Amnesty shines light on Israeli apartheid

Empowering Weak & Oppressed

Crescent International

Jumada' al-Akhirah 29, 1443 2022-02-01

Daily News Analysis

by Crescent International

Following in the footsteps of a number of other human rights organizations—international and domestic—Amnesty International has come out with its own damning report documenting Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.

Released on February 1, the 280-page Amnesty report in precise and methodical.

It highlights how the Israeli occupiers of Palestine enforce a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinians.

The rights body says in its report that Zionist Israel is carrying out “the crime of apartheid against Palestinians” and must be held accountable for treating them as “an inferior racial group”.

At a press conference held in Zionist occupied East Jerusalem, Agnes Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general said on February 1:

“Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime. Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights.”

She called on the international community including the United Nations to take “resolute action against the crime against humanity being perpetrated in order to maintain the system of apartheid”.

Ms. Callamard said the Security Council should impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, as well as “targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes, against Israeli officials most implicated in the crime of apartheid.”

This must be the first time a senior Western human rights representative has called for sanctions against Zionist Israel.

Sanctions are a tool the US and the West in general use against countries and governments that refuse to surrender to their demands.

A long list of countries has been targeted with such sanctions that have caused much suffering to ordinary people.

The one regime that must be sanctioned is apartheid Israel.

Aware that Amnesty’s report highlighting Israeli crimes would lead to the usual canard of anti-Semitism charge, Ms. Callamard pre-empted this by saying:

“Some within the government of Israel may seek to deflect from them by falsely accusing Amnesty of attempting to destabilise Israel, or being anti-Semitic, or unfairly singling out Israel. But I am here to say that these baseless attacks, barefaced lies, fabrications on the messenger will not silence the message in an organisation of 10 million members the world over.”

She went on: “It is the cruelty of the system – the intricate evolving administration of control, dispossession, and inequality [and] the incredible detailed bureaucratisation upon which that system is predicated,” she said.

“Its sheer banality, and at times absurdity that has taken my breath away.

“Our conclusions may shock and disturb – and they should,” she said, demonstrating unusual courage and determination.

Amnesty’s investigative report lists a wide range of Israeli abuses.

These include extensive seizures of Palestinian land and property, extra-judicial executions, forcible transfer of population through home demolitions as witnessed in Sheikh Jarrah and other parts of East Jerusalem, drastic movement restrictions through military check-points on the Israeli occupied West Bank, administrative detention that has resulted in some Palestinians being held for decades without charge, much less a trial.

While Israel claims to be the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’—a blatant lie—its National Law passed in July 2019 categorically states that Israel is the state only for Jews.

Amnesty International’s Executive Summary starts with a quote posted online by former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2019:

“Israel is not a state of all its citizens... [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.”

Even the apartheid regime in South Africa did not go that far in its vicious discrimination against the blacks.

Palestinians living in East Jerusalem are denied nationality and even those Palestinians that live inside what is referred to as the ‘Green Line’—1948 armistice boundary established after Israel’s violent creation—are denied most basic rights.

Palestinians are denied building permits while illegal Israeli settlers have no such problem occupying Palestinian lands.

When Palestinians repair their badly dilapidated houses, Israeli bulldozers arrive to demolish them.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been left homeless when their houses were destroyed.

Amnesty describes these as components of a system that amounts to apartheid under international law.

“This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity,” AI said in its statement.

Release of Amnesty’s report immediately evoked the usual allegation of anti-Semitism.

Israel’s foreign minister Yair Lapid and pro-Israeli groups in the US and Canada resorted to this canard to deflect attention from Israel’s well-documented crimes.

The world is fast catching up to Israel’s horrible record of human rights abuses.

Amnesty International is the latest group—and the most important—to join a growing list of organizations that have exposed Israeli crimes of apartheid.