to avoid prison on multiple counts of corruption — and he’s got a whole week to do so. He is expected to use bribes, threats, and punishments to lure at least one member out of the 61-vote bare majority coalition — and that would be enough to scuttle the deal.

Many anticipated that last month’s war against Gaza would increase public support for Netanyahu, but it seems it did not — at least not enough. But he has never given up using war to gain support, so keep an eye out for potential provocations against the usual targets of Netanyahu’s foreign policy, including Gaza, Iran, or perhaps Lebanon.

2. If Netanyahu is defeated and the “change coalition” does take over, its most powerful figure will be the ultra-right Naftali Bennett.

Bennett was a longtime Netanyahu supporter and remains a staunch backer of illegal Jewish settlement expansion and annexation of huge swathes of Palestinian territory in the West Bank. He’s significantly to the right of Netanyahu.

The “change coalition” parties range from Bennett’s extremist New Right Party to Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid formation — and even includes the left-Zionist Meretz party and the Palestinian Ra’am party. Its unity is limited to ousting Netanyahu. Its breadth and political diversity render it completely unstable, which will make any serious political action beyond maybe passing a budget impossible. That means political paralysis as long as it holds on to power.

3. Majorities in both blocs in the Knesset — Netanyahu’s and the “change coalition” — largely agree on maintaining the status quo of Israeli occupation and apartheid, as well as its regional anti-Iran militarism.

Despite the (likely short-lived) presence of centrist and left parties and a Palestinian party, the new coalition’s political power remains firmly in the center-right to extreme right spectrum that reflects Israeli politics overall. There will almost certainly be no resumption of calls for a “two-state solution,” (something long ago rendered impossible anyway because of escalating Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land) since Bennett opposes it even more vociferously than Netanyahu.

4. Even if it wins and manages to hold onto power, the “change coalition” will not bring significant improvement in the lives or rights of Palestinians.

As long as the U.S. continues to provide Israel with virtually unlimited economic, military, diplomatic, and political support and protection, regardless of Tel Aviv’s violations of international law and the systemic inequality and discrimination with which it treats the Palestinians, Israel has no reason to change.

For years, Netanyahu has claimed that he alone can deliver continued U.S. support and military aid. In fact, if the anti-Netanyahu coalition wins, a new prime minister — even one actually more extreme in his racist anti-Palestinian views than his predecessor — might well be seen as a boon for the White House and some in Congress, for whom Netanyahu has become somewhat of a liability.

Those politicians, largely Democrats, may be eager to look like they’re responding seriously to rising public opposition to Washington’s enabling of Israeli apartheid and human rights violations. Embracing a new prime minister with less well-known baggage in Washington could be just enough to clinch the deal.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

France 24 English: “Netanyahu seeks to peel off opposition supporters ahead of crucial vote”

The Biden administration thought it could muddle through with the usual pro-Israel platitudes, but rising awareness of Israeli apartheid is making that impossible.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – So just what is the Biden administration’s policy towards Israel?

Why did Biden take so long to respond to the violence as it spiraled out of control in Jerusalem and Gaza? Why do Biden’s repeated “Israel has the right of self-defense” litanies so closely match the positions of his predecessor, despite the wide disparity between Biden and Trump policies on so many other issues?

Throughout his campaign and the first months in office, President Biden made his main priorities clear: the pandemic and the economic crisis it created. People across the United States are suffering, and Biden’s first tier of importance has been to deal with those intersecting crises.

That makes a lot of sense — but there are consequences. Foreign policy, for one, gets virtually no priority. And transforming U.S. policy towards Israel-Palestine? Not on the agenda at all. Biden has yet to even appoint an ambassador to Israel, and waited nearly a week into the current crisis to send a special envoy.

There have been no meaningful policy shifts so far — only some effort to supplant Trump’s hardline language. Even then, Biden’s team only slowly, even reluctantly, began to respond to the violent escalation of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians across occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, inside pre-1967 Israel, and especially in its air war against the Gaza Strip.

The administration seemed to want to hold on to their operative position that “it’ll just have to wait.” Until suddenly it couldn’t wait, because the escalation of violence veered out of control.

The longstanding reality of Palestinians facing violence and eviction, living under occupation and blockade, denied the right to move, and being killed by Israeli settlers, police, and military forces — that’s all considered normal in official Washington. But when Israelis were suddenly threatened with the primitive rockets from Gaza, that turned it into a crisis.

During a briefing in the first days of the crisis, journalists pushed back against White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s familiar statement that Israel has “the right to self-defense.” They asked whether Palestinians also have the same right. But while she had said in other circumstances that “Palestinians and Israelis deserve equal measures of freedom, security, dignity and prosperity,” she had to twist herself into a verbal pretzel to avoid saying the words she had clearly been ordered not to say — that Palestinians also have the right of self-defense.

But amid rising opposition to this uncritical support for Israel from within Biden’s own party, this usual line hasn’t been sustainable. Biden himself has dealt with the tension by largely avoiding most public comment on the issue. But now, others in his administration are using language that not so subtly criticizes Israeli actions alongside Hamas’s.

When Biden’s UN ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield pushed “all parties to protect medical and other humanitarian facilities, as well as journalists and media organizations,” she was talking to Israel, not Hamas. The U.S. is “particularly concerned about protecting UN facilities as civilians seek shelter in about two dozen of them,” she added. Israeli airstrikes have destroyed medical, media, and UN facilities alike.

Similarly, when Greenfield urged all parties to avoid “evictions — including in East Jerusalem — demolitions and settlement construction east of the 1967 lines,” she was talking about Israel’s threatened evictions of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah to turn their homes over to Jewish settlers.

Greenfield has also called for an end to the home demolitions and settlement expansions that have been going on in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank for more than 50 years. That’s all on Israel — Palestinians are not dispossessing Jewish families of their homes.

So the language is changing. But the fundamental challenge is when and how will the policy change?

Despite hints and claims to the contrary, the Biden administration does have a policy in place on Israel-Palestine. Biden’s gone back to assert support for the widely discredited “two-state solution” that Trump discarded. But the rest of his policy so far preserves Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the sole and undivided capital of Israel. It includes keeping the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, in violation of international law and UN resolutions.

And it maintains the false claim that settlements are not illegal, paving the way for Israeli annexation of huge swaths of West Bank territory. Nor has the Biden administration issued a word of criticism regarding Israel’s 2018 “Nation-State Law” that states that only Jews, no other citizens of Israel, have the right of self-determination in Israel.

Those policies sound pretty extreme — and they are. They violate international law, they defy longstanding U.S. diplomatic practice (which was already overwhelmingly pro-Israel), and they guarantee permanent oppression of Palestinians.

Do Joe Biden and his top policy advisers actually believe in all that? Probably not. But those are the components of the policy that Biden inherited from Trump. And however extreme they may be, until Biden changes the actual policy, not just the rhetoric, they remain U.S. policy.

Beyond helping to end the devastation underway in Gaza, Biden could, in a minute, transform U.S. policy towards Israel and the Palestinians to one that actually reflects the human rights he claims are central to his foreign policy.

He could announce the U.S. embassy is leaving Jerusalem to return to Tel Aviv. He could acknowledge the clear reality that settlements are illegal, and that annexation is an unacceptable act of further colonial expropriation. And Biden could state unequivocally that regardless of how many states there are, U.S. policy towards Israel and towards the Palestinians from now on will be based on human rights and equality for all — for everyone, from the river to the sea.

If he looks carefully at U.S. opposition to Israel’s apartheid policies — now rising among young people, Democrats, African-Americans, Jews, and so many others across the country, as well as in the media and even in Congress — he’ll realize changing his own policy is just not that hard.

Equality for all — turns out it’s pretty popular in this country too.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Is U.S. opinion shifting on the Israel-Palestine conflict? | Inside Story”

Netanyahu’s political troubles — and an arms industry eager to battle test new wares on Gazans — may help explain the latest escalation of violence.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – “Both sides need to de-escalate.”

“No one benefits from this. ”

You’ll hear a lot of statements like that from pundits, elected officials, government spokespeople, and mainstream media anytime there’s violence in Israel-Palestine.

In the last few days, Israeli war planes, armed drones, and artillery mounted on tanks have killed more than 119 Palestinians in the besieged and blockaded Gaza Strip. Thirty-one of them were children. Rocket fire from Gaza left eight Israelis, including one child dead.

It’s easy to say no one benefits. But it’s not true.

Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has a whole lot to gain from this assault — among other things, it may keep him out of jail. More broadly, Israel’s strategic military planners have been waiting for another attack on Gaza. And for Israel’s arms manufacturers, assaulting Gaza is what the leading Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz has called “a cash cow.”

A Series of Provocations

It’s important to understand the specific factors that led to the current escalation in Israel’s horrific air war against Gaza.

The Hamas rocket fire that began on May 10 did not come out of nowhere. It was a response to Israeli police and settler attacks against Palestinians in Jerusalem, indeed across much of the West Bank as well.

Those attacks included demolitions to force Palestinians out of their homes and the continuing threat of eviction for families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem. They included police denying Palestinians access to the steps of the Damascus Gate of the Old City, their traditional gathering place to share iftar (sunset) meals during the fasting month of Ramadan.

And they included the deliberate provocation — not only to Palestinians but to Muslims everywhere — of Israeli police raiding the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in all of Islam, shooting stun grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets at worshipers at morning prayer in and around the mosque.

Meanwhile, given the experience of Gaza’s 2 million people — half of whom are children and around three-quarters of whom are refugees, who have lived through 14 years of a crippling Israeli blockade of the over-crowded, impoverished strip — it was hardly a surprise that such provocative actions would lead to a military response from Hamas.

But these actions don’t explain Israel’s choice — and it was certainly a choice — to immediately escalate its military assault to the level of full-scale war. So what does explain it?

Netanyahu’s Troubles

For starters, politics.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is on trial and facing years in jail for a wide range of corruption charges. As long as he remains prime minister, he can’t be jailed — but if he loses his ruling coalition, as he was on the verge of doing just before this crisis, he could go to prison.

So for Netayanhu, maintaining public support is not just a political goal but an urgent personal necessity. The mobilization of troops and the sight of Israel’s military in action allows him to reprise his longstanding role as the ultimate “protector” of Israel against its “enemy” — whoever the chosen enemy du jour might be.

It might be Iran (which, unlike Israel, does not have a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapons program). It might be the non-violent BDS (Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions) campaign, which leading Israeli leaders equate with Iran as an existential threat. Or it might be Gaza — as it was in 2008-2009, 2012, and especially for the 50 days of Israeli bombardment in 2014 that left 2,202 Palestinians, including 526 children, dead.

Netanyahu’s political capital is also bound up with his claim to be the only Israeli leader who can maintain the key levels of absolute impunity and uncritical economic and political support from the United States. Certainly the Trump years were characterized by Washington’s warmest embrace of Netanyahu’s right-wing government and the most extremist pro-Israel policies to date. But so far President Biden, presumably convinced that moving to restore the Iran nuclear deal means no other pressure on Israel is possible, has recalibrated only the rhetoric.

Washington’s actual support for Israel — including $3.8 billion in military support every year and the one-sided “Israel has the right of self-defense” rhetoric that refuses to acknowledge any such right to the Palestinians — remains in place. And history shows us that direct U.S. backing — in the form of additional cash and weapons as well as effusive statements of support — rise when Israeli troops are on the attack.

“Mowing the Grass”

Beyond the political advantages, there are strategic advantages for Israel to go to war against Gaza. Despite the withdrawal of Israeli settlers and troops from inside the Gaza Strip in 2005, since 2007 Gaza has remained under an Israeli-imposed blockade and siege. It is, under international law, still occupied.

And for years, Israel’s strategy towards Gaza and the Palestinians who live there has been one of absolute control. Israel controls who can enter or exit Gaza, which means control over people’s lives — and deaths. In the past, Israel has determined exactly how many calories Gazans should be able to eat each day — to “put them on a diet,” as Israeli military officials said in 2006.

And not surprisingly, Palestinian resistance to the years of siege and occupation in Gaza has at times included military resistance.

During the 2014 war, the influential Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies issued a report endorsing what had already become a standard approach for Israel toward Gaza. It was called “Mowing the Grass in Gaza,” and it described the lethal military assault as being “in accordance with a ‘mowing the grass’ strategy. After a period of military restraint, Israel is acting to severely punish Hamas for its aggressive behavior, and degrading its military capabilities — aimed at achieving a period of quiet.”

The report ignored the fact that Israel is an occupying power, that the people of Gaza are protected civilians, and that collective punishment, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the use of dramatically disproportionate levels of violence are all violations of international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions, and more. The report’s author was unequivocal that “a war of attrition against Hamas is probably our fate for the long term, and we will quite frequently need to strike Gaza in order keep the enemy off balance.”

Initiating periods of intense violence in Gaza, even when the resistance was non-violent such as the 2018 Great March of Return, has been Israel’s approach ever since.

Israel’s Arms Industry

Finally, these frequent attacks on Gaza have provided a critically valuable testing ground for the Israeli weapons manufacturers whose export deals — worth $7.2 billion in 2019 — represent a huge component of Israel’s GDP.

During the height of the 2014 assault, Ha’aretz reported that the company’s factories “worked around the clock turning out munitions as the army tested their newest systems against a real enemy. Now, they are expecting their battle-tested products will win them new customers.”

“Combat is like the highest seal of approval when it comes to the international markets,” explained Barbara Opall-Rome, the Israel bureau chief for Defense News told Ha’aretz. “What has proven itself in battle is much easier to sell. Immediately after the operation, and perhaps even during, all kinds of delegations arrive here from countries that appreciate Israel’s technological capabilities and are interested in testing the new products.”

“From a business point of view,” concluded the editor of Israel Defense, “the operation was an outstanding thing for the defense industries.”

As I write this seven years later, Israel’s latest air war against Gaza continues. Ground troops are massed outside the Strip, with tank-mounted artillery weapons aimed at 2 million people crammed into one of the most crowded territories on the earth. Half an hour ago a family of six was killed in their home as tank and air strikes continue.

Far beyond some claim of “self-defense,” are there other reasons Israel might once again be on the attack? When you look at who benefits, the answer might not be so complicated after all.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CBC News: The National: “Violence in Israel and Gaza spreads to the Occupied Territories”

The report reflects the power of decades of work in defense of Palestinian rights.

By Phyllis Bennis | –

( Commondreams ) – Human Rights Watch is the best-known and arguably the most influential among Washington elites of any of the many human rights organizations in the United States. So when HRW issues an unsparing, 200-plus page legal and factual report concluding that Israeli government authorities are guilty of the crime of apartheid, it is a very big deal.

The key findings are that it is Israel’s “intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.”

The language is legalistic and at times seems designed to deliberately muddle the actual charge HRW is making. But stripping away the obfuscation, the take-away is this: Human Rights Watch now acknowledges that Israel’s policies are designed to maintain Jewish domination over Palestinians across all the territory it controls, from the river to the sea. And Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid.

Human Rights Watch is hardly the first institution to identify Israeli suppression of Palestinian lives and rights as a violation of the International Covenant Against the Crime of Apartheid. Its report is far from the most clear and powerful in its conclusions. (The internationally respected Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, which for many years had also resisted calling Israeli violations “apartheid,” issued its own report in January, titled unequivocally “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the River to the Sea: This Is Apartheid,” which identifies the entire structure of Israeli control as constituting apartheid, not only in the OPT.) HRW’s own examples and narratives clearly reflect (and indeed frequently cite) the work of Palestinian, South African, and other allied human rights advocates and organizations over the last two decades or more. Books and articles have been written, Palestinian rights organizations have mobilized, UN conferences have been convened, US Congressmembers and influential Palestinian and other academics as well as faith leaders from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to the Poor People’s Campaign co-chair Rev. William Barber II have all spoken out to condemn Israeli apartheid.

When Human Rights Watch, by far the human rights organization with the most direct access to power in Washington, says that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid, that action not only reflects the discourse shift fought for and won by so many who have gone before, it also pushes that shift even farther.

So why is this latest report from HRW so very important? Precisely because its publication reflects (and pushes further) the gains that the global movement for Palestinian rights has made in transforming the public discourse regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The reason that activists and public scholars and others have worked so hard to build recognition that Israeli actions equal apartheid, is to reach the goal of mainstreaming that understanding. When Bishop Tutu said “Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation,” it was still too easy for US officials, congresspeople, media people in powerful venues to ignore his statement. As Palestinian and other academics began to use that definition routinely to describe Israeli policies, it moved the debate, but not enough. When more and more African-American and other progressive intellectuals, and UN officials, started to use the term, it got to be a little harder to ignore. And since Congresswoman Betty McCollum and Rev. Barber spoke out to identify and condemn Israeli apartheid, it has become harder still.

So when Human Rights Watch, by far the human rights organization with the most direct access to power in Washington, says that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid, that action not only reflects the discourse shift fought for and won by so many who have gone before, it also pushes that shift even farther. It is precisely because the word apartheid is so charged, and so powerful that HRW and others have been reluctant to say the word, to tell the obvious. And it is precisely because the Palestinian-led and broader movements for Palestinian rights have accomplished so much in changing that discourse, that an organization like HRW is now willing to join the expanding chorus. Whether they admit it or not, there can be little doubt that much of HRW’s decision to issue this report now was based on the recognition that not only is it no longer political suicide to call Israeli apartheid what it is, but that we are now at a tipping point whereby failing to call out apartheid risks losing credibility for a human rights organization.

That’s huge. The report reflects the power of decades of work in defense of Palestinian rights. It hasn’t ever been easy, and it won’t be easy now. It surprised no one that White House press secretary Jen Psaki, asked about the report, responded that it “is not the view of this administration.” But the report will make it much more difficult for reluctant mainstream Democrats to ignore Palestinian rights, and much easier for progressive Democrats, looking for evidence of broadening support for those rights, to take a stand. It will significantly strengthen our work to change US policy: winning support for the Palestinian Children and Families Act in Congress, moving forward on conditioning and eventually ending military aid to Israel, and mobilizing BDS campaigns against the kinds of corporations HRW calls on to stop supporting Israeli apartheid.

I remember discussions almost twenty years ago within the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, about launching a major campaign to popularize the apartheid framework. All of us took for granted that Israeli apartheid was the right description. The disagreement was over timing—would using the term then be a diversion, too much time spent debating the accuracy of the word? Or would it amplify the urgency of ending Washington’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people? The discourse has indeed shifted, and now Human Rights Watch itself recognizes the need to move with history and publicly recognize apartheid for what it is.

It’s a huge victory for our movement.

Apartheid & More

Human Rights Watch recognizes the “discriminatory intent by Israeli authorities to maintain systematic domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians” in the OPT and inside Israel. It then goes on to charge Israel with the additional crime of persecution, “based on the discriminatory intent behind Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the grave abuses carried out in the OPT.” Like apartheid, persecution is a crime against humanity according to the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the International Criminal Court.

The bulk of the report is devoted to a deep dive into the breadth and depth of Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, stories of Palestinian lives torn apart, community dispossession and loss of land, homes, and rights. It includes Israeli laws and statements of top officials proving the state’s intentions. Describing Israeli crimes committed both within Israel’s pre-1967 borders and the OPT, HRW states unequivocally that the Israeli government “grants Jewish Israelis privileges denied to Palestinians and deprives Palestinians of fundamental rights on account of their being Palestinian”—rejecting the pretext of so-called “security” concerns.

The report goes on to critique a long list of violations of Palestinian rights involving land, residency and more, in the occupied territory, inside Israel, and affecting Palestinian refugees. Targeting the refugees’ right to return to their homeland as an inextricable component of Israel’s crimes against humanity is particularly important. HRW has affirmed the Palestinian right of return before. But it’s new for the 43-year-old organization to highlight the connected violations of all three parts of the forcibly fragmented Palestinian people: those living under military occupation, those living as second- or third-class citizens inside Israel, and the millions of refugees in camps across the region and scattered around the world.

The report’s legal conclusions are followed by recommendations of actions—by Israel, the international community, the United Nations, Palestinian authorities, and by the United States.

The recommendations to Israel are sweeping. They start with “[d]ismantle all forms of systematic oppression and discrimination that privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians and otherwise systematically violate Palestinian rights in order to ensure the dominance of Jewish Israelis, and end the persecution of Palestinians, including by ending discriminatory policies and practices in such realms as citizenship and nationality processes, protection of civil rights, freedom of movement, allocation of land and resources, access to water, electricity, and other services, and granting of building permits.”

HRW urges implementation of specific rights long denied to Palestinian citizens of Israel (such as repealing the 2018 Nation-State law that states only Jews, no other citizens, have the right of self-determination in Israel). And it calls on Israel to “recognize and honor the right of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948 and their descendants to enter Israel and reside in the areas where they or their families once lived.”

HRW calls on all governments to impose sanctions, “including travel bans and asset freezes” against those responsible for Israel’s crimes against humanity, and to condition arms sales and military aid on Israel taking steps to end its crimes.

It calls on the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute individuals involved in the crimes of apartheid and persecution in Israel and the OPT. And on the United Nations to “investigate systematic discrimination and repression based on group identity in the OPT and Israel,” as well as to appoint a global envoy to “advocate for their end and identify steps that states and judicial institutions should take to prosecute” crimes of apartheid.

HRW calls on all governments to impose sanctions, “including travel bans and asset freezes” against those responsible for Israel’s crimes against humanity, and to condition arms sales and military aid on Israel taking steps to end its crimes. It also calls for individual governments to bring charges against Israeli officials based on universal jurisdiction.

And in a move that will strengthen the global BDS movement, it urges corporations to “cease business activities that directly contribute” to Israeli crimes. In a clear reference to companies such as US-based Caterpillar, long targeted for boycotts because its D-9 bulldozers are routinely used by the Israeli military for precisely this purpose, it specifies “equipment used in the unlawful demolition of Palestinian homes” as the example of activities directly contributing to apartheid and persecution.

In perhaps the most important section, HRW sets out a long list of actions the US government should take. Beyond issuing statements of concern and greater transparency, it calls on the White House and Congress to condition military aid on Israeli authorities taking “concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.” They also call for applying to Israel existing US laws restricting military aid to human rights violators—laws from which Congress and presidents have long exempted Israel.

Human Rights Watch titled their report “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.” The title may have referred to their finding that Israel’s policies are no longer in danger of “becoming” apartheid because that threshold has been crossed, and that Israel’s 1967 occupation can no longer be considered temporary. But the other threshold they’ve crossed is in the recognition that history has moved forward. The time has come, the discourse has been transformed, and their own credibility now depends on this new recognition of what many—including HRW’s own staff—have known for years. Human Rights Watch itself is over the threshold now, and it’s the movement for Palestinian rights that has made that crossing not only possible but necessary.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Via Commondreams

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Middle East Eye: “Israel guilty of ‘apartheid’ crimes against Palestinians”