Amnesty says Israel is an apartheid state. Many Israeli politicians agree
JVL Introduction
In a powerful article in the Guardian, Chris McGreal looks particularly at American responses to the Amnesty report on Israel and apartheid.
He contrasts their kneejerk reactions and stock phrases – Amnesty “hates Israel”, it’s a “libel” against Israel, it’s demonisation, delegitimisation – with the willingness of Israeli politicians, over the last decades to be open about their political system, and the tendencies within it towards apartheid.
These tendencies have now become full-blown.
See also: Chris McGreal sets the record straight following Archbishop Tutu’s death.
This article was originally published by the Guardian on Sat 5 Feb 2022. Read the original here.
Amnesty says Israel is an apartheid state. Many Israeli politicians agree
While some in Washington DC and US media decry Amnesty’s conclusions, it’s a different story among some Israeli leaders
Who speaks for Israel? Rightwing lobby groups in Washington and US politicians would have Americans believe that it is them – and not Israel’s own former prime ministers and others who actually live in the Jewish state.
Earlier this week Amnesty International released a report making a 280-page case that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians constitutes apartheid. The response in the US was a wave of orchestrated outrage – outrage that not only denies what many prominent Israelis say is true but, in effect, denies their right to say it.
A joint statement by American groups that claim to be pro-Israel – including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a powerful rightwing lobby organisation – accused Amnesty of seeking to “demonize and delegitimize the Jewish and democratic State of Israel”, a formulation frequently used to imply antisemitism.
Groups that made little criticism of Israel’s military collaboration with South Africa’s white minority regime now profess concern that Amnesty’s report diminishes the suffering of black Africans under apartheid.
As the Guardian’s correspondent in Jerusalem during the Palestinian uprising of the early 2000s, the second intifada, after covering the end of white rule in South Africa, I was struck by how frequently prominent Israelis drew comparisons between the occupation and apartheid. I also noticed how hard pro-Israel groups in the US fought to delegitimize any such discussion.
Yet Amnesty explicitly said that it is not drawing direct parallels with the old South Africa. Its report accuses Israel of crimes against humanity under international laws, including the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the 1998 Rome statute of the international criminal court, which defines apartheid as systematic racial domination.
That did not stop American politicians from piling in with accusations that Amnesty “hates Israel”, although not always to the best effect. The Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas exposed his tenuous grasp on the situation by denouncing the human rights group for “attacking a free democracy where Jews, Christians, and Muslims live in peace”.
If the critics of the report have read it at all, they rarely engage with its detailing of Israel’s system of military rule, segregation and forced removals that treats Palestinians as an inferior racial group. Instead critics are more focused on smearing Amnesty.
A Wall Street Journal editorial, ignoring the report’s substance, called it a “libel” against Israel and claimed that Amnesty is in the company of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran because the human rights group “all but says the Jewish state shouldn’t exist”.
For those charges to stand up, you have to believe Israel has been led by antisemites who hate their own country. In smearing those who lay out a reasoned case that Israel is guilty of apartheid under international law, American critics are conveniently sidestepping years of damning judgments by Israeli leaders.
As Yossi Sarid, a former Israeli cabinet minister, ex-leader of the opposition, and member of the Knesset for 32 years, put it in 2008: “What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck – it is apartheid.”
Leading Israeli politicians have warned for years that their country was sliding into apartheid. They include two former prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who can hardly be dismissed as antisemites or hating Israel.
“As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish or non-democratic,” Barak said in 2010. “If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
Israel’s former attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, was even clearer.
“We established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day,” he said in 2002.
Ami Ayalon, the former head of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service, has said his country has “apartheid characteristics”. Shulamit Aloni, the second woman to serve as an Israeli cabinet minister after Golda Meir, and Alon Liel, Israel’s former ambassador to South Africa, both told me that their country practices a form of apartheid.
Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem, published a groundbreaking report last year that described “a regime of Jewish supremacy” over Palestinians that amounted to apartheid. Another Israeli group, Yesh Din, gave a legal opinion that “the crime against humanity of apartheid is being committed in the West Bank”.
The reckoning is not confined to the political class. “The cancer today is apartheid in the West Bank,” AB Yehoshua, one of Israel’s greatest living writers, said in 2020. “This apartheid is digging more and more deeply into Israeli society and impacting Israel’s humanity.”
Those views may be disputed by many in Israel, even a majority. But Aipac and other US groups – which have spent years shoring up support in America for rightwing Israeli governments intent on maintaining their particular form of apartheid – are not concerned about truth.
Hardline pro-Israel groups are lashing out now in fear that the narrative in America is finally shifting. Americans no longer uncritically accept the idea that Israel is desperate for peace and that the occupation is temporary. More and more Americans now see the system Israel has constructed as oppressive and its governments as disingenuous.
Perhaps most worryingly for the Israeli government’s apologists, an increasing number of Jewish Americans share that judgment. A survey of Jewish voters in the US last year found that 25% agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state”. The days of rightwing apologists for Israel imposing their false narrative may finally be numbered.
- Chris McGreal is the former Guardian correspondent in Jerusalem and Johannesburg
Chris McGreal’s analysis of how pro-Zionist groups and media commentators in the United States have reacted to the Amnesty International report is like a blast of fresh air: the sort of journalism that restores faith in the trade. That he can list the names of Israeli politicians who have used the term “apartheid” over many years is answer enough to those in America and Britain who – in the face of truth – reach for smears and tired lies.
But the most striking aspect of the Guardian’s coverage of the Amnesty report in the context of our own domestic politics is that there isn’t any. Nobody at the Guardian seems to have thought of asking Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, how he squares his support for Zionism with a document which sets out in relentless detail how Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people is built on a belief in racial superiority. That is odd, considering that apartheid is an internationally recognised crime and Keir Starmer is supposed to be a human rights lawyer.
Given that Amnesty has more than 200,000 members in the UK – many of whom may still be Guardian readers – it seems strange that the paper doesn’t feel the need to pursue that line of inquiry. Or perhaps I am missing something….?
This silence, this extraordinary lack of interest by a newspaper which is usually so concerned with human rights abuses in other countries, is thrown into even sharper relief by the attention it has given to Whoopi Goldberg.
Both stories broke on 1 February. So far the Guardian has carried three reports about off-the-cuff remarks by an American talk-show host: her apology, her suspension and an explanation of how little Americans know about the Holocaust. All in, 1,905 words.
Compare that to Amnesty’s analysis of the systematic dehumanisation of the Palestinian people – the product of four years’ work by one of the world’s biggest and most respected human rights organisations – to which the Guardian has given 1,588 words. And more than half of those have come from Chris McGreal.
When the Guardian’s editorial bigwigs decide that their first duty is to ensure that Keir Starmer is not asked any awkward questions, and their second is to smother any British debate on apartheid, then their journalism putrefies and they betray their readers.
I suggest that JVL members and readers of your website do what the Guardian is too cowardly to do: ask Keir Starmer what he thinks of the Amnesty findings?
Correct. But note the adjective “cruel”, in Amnesty report. The dispossession of land, homes, atrocities on any resistence by careless destruction of life and property, goes way beyond any atrocity committed by South Africa.
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I’m amazed that the Guardian has not yet found an excuse to get rid of McGreal – one of a small band of fast vanishing brave journalists left on this once left of centre paper. Novara media has an item that Viner has hired the Daily Mail journalist Emine Sinmaz the journalist who authored the scurrilous ‘Corbyn’s wreath at Munich terrorists’ graves’ which was amongst the worst of many lying and damaging articles by the msm designed to damage Corbyn.
IHRA definition states clearly that any accusation that Israel is an apartheid state is another example of anti-Semitism. No. It is the denial of a self evident truth to be constantly ignored by MSM. Does it matter who owns & controls MSM? Speaking truth to power with no voice & no platform is difficult.
Neither the IHRA definition nor the attached examples mention Apartheid. Apologists for Israel try to insist that the implication of the definition is that the description of the Israeli state as an an Apartheid state breaches the definition. This is highly contestable, even within the distorted discourse promoted by the definition, there is no ‘state clearly’ and it is a serious error to suggest there is – it is adopting the terms of reference of the Hasbara machine.
I welcome the fact that the Guardian has decided to publish its “view” on the Amnesty report. I now look forward to the paper asking Keir Starmer to explain his view.
McGreal article was published by the Guardian online on Saturday night (5 Feb). It did not appear this morning (7 Feb) in the printed version of the paper. Instead, there is a much softened and shorter version as an editorial. Unlike the article, it makes no mention of the fake accusations of ‘antisemitism’. I wonder why…