Our official new report looks at the decades-long suffering of Palestinians under Israel’s rule. We’ve concluded that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians throughout Israel & the Occupied Palestinian Territories amounts to apartheid.
Many people very upset with accusation of apartheid. Interestingly, no one can actually disprove it.
Amnesty carried out its investigation and analysis for four years, from 2017 until the end of 2021, so they did not exactly jump to conclusions. Amnesty carefully defines the crime with which it is charging the Israeli authorities. Apartheid, they say, is committed “when any inhuman or inhumane act (essentially a serious human rights violation) is perpetrated in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention to maintain that system.” AI adds, “A regime of oppression and domination can best be understood as the systematic, prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members of another with the intention to control the second racial group.”
Mondoweiss wonder how long NY Times will refuse to report on Amnesty International report.
MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan:
“You don’t have to believe Israel is committing apartheid…what you cannot do is simply shout down all references to apartheid as antisemitic…you have to engage with the evidence…you have to speak to Palestinians.”
Electronic Intifada feels annoyed that the three human rights groups, AI, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, do not place Israel’s apartheid policies into the context of settler colonialism. But the three reports are highly useful to Palestinians anyway.
Amnesty repeatedly stresses Israel’s “intent to maintain this system of oppression and domination” without making the explicit point that apartheid is a means towards the end of settler colonization: removing Palestinians from the land so that they may be replaced with foreign settlers.
Update: Very sad to hear that the US rejects the finding of AI.
Update: Other media have covered the story, but NY Times doesn’t appear to want to cover it. Subtitle from Mondoweiss:
A week has passed — and still not a single word in the ‘NYTimes’ about Amnesty International’s landmark report that found Israel practices ‘apartheid’
