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Amnesty International Calls For Ending Israeli Apartheid

This Tuesday, Amnesty International, the world’s leading human rights organisation, released a near 300 page report accusing Israel of committing the crime of Apartheid. The report has now created a consensus amongst human rights groups that Israel is a racist regime, built on Jewish supremacy.

Prior to the release of the lengthy and well researched Amnesty International investigation, Israel publicly urged the world’s leading human rights group to not release the Apartheid report, stating that it was “false, biased and antisemitic.” Similarly, on the day of the report’s release the Israeli foreign ministry, as well as leading pro-Israel groups such as the ADL, AIPAC and others, condemned Amnesty, stating that they are unjustly picking on Israel because of its Jewish identity. “These are the exact components from which modern antisemitism is made,” the Israeli foreign ministry re-iterated, following similar earlier remarks.

On the human rights group’s website, it states that “Amnesty International’s new investigation shows that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.” Indeed the documentation provided for such an argument is solid and doesn’t cut any corners.

The significance of Amnesty International’s report, is that there is now no question that amongst human rights groups there is now a consensus that Israel is a racist regime, which is responsible for the crime of Apartheid. This means that for policy makers throughout the world discarding the claims of Israel’s racist policies, practiced against Palestinians, it’s not as simple as labelling pro-Palestinian statements as anti-Semitic.

Last year, Human Rights Watch, the second biggest human rights organisation in the world, also released its own extensive report, entitled ‘A Threshold Crossed’, in which it too accused Israel of the crime of Apartheid. On top of this, Israel’s top human rights organisation B’Tselem released a statement of its own in late 2020, in which it officially accused Israel of operating a regime of “Jewish supremacy from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean sea”. This means that all the most reputable human rights organisations in the world, when it comes to Palestine-Israel, are in agreement on Israel being a racist regime that practices Apartheid.

Although this may have no immediate effect on the Israeli regime itself, in the long-run this has paved the way for a complete dismantlement of the Jewish State. If Israel is to follow the recommendations made in both Amnesty’s and HRW’s reports, this means that it will no longer be a State which is exclusively for Jews alone (as Netanyahu open stated) and instead a State for all of its citizens. Meaning that there will be no Zionist State, but instead a State of coexistence. For Israel and its supporters, they are in a tough position. They cannot refute the reports and have not even tried to do as such, but because they support Jewish supremacy over Palestinians in a Jewish State, they see the reports as a death sentence for Zionism.

Now that the most authoritative groups on the planet have declared it Apartheid, signaling they are not afraid of the accusations of anti-Semitism that will come there way as a result, and are actively urging people to campaign for an end to Israeli Apartheid, it has set the stage for a new solution to the conflict. On top of this, the International Criminal Court (ICC), is still yet to complete its investigation — announced 3 March 2021 — into Israeli warcrimes in the Palestinian occupied territories. If the ICC report finds Israel guilty of warcrimes, this could mean that the top international court issues arrest warrants for Israeli politicians and/or military leaders responsible for those crimes.

The mounting pressure on Israel from the human rights groups, as well as international legal efforts, namely from the ICC, is a very troubling development for Israel. This is especially the case at a time when Palestinians throughout historic Palestine are growing ever more agitated with their living conditions and are uniting in a way never seen before in the history of the conflict with Israel. If the Palestinians revolt and start a new Intifada, Israel could be in a very unstable position, and now the Palestinians have the legitimacy to argue for liberating all of their land, because they won the argument internationally.

Robert Inlakesh
Robert Inlakesh
Robert Inlakesh is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, writer, Middle-East analyst & news correspondent for The Last American Vagabond.
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