Last week, the London-based Amnesty International joined the New York-based Human Rights Watch and the Jerusalem-based B’Tselem in calling Israel’s abusive and cruel system of domination over the Palestinians an apartheid, which amounts to a crime against humanity.
Predictably, Israel and its supporters condemned the ‘libellous’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ report, and rejected its detailed and well-documented findings as biased distortions. And like the two reports by B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, it seems none of the critics bothered to read the 280 pages Amnesty produced, let alone argue against the airtight case in them.
This trifecta of Israeli, American, and British documentation will prove an extremely important breakthrough for Palestinian human rights in terms of its timing, precedence, scope, legality, globality, boldness and ramifications.
Indeed, the timing could not have been more critical. These human rights organisations have exposed the apartheid state of Israel as more Arab regimes have embraced it, as Western governments have appeased it, and as the unabashed Palestinian leadership has submitted to it, shamelessly scheming against fellow Palestinians and bartering their rights for Israeli travel permissions for its cronies.
This is, of course, not the first time apartheid has been invoked internationally. A number of Israeli, British, American, and other foreign leaders have warned Israel against undermining the two-state solution by imposing dual legal regimes that ‘arguably’ constitutes apartheid in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.
But Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem have widened the scope beyond the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and for the first time, made the case against an Israeli apartheid regime imposed on all Palestinians from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Instead of looking at the Palestinians as separate communities experiencing different sets of circumstances, as the US Department of State’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices does to muddy the waters, the three organisations document the totality of the Israeli policies and their implications for all Palestinians.
In other words, the problem goes well beyond the occupation of 1967 to the Israeli dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948. And so, I believe, must the solution. The Israeli organisation, B’Tselem, has emerged as the torchbearer that inspired and encouraged its American and British counterparts to follow suit.
Excerpted: ‘Israel’s apartheid and the myth of the democratic Jewish state’.
Courtesy: Aljazeera.com
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