The Amnesty report seeks to link the universally accepted definition
of apartheid, “an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination
by one racial group over another,” with Israel’s treatment of
Palestinians. Amnesty argues that such treatment is a violation of
international law and a crime against humanity as set out in the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute and “include unlawful killing, torture, forcible transfer, and the denial of basic rights and freedoms.”
With that definition in hand, the report forensically examines the
treatment of Palestinians over decades in the Occupied Palestine
Territories (OPT), Gaza and Israel. Categories include Segregation and
Control, Dispossession of Land and Property, Deprivation of Economic and
Social Rights, Forcible Transfer, Administrative Detention and Torture,
Unlawful Killings and the Denial of Basic Rights and Freedoms.
Section 5.1 considers Israeli government policy that since the
country’s inception in 1948 has sought to insure a “Jewish demographic
hegemony.”
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.
One of many examples it cites of this policy is the passage in 2018
of the Basic Law which decreed Israel the nation state of the Jewish
people. The law, it notes in one example, was used to deny the
establishment of an Arabic school for Israeli-Palestinian citizens
living in the town of Karmiel on the grounds it would undermine the
town’s Jewish character.
The strength of the report - and the reason perhaps that the Israeli
government, pro-Israeli lobbies and other Jewish organisations have
reacted with such anger - lies in the use of the words from politicians
themselves to buttress the central argument that the state practices
apartheid. Thus it quotes then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posting
a message on Instagram in March 2019 that “Israel is not a state of all
its citizens” but rather “the nation-state of the Jewish people and
only them.”
It quotes the former mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek who when he was in office said this in 1990:
For Jewish Jerusalem, I did something in the past twenty-five
years. For East Jerusalem? Nothing! What did I do? Nothing. Sidewalks?
Nothing. Cultural institutions? Not one. Yes, we installed a sewerage
system for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you
think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were
some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that they would
catch it, so we installed sewerage and a water system against cholera.
Amnesty comments at length on unlawful killings. One not mentioned was the very recent death
of an 80-year old American-Palestinian Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad. He was
pulled from his car, beaten, handcuffed, blindfolded, gagged, forced to
the ground and left to die by soldiers of the Netzah Yehuda Battalion,
already notorious for abusing detainees. Washington demanded answers for the death of a citizen. The IDF responded
calling the incident a “moral failure and a failure of judgement.”
According to Haaretz the Netzah commander will be rebuked and two
subordinates dismissed but no further action will be taken and the
soldiers involved will not be held responsible for Omar As’ad’s death.
Nor, one suspects, will the young settlers who attacked Palestinians
planting olive trees on 21 January with stones and clubs. The video,
widely circulated, shows a car being set ablaze and the youths, faces
concealed with balaclavas, beating people and hurling heavy stones.
It is actions like these that bring shame to Israel. As Crispin Blunt said in our 31 December podcast:
“at the heart of this is a searing injustice and a growing
embarrassment about Israeli policy and the consequences of it for
others. And this does not reflect well, inevitably, on those people who
would otherwise be very sympathetic to the State of Israel.”
The comfortable assumption that Israel is a vibrant democracy does
not jibe with the facts on the ground. And while the description of the
state and its policies as apartheid may be thought harsh it is not, on
balance, unfair. Rather than describing Amnesty as a propagandist for
terror organisations and the report as a slur and anti-Semitic, Israel
and its supporters must see the treatment of its Arab subjects for what
it is: abusive and grossly unjust. Israel is neither a state for all its
citizens, nor for Palestinians excluded from citizenship and the
exercise of their rights.