Is Israel an Apartheid State? Is Amnesty International Antisemitic?
JVL Introduction
Tony Klug has been involved in issues around the Israel-Palestine conflict for over fifty years and his commitment to the cause of Palestinian rights is unwavering.
In this contribution to the Israel-Palestine Journal he asks a number of pertinent questions of the recent Amnesty Report which labelled Israel an apartheid state.
In sum
- While Israel has unquestionably constructed an apartheid regime in the occupied West Bank, might its recasting as such deflect the focus from the need to end the occupation, of which apartheid is an ugly offspring?
- The reality in Israel proper is trickier. While there is discrimination, when does it pivot into apartheid?
- Surrounding Middle-East countries, to look no further afield, are riddled with discrimination against minorities of all kinds. Should these situations be also characterised as apartheid?
- But if apartheid is everywhere, then it is nowhere.
- From this perspective, whatever the intentions of the authors, depicting sovereign Israel uniquely as an apartheid state can evoke for many people the age-old antisemitic practice of singling out the Jews (in one guise or another) for special treatment.
- How might this characterisation of the state of Israel translate into any tangible advance for the Palestinians?
And he suggests Amnesty might give serious consideration to a proposal he and the Palestinian writer Sam Bahour first put forward in 2014, to the effect of “a Palestinian state now or equal rights until there is a solution” – a practical, human-rights-focused proposal centred on the principle of equality (national or individual).
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Thanks to the Palestine-Israel Journal for permission to reproduce this article. See the contents of its special issue here.
This article was originally published by Palestine Israel Journal on Tue 24 May 2022. Read the original here.
Is Israel an Apartheid State? Is Amnesty International Antisemitic?
Apartheid and antisemitism are abominations which have caused immense suffering to millions of people. So, to use these terms accurately is of critical importance. Cheapening their meaning by using them loosely is itself abominable, as it demeans their authentic victims.
Mercifully, apartheid, in its country of origin, was officially abolished in 1994. Ominously, antisemitism is again on the rise. Now Amnesty International (AI), the widely respected international human rights organization, accuses the Jewish state – conceived as a bulwark against antisemitism – of practicing apartheid; not just in the context of a military occupation but at its core. In turn, the Israeli Government accuses AI of antisemitism. Are these charges cheap sloganeering or is there substance to either of them?
Israel Routinely Violates Human Rights in the OPT
That Israel has been a serial violator of human rights mainly, although not solely, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) it captured in the 1967 war is well documented and denied only by those who consider compelling evidence of no consequence. Over the 55 years of Israel’s presumptively provisional occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), successive Israeli Governments have encouraged hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israeli civilians to settle in the OPT in close proximity to 3-4 million Palestinians.
While the Israeli settlers in the West Bank have full Israeli citizenship with all the rights and privileges that bestows on them, including being subject to Israeli law and justice, the occupied Palestinians, a stone’s throw away, have very few rights and are subject to Israeli military rule, which rarely dispenses any sort of justice.
Shootings and killings by Israeli armed forces, forced evictions and house demolitions, and violent attacks by settlers are commonplace. Palestinians under occupation are routinely humiliated and corralled by a system of permits, checkpoints, and roadblocks. All Israelis (Palestinian as well as Jewish) are in a way complicit in these misdemeanors just by virtue of being citizens of the country. Conscious of this, a hardy number of them protest vigorously. Some are descendants of Jews who took refuge in Israel from violent pogroms and relentless persecution in Eastern and Central Europe – not least in the Ukraine and Russia — and recoil at what is being done in their name, which they regard as not just an assault on universal human rights but also an affront to traditional Jewish values of peace, justice, liberty, and equality, proudly echoed in the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence.1
In sum, in the same territory, two populations of different ethnicities live, work, and play under different, and blatantly unequal, legal and political regimes. Israel’s only defense against this being tantamount to apartheid is that its rule in the OPT is a temporary occupation that will end imminently and that meanwhile it has been observing the Geneva Convention prohibition against changing the legal and political status of an occupied territory and population. After more than half a century of physical, social, and demographic changes on the ground, it’s not a very strong case, but it’s the only argument that Israel can make.
Apartheid Debate Could Deflect Focus on Ending the Occupation
For years, loyal Israelis have been warning that indefinite occupation of the West Bank together with the construction of settlements there would lead inexorably to a system of apartheid. Among them were former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and even David Ben-Gurion (in the wake of the 1967 war), as well as former Likud MK and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin. Similar warnings have been issued by diverse others, including former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
These warnings went unheeded while successive Israeli Governments steadily and deliberately built a structure of apartheid in the West Bank, only to react with disingenuous fury when their own diligent creation was called out for what it is. To then accuse the accuser of antisemitism is monstrous. It insults not just the accuser but also the Palestinian victims of Israeli abuses; the past, present, and future Jewish victims of authentic antisemitism; the black and other hapless victims of white-ruled South Africa, and ordinary Israeli citizens who are sometimes the targets of baseless vile epithets which may indeed be motivated by anti-Jewish bigotry. But in this case, the charge is far from baseless.
A more fitting Israeli response would be to deconstruct the apartheid consciously created in the West Bank by swiftly ending the occupation. Unfortunately, there is no sign of this intention at present. What we are more likely to witness is a repetition of the standard Israeli response to allegations of past misdemeanors: first ignore, then deny, followed in turn by discredit, acknowledge, excuse, justify, and finally embrace, culminating in Israel’s kneejerk supporters eventually accepting and validating a practice they once considered abhorrent.
While there is plenty of evidential justification for characterizing the regime in the West Bank as apartheid, there is a caveat: What actually is gained by labeling it as such? The report calls for an end to apartheid, but it does not call for an end to occupation. This seems absurd, as the only sure way of dissolving apartheid on the West Bank is to terminate the occupation. They are organically linked. Switching the focus to apartheid may obscure the underlying reality of the occupation. It could also play into the hands of those who wish to see the occupation extended indefinitely, and it chimes with the paradigm currently favored by Prime Minister Bennett of “shrinking the conflict,”2 the most recent version of the deceptive idea of making the occupation more bearable rather than ending it. Is this what AI wants, too?
Thus, in the case of the West Bank, the issue is more tactical (whether to call it occupation or apartheid) than substantive. The matter is a lot trickier, however, in the territory of Israel proper.
When does discrimination pivot into apartheid?
That there is legal and social discrimination within sovereign Israel (elaborated in the AI report) and, in some instances, an entrenched pattern of abuses is not in question, but whether this amounts to apartheid is not just a matter of ticking boxes. It’s also a matter of where to position the bar (analogous to when maltreatment becomes torture), bearing in mind that minorities are discriminated against and persecuted in just about every country in the region (and many beyond), in several cases considerably more egregiously than in sovereign Israel (see below).
The crime of apartheid is considered exceptionally serious and – unlike charges of torture, disappearances, extrajudicial executions, and so on – AI has never leveled this charge against any country before, apart from one qualified exception in Myanmar. This puts an onus on the worldwide human rights body to establish a threshold against which countries that discriminate against their minority (or in some cases majority) populations may be assessed. That would be a valuable investigation. But AI has skipped this crucial step and plunged straight into the combustible apartheid pit by picking out sovereign Israel from a clutch of regional contenders and historical foes.
The best way to combat violations of human rights in the Israeli-Palestinian cauldron is to bring the conflict to a tolerable end. As someone who has tried to contribute to that quest for the last few decades, I struggle to see how the AI report is helpful to that goal. The Palestinians are well able to present their own case but, in fully adopting it, AI paints an almost entirely one-sided picture, even if the raw facts it presents, in and of themselves, stand up to scrutiny. An innocent might conclude that the whole point of Israel was to persecute Palestinians.
Putting the Israeli Jewish Perspective into Context
The Israeli Jewish perspective – barely touched on in the AI report, even as context (aside from a passing reference to “the Holocaust”) – is, in a nutshell, that at a time of unprecedented international turmoil, the Jewish state was the product of a relentlessly persecuted people’s frantic survival strategy, that the Arabs rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan endorsed by more than two-thirds of the General Assembly and attempted to destroy Israel in 1948 and again in 1967, and that the conflict has been marked by
Arab antisemitism and Palestinian terrorism, which have posed serious security challenges for Israel. Again, these raw assertions stand up to scrutiny but paint a distorted picture.
It is important to grasp the core perspectives of the principal parties, because no resolution of the conflict that fails to accommodate the bare minimum aspirations of both peoples is possible or sustainable. But when third parties fully embrace just one or the other discourse, the effect of their lopsided campaigns is most often to heighten tensions, aggravate the problems, and further poison communal relations in countries around the world.
The charge that sovereign Israel, alone and from the beginning, is intrinsically an apartheid state — and that that is the essence and substance of the problem — makes light of complexity. It plays into the simplistic notion, promoted by partisans of both sides, that the Arab-Israel conflict, from its inception, is an elemental struggle between good and evil. Eradicate Zionist Israel and dismantle its settler-colonial apartheid, cries the Israel-vilifying current, and all conflict will disappear. Once the Arabs stop their Jew-hatred and give up violence, cries the Palestinian-demonizing current, all the problems will be solved.
By constantly blurring the distinctions between sovereign Israel and the occupied West Bank, the AI report underplays the reality that Palestinian Israelis – unlike occupied Palestinians and South African blacks under apartheid – do have citizenship of the country they inhabit, even if it doesn’t confer the full package of rights and privileges enjoyed by Jewish Israelis. Palestinian Citizens of Israel (PCIs), who comprise roughly 20% of the Israeli population, carry Israeli passports and have freedom of movement and expression and the right to vote and stand for election.
Currently, there are 14 Palestinian members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset out of a total of 120. An Arab Islamic party is part of the governing coalition. There are Palestinian diplomats, professors, doctors, senior judges, all working in non-segregated institutions. Palestinians are active in business, journalism, sports, and other professions. A Muslim captains Israel’s national football team, which comprises Jewish, Arab and Muslim players.
If Apartheid Is Everywhere, It’s Nowhere
These observations are made not to paint a rosy picture, as PCIs do suffer discrimination, most acutely experienced by Bedouin in southern Israel, but to bring them into the picture. The critical question is: Does the discrimination within sovereign Israel amount, on the whole, to the grave sin of apartheid, especially when compared with other countries? A brief glimpse at the severe discrimination suffered by minorities in some other Middle East states is enough to suggest that if the bar is lowered to include sovereign Israel, most other countries in the region would almost certainly be guilty of the crime of apartheid, too. And if apartheid is everywhere, it’s nowhere.
In Egypt, systematic bias against Copts and other Christians in the job market and for planning permits, along with unprecedented persecution, was documented in an independent 2018 report.3 The Minority Rights Group has reported severe discrimination against the Baha’i population, Jehovah Witnesses, and Ahmadiyya.
Syria is home to a diverse population, including over 2 million Kurds, many of whom are excluded from citizenship. The ruling Alawite sect comprises less than 15% of Syria’s population, yet dominates the upper echelons of the political, military, security, and intelligence sectors. Discrimination is rife, often at the expense of the Sunni majority. Violent suppression of opponents of the regime is commonplace.4
In Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, over 100,000 settlers from Turkey replaced thousands of Greek Cypriots who were evicted (or “ethnically cleansed”) from their homes during the 1974 partition. Today, Turkish settlers exceed the number of indigenous Turkish Cypriots.5 Turkish Cypriots were simultaneously ethnically cleansed from Greek areas. Neither side has committed to a right of return. Turkey itself has a long history of discrimination against the Kurdish minority, including sporadic massacres.6
“From Saudi Arabia’s establishment in 1932, its minority Shi’ite population [about 15%] has been subject to discrimination and sectarian incitement,” according to the International Crisis Group. Shiites are underrepresented in official positions, and students complain of open hostility from Sunni instructors. Jobs in the police and military are rare and promotion prospects rarer still.7
In the Sunni-led monarchy of Bahrain, the Shi’ite population outnumbers the Sunnis, yet they, too, suffer from institutionalized discrimination. Shi’ite protests are harshly suppressed, and a heavy security presence in primarily Shi’ite villages is maintained. To erode the Shi’ite majority, foreign-born Sunnis are encouraged to become citizens, while the citizenship of hundreds of Shi’ites has been revoked.8
Millions of Palestinians suffer discrimination all over the Middle East. Apart from Jordan, Arab states routinely deny them citizenship, even when they, their parents, grandparents, or even great grandparents were born in the country. Whatever the original justification, their continuing limbo is a severe curtailment of their basic rights. In Lebanon – probably the most egregious case – approximately 280,000 Palestinians are barred from some 70 occupations and from owning businesses and property. They mostly live in dire poverty, are excluded from most public schools and denied free treatment in hospitals.9 At different times, Palestinians have fled or been expelled from Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.
Further afield, India has recently enshrined discrimination in law by dividing migrants into Muslims and non-Muslims.10 Kashmir has been described as “a place of no rights” where discrimination is rife.11 Pakistan officially became an Islamic state in 1973, making the government beholden to Sharia law, marginalizing other communities.12 Similarly for Iran. Then there is the matter of China’s appalling treatment of the Uyghurs and the systemic discrimination against indigenous peoples in many countries around the world, including the Americas (North and South), Europe, and the Pacific.
This is just a peek. It is neither systematic nor exhaustive, but it does point to inequitable treatment as a ubiquitous problem. So why single out only sovereign Israel for intensive scrutiny?
Singling out sovereign Israel may be perceived as antisemitism
At the launch of the report on February 1, 2022, Dr Agnès Callamard, the new AI secretary general, tried to preempt this question, maybe in recognition that it is here where the charge of antisemitism resonates for many Jews, and for good reason. For long stretches of history, Jews were singled out, scapegoated, and severely persecuted for catastrophes like plague, famine, war, poverty, etc. for which they bore no responsibility or, in other cases, for misdeeds for which they were no more to blame than everyone else. This was classical antisemitism.
So, when the Jewish state is singled out for the crimes of the many, this inevitably raises hackles and summons old ghosts, even among Jews who do not necessarily consider themselves strong supporters of Israel but take exception to the mark of Cain being reserved for the Jewish state. The accusation of apartheid is not like the accusation of torture or other atrocities. Countries can stop practicing torture or disappearances or executions or even apartheid in a province or an occupied territory (by ending the occupation), but when apartheid is alleged to be in the very DNA of a state, the implication is pretty self-evident: exclusion and eradication, familiar Jewish experiences.
Dr Callamard endeavored to head off some of the criticism and inferences by observing that, some four years earlier, AI had accused Myanmar of practicing apartheid against the Rohingya people in Rakhine State.13 The two cases are not really equivalent, inasmuch as the accusation in one case is confined to a country practicing apartheid in a particular region and in the other case being apartheid. Myanmar is also far removed from Israel’s regional and political context.
The other mitigation she offered was that AI recognizes the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and recognizes the State of Israel. It is not clear how she squares that with what is tantamount to a full frontal assault on Israel’s raison d’etre. This is the problem with overstepping the mark without properly thinking through the implications. It can lead to overstepping another mark in compensation, aggravating the problem rather than ameliorating it. The more she tried to dig herself out of the hole of AI’s own making, the deeper it became.
Since when does AI recognize (or not recognize) states? States, not human rights organizations, recognize states. Does AI recognize any state apart – apparently – from Israel? Does it explicitly recognize the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination or only the Jewish people’s right? It looks as if these positions were hastily improvised in a belated attempt to balance the books, inviting justifiable brickbats from both sides. With this report, AI has politicized human rights, which is likely to affect its future work and undermine its hard-earned reputation for impartiality.
Equal Rights on the Road to an Equitable Solution
Even at this late stage, I would urge AI to give serious consideration to adopting a proposal along the lines of one co-authored in 2014 by Palestinian thinker Sam Bahour and myself to the effect of “a Palestinian state now or equal rights until there is a solution.”14
This is a practical, human-rights-focused proposal centered on the principle of equality (national or individual), with the potential to attract widespread support from diverse constituencies. With appropriate pressure, it could spark new currents and promote vigorous debate within Israel and among the Palestinians, and thereby hasten the return to the agenda of practical alternatives for resolving the conflict. It would be unifying rather than divisive, with no one having to feel demonized and isolated.
To summarize, the charge of apartheid in the West Bank is self-evidently true, but switching the focus from occupation to apartheid obscures the imperative to end the occupation, of which apartheid is an ugly offspring. The paramount need is for a worldwide campaign to end the occupation. Only then will the two sides be freed and required to confront their internal inequities, including discriminatory practices.
Hundreds of thousands of learned books and millions of articles have been devoted to explaining, understanding, and trying to resolve this wretched, multilayered, conflict. For AI to throw its full weight behind just one, inevitably skewed, discourse regarding Israel proper is simplistic and not very constructive. For decades, both Palestinians and Israelis have tended to measure their advances by the setbacks of the other side. The AI report fits this pattern and doubtless will be viewed as a setback of sorts for Israel. Whether this setback will translate into a tangible advance for the Palestinians, however, is another question altogether.
Dr Tony Klug has written extensively on Israeli-Palestinian issues over many years. He has been a special advisor on the Middle East to the Oxford Research Group and a consultant to the Palestine Strategy Group and the Israel Strategic Forum. In the past, he was active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and served for 15 years as a staff member at Amnesty International.
Endnotes
1 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/truman-israel/
2 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/world/middleeast/israel-bennett-palestiniansshrinking.html
3 Harriet Sherwood, The Guardian, 10 January 2018.
4 https://minorityrights.org/country/syria/; https://origins.osu.edu/article/alawites-andfate-syria?language_content_entity=en
5 https://theowp.org/northern-cyprus-turkish-cypriots-outnumbered-by-mainland-turks/
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_of_Kurdish_people_in_Turkey
7 https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/saudi-arabia/shiite-question-saudi-arabia
8 https://borgenproject.org/shia-refugees-in-bahrain/
9 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/16/palestinians-in-lebanon-its-like-livingin-a-prison
10 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-50670393
11 https://www.justsecurity.org/71840/kashmir-a-place-without-rights/
12 https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/pakistan-is-already-an-islamic-state
13 https://www.amnesty.org.uk/myanmar-apartheid-against-rohingya
14 Le Monde Diplomatique, 8 April 2014
Tony Klug’s makes some good points with some interesting analysis , but his conclusion is rather weird and he seems to fallen into the classic ‘both sides’ pit hole that the mainstream media perpetuates.
HRW and B’Tselem have also both come out as saying that Israel is an occupier settler state and an apartheid regime.
Are they now also anti-Semitic , especially as Tony Klug has already admitted in his article that Israel does actually practice apartheid against Palestinians? It’s just that you shouldn’t mention this truth, because if you do, then you are guilty of Israel not pursuing the path to peace!?
This is a poor article by Tony Klug and it seems he hasn’t read the Amnesty report – he doesn’t even put it in his references.
The Amnesty report is clear about the segregation of and discrimination against Arab groups in Israel. This is how the the ‘Jewish state’ was founded and what it continues to do. It is indisputable that Israeli Jews enjoy privileges that are not afforded to others.
We cannot make sense of the occupation without understanding how Israel operates – apartheid doesn’t magically disappear on the Israeli side of the green line (a line that has been politically dead in any case for decades). The Jewish ethno-state is very hard to defend and needs to be looked at on its own terms and not subjected to the whataboutery of other states.
Amnesty Internationals report is titled
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity”
and includes the following in its Introduction:
“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.”
The article by Tony Klug discusses whether such a point of view
is antisemitic or not and arrives at a partial solution.
I share his reluctance to use the word apartheid for (I think?)
the same reason. The clip I quoted from AI was correct in its statement up to the end of the first sentence***. The last sentence is I assume a necessary condition in international law for the existence of Apartheid? The next question
is the important one of sufficiency which Klug also
tackles..
I first came across the question of Apartheidt in respect of
Israel in an academic journal and it was followed by a
refutation by a different author in a possibly later Edition.
There has been much discussion about this question
and it seems to me that it is obscuring the REAL and
outrageous injustice to Palestinians in Israel and the
Occupied Territories and – more importantly how
to correct it.
I am NOT an expert in Middle East affairs and nothing
approaching it – just a scientist with nerdy propensities
so I hope you dont mind me giving my pennyworth !!
*** Whether the situation is REALLY to the benefit of
Jewish Israelis is – I think – arguable.
Tony Klug by interpreting Israeli apartheid as a form of discrimination between different ethnicities exposes the weakness of the apartheid framework when it is detached from the settler colonial dynamics to which, in Israel, it is organically linked. Israel is not the only country which as a matter of policy treat some ethnic groups less favourably than the dominant one but can Klug point to another example of a state that, by its constitution, is committed to pursue a policy of dispossessing one ethnic group in order to entrench the dominance of another? Can he point to an analogous case to a Palestinian Israeli citizen not being permitted to set up home with her/his Palestinian married partner in Israel? To cite only a brief paragraph from Adalah, the Palestinian human rights organization which has identified more than 65 laws which discriminate between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jewish citizens:
“Decades of land confiscations and discriminatory planning policies have confined many Palestinian citizens to densely populated towns and villages that have little room to expand. Meanwhile, the Israeli government nurtures the growth and expansion of neighboring predominantly Jewish communities, many built on the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. Many small Jewish towns also have admissions committees that effectively bar Palestinians from living there.” https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-land-policies-hem-palestinians Does this not amount to apartheid?
Amnesty International concluded that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians living under its control – be it in the OPT or behind the Green Line – met the Rome Statute’s definition of apartheid. AI had previously come to this conclusion with Myanmar, so it’s clear that Israel is NOT being singled out. Klug is minimizing this because he’s determined to weaponize anti-Semitism against AI, even though B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch have come to the same conclusion.
Even the former Attorney General of Israel, Michael Benyair, concurred with the AI report and admitted that his own country – ALL of it – is an apartheid regime. It’s time to grow up and face facts.
Brian Klug does make some good points. Human rights are the inalienable rights of individual people because of their common and inherent humanity. States and other collectives do not have human rights; individual people do, whether Israeli or Palestinian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish or atheist.
States can uphold, tolerate, or suppress the rights defined in the UNDHR and subsequent treaties. They can also recognise the legality of other states or withhold it, no individual can. Amnesty defines itself as the world’s leading human rights organisation (how leading is measured is unknown) and might be considered to have been better focusing on that framework.
However, apartheid is wrong precisely because it violates many of the basic tenets of human rights, particularly when enforced with violence, as it has to be, and as early Zionist writers understood their project would require. So there is considerable overlap. The aim is to secure Palestinian human rights and self determination. The apartheid label gets the attention (or should do) of international bodies because of their resolutions and laws making it a crime.
But what if the apartheid label is examined at an international level and found to be inappropriate? Would that give Israel a clean bill of health?
Thank you Tony Klug for writing what must have been a very difficult article. I expect a lot of people on both sides will now consider you a traitor, if they didn’t already. As you rightly point out, “Hundreds of thousands of learned books and millions of articles” have been written, but so few of them have done what you do here — give genuine consideration to the reactions of those who disagree. In this case, those people whose instinct is to support Israel unconditionally and who suspect antisemitic motives for any criticism. You and I may think they are wrong, but it’s desperately important that we find ways of engaging them in discussion and winning them over to support human rights.
So maybe you’re right to suggest downplaying the apartheid thing. I’m not at all sure that I agree, but because I can see that you give honest consideration to the question, I certainly want to continue debating it.
Just to clarify and correct my previous post
– what I should have said was that the picking
apart of the definition of apartheid – as l have
indeed done – it used by some to obscure the
injustices.
In fact the comparison with other countries
or “whataboutery ” referred to by one
of the responses is actually used in respect
of the word “apartheid” and not as a way
of letting Israel off the hook.
PS Sorry for mis-spellings in my previous post.
Many of us attended the ICJP (Intl Centre of Justice for Palestinians) conference entitled ”Dismantling Apartheid” at the Institute of Civil Engineers, held on 31/5/22.
Among the speakers, Hagai El-Ad of BTselem, Soloman Sacco, a South African human rights lawyer and Dep Director of Amnesty and Shawan Jabrin, DG of Al Haq, plus other estimable experts, Palestinian and others. The recording is available here:
https://www.icjpalestine.com/apartheid-conference
Facts on the ground can become antisemitic just because the label is put on the tin?
BTW, on 14th June, Amnesty Intl is hosting a ”Dismantling Apartheid” conference too.
« While there is plenty of evidential justification for characterizing the regime in the West Bank as apartheid, there is a caveat: What actually is gained by labeling it as such? … The best way to combat violations of human rights in the Israeli-Palestinian cauldron is to bring the conflict to a tolerable end. As someone who has tried to contribute to that quest for the last few decades, I struggle to see how the AI report is helpful to that goal. »
The reason why reports like those of AI, B’Tselem and Harvard Law are helpful is because they make it easier to argue that the occupation is abusive without inviting false accusations of antisemitism. Since decades of diplomacy have, by Klug’s own admission, failed, we are left with the task of motivating the international community to protest Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians: by publicising Israel’s crimes, by boycott, and by persistent well-evidenced argument.
Margaret West raises the question of whether the Israeli state’s system of Apartheid is of benefit to Jewish Israelis. This points to a flaw in the Amnesty report as the introduction of “benefits” just introduces confusion:
Do all Jewish Israelis benefit?
Are these benefits long-term, short-term of both?
How to balance out exclusive rights to land, housing, segregated education, health care etc. against living in a perpetual state of insecurity in a militarised society?
Aren’t the poorest Jewish Israelis paying for this system of Apartheid and segregation through their taxes?
Similar arguments came up in Apartheid South Africa, which has/had a significant “poor white” working class. The fact that there are poor, exploited Israeli Jews does not stop the system being one of Jewish supremacy, codified in law, and in fact it is well known that such systems tend to command the loyalty the most exploited members of the dominant ethnic group. You can see what the Amnesty report is getting at, but the phrasing is sloppy.
Tony Klug claims that the establishment of the Israeli state was endorsed by “more than two thirds of the General Assembly” of the UN. The vote was 33 for, 13 against 10 abstentions and 1 absent. 33/57 is not two thirds. but more importantly, the UN was entirely unrepresentative of the countries of the world, as by my reckoning about 90 were colonised by the British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Dutch empires and remnants of the Spanish empire. It is exemplified by the votes of the 4 African members of the General Assembly. Liberia and South Africa, both colonial-settler Apartheid states at the time, voted in favour. There are now 54 independent countries in Africa – and one colony, Western Sahara.
I take Tony’s point about lowering the bar for discriminated minorities and how it equates to other states practicing the same, although he doesn’t mention the 2018 Nation State Law and the sense that the rights of PCI’s can be withdrawn at any time and Gaza is hardly mentioned. For me the big break-through of AI’s report was to bring together all the varying forms of discrimination in the OPT, Israel, Gaza, across the whole of historic Palestine, whilst acknowledging the different realities and experiences, which collectively comprise ‘Apartheid’. This requires a totality of approach rather than just one aspect, though Tony is right to point out AI’s problematic call to end Apartheid without addressing the end of the occupation. Even if the focus was on ending Apartheid in the OPT it still leaves the question of what to do about 700,000 ultra-nationalist settlers, armed to the teeth.
Philip Ward raises the point that perhaps not all Israelis benefit from a society that prioritizes Jews.
For some time now I have considered the admittedly startling theory that Israel was NOT just created for the benefit of the Jewish community. Originated by mostly British politicians ( a group not famous for altruism) I now seriously suspect that the dilemma of Jews at the end of WW11 could have been used as a pretext for the creation of a state that was seen as being a political foothold in the Middle East for the furtherance of Western interests. Why does the US give such massive financial and military support to Israel? Are we to believe that this aid has no self interest on the part of the US? Are we to believe that Lord Balfour had only a humanitarian agenda in establishing a state for persecuted Jews.
I do not have enough information to say categorically one way or another but would it not be interesting to consider that perhaps both Palestinians AND Jews have been manipulated for Western political advancement.
You cannot separate the occupied territories from ‘green line’ Israel. Israel’s clear intention is to effect complete control ‘from the river to the sea’ and the indigenous Palestinian population to be made as powerless as possible. The Nation State law within the current state of Israel makes clear that only Jews may achieve self determination, and all other ethnicities will, therefore, be permanently de-citizenised. Israel’s laws allow communities to be Jewish only enclaves in order to maintain cultural homogeneity. Arabs are barred from residing in them. Arab communities within Israel receive far less funding for schools, for sanitation facilities and do not have free movement to visit relatives and friends. Actual ethnic cleansing has been underway in East Jerusalem for many years as Arabs are forcibly expelled from their homes to make way for Jewish citizens, and house demolitions are common. The right of return, guaranteed under international law for populations forcibly expelled from their homes during war, is, of course denied completely to Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Israel’s unambiguous intention is to exert total control over the entire geographical area of what, for centuries, has been known as Palestine and to keep the indigenous population as powerless as possible. To claim that Israel and the occupied West Bank should be seen quite separately, and to suggest that the state of Israel cannot be designated as an apartheid state does not stand up to any serious scrutiny, even without the long history of Israeli leaders making absolutely clear their intention to claim the entire area from the river to the sea as a Jewish state where only one ethnic group will have power. Zionism is not, and never can be, an ideology embracing cultural or religious diversity. It uses extreme violence to maintain its ethnic homogeneity as much as it possibly can, and, as Desmond Tutu observed, is a worse apartheid state than the old South Africa.
…ער איז נישט אזוי קלוג
Mr Klug does not come to terms with the fact that the Zionist project is one of colonisation; and the State of Israel, a product and instrument of this project has been from its inception a colonial settler state. Apartheid is a necessary tool in this project.
See corrected comment below, posted on 11th June 2022 at 18:19.
I’m afraid a lot of the above posts are well-meaning but ill-informed. Refusing to call something by its name just because some people might get upset by the truth can’t help resolve any issue.
I grew up supporting the Anti-Apartheid Movement and worked for the organisation after I left school. I know what apartheid looks like and I’ve seen it for myself in Israel/Palestine. There were close links between the white South African regime and successive Israeli governments, despite the SA government containing actual neo-Nazis.
Many of the policies implemented in the West Bank are almost identical to those of the original apartheid regime: in particular, the Bantustans and the differential application of “neutral” laws to different population groups.
SA apartheid was eventually defeated not because white South Africans suddenly changed their minds, but because of the commitment of black South Africans to the fight within the country and the support for that fight from abroad. The boycott campaign was very successful and we are slowly replicating that success with this version of apartheid.
Nobody believed that SA racism could be defeated, but it was and Israeli racism will one day be history as well. Call apartheid by its name and keep the pressure up!
Dr Klug is not the first person to raise the question why Israel is singled out for criticism rather any of the other countries whose records are just as bad, or worse. The answer, I would suggest, is that serious people do not waste time and energy attacking things that nobody is defending. Virtually nobody, in Britain or Europe at least, would try to defend or excuse the treatment of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government or of the Rohinga people by that of Myanmar.
Suppose that a substantial group of people appeared in Britain dedicated to writing and speaking in defence of China or Myanmar, and suppose that they were to receive a generally favourable response in political and media circles. It is safe to say that in reaction a very large number of people would feel impelled to draw attention to the crimes committed by these regimes.
To summarise, Israel is not the worst state in the world and its government is not the worst government. They are however the worst state and government stiil being defended by a significant number of people who are otherwise rational and even liberal-minded.
Amnesty and B’Tselem authoritatively established why Israel falls into the definition of an apartheid state. Due to Amnesty’s international standing morally, politically, and with the world’s media it’s report represented a major setback for the Israeli lobby, which has for decades fought off this characterisation of Israel.
Essentially Klug pursues a disingenuous attempt to separate ‘proper’ Israel from the Occupied Territories (which carries echos of Apartheid South Africa’s four levels of status – native, coloured, Asian, white – and its Bantustan policy of ‘combined and separate development’) . Then by posing the question ‘can the lesser quantity and nature of the violations of Palestinian human rights in Israel qualify it to be included in the qualitative definition of aparthied’, Klug seeks to undermine the credibility of the Amnesty report.
The principal point which he evades, indeed that his article serves to deflects from, is the fact that it is the Israeli state, through the deployment of huge military and financial resources, which instituted and maintains the apartheid regime in the Occupied Territories, and that most major Israeli institutions, from corporations and banks to universities and cultural bodies, engage in or invest in the Occupation.
The function for Israel of the Occupied territories as a pool of labour, as a resource for water and minerals, and as a captive market was documented twelve years ago by Shir Hever . In addition the Occupation provides a live theatre for the development of its armaments industry, giving it a leading edge. The Occupation is an integral part of the Israeli military-industrial complex and thereby of its political economy – Israel is the Occupation, the Occupation is Israel, and it takes the form of apartheid.
The apartheid regime in South Africa was formally established in 1948. A portentous date.