If It Looks Like Apartheid…
In 1966 the UN General Assembly labelled apartheid a crime against humanity (Resolution 2202 A [XXI]), a mandate that was endorsed by the Security Council in 1984 (Resolution 556). And yet it continues still…with impunity. Why?
“If it looks like apartheid; if it behaves like apartheid; if it walks like apartheid; it is apartheid!”
Gideon Levy - Haaretz Weekly Podcast, June 25th 2021.
Gideon Levy, winner of the 2021 Sokolov Prize, Israels top prize for journalism, loves Israel. He says he wouldn’t live anywhere else, and to listen to him, he sounds proud that the Israeli democracy seems to work pretty well. For most at least.
He is just deeply saddened that it only works for Jewish Israelis and is a non-existent, unreachable human right and remains an unattainable political phenomena for the non-Jewish minority, the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs.
‘This,’ he says, ‘disqualifies Israel from calling itself a functioning democracy.’
An outspoken critic of his home state Israel for many decades now, Levy is a man who seems largely isolated in his beloved Israel. Perhaps the only place he feels amongst allies is at his place of work, the left-wing Israeli daily, Haaretz, who have published and promoted his writings for his whole working life, often to their own financial detriment.
And yet he loves Israel, the place where he has lived all his life. Despite the threats. Despite the insults. Despite the right-wing onslaught and calls for him to be charged with Treason.
He loves Israel.
For me Gideon Levy has long been a hero! Though such a mantle sits uneasily on the head of this laconic, thoughtful, brutally honest, highly intelligent and irredeemably courageous man; and I can sense his unease with his iconic status, but, a hero he remains nonetheless.
Of course, he’s not the only hero in this most complex, most tortured of stories. And he’s not now the only one calling Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians apartheid.
‘And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.’
Genesis 1:27.
Late member of the Knesset, Yossi Sarid, held the above verse particularly close to his heart. For him the words held a distinct meaning that lay in harmony with the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and therein a universal moral edict to uphold the human rights of all peoples.
In fact it meant so much to him that he named the Israeli human rights organisation he help to start after it; B’Tselem, which in Hebrew means literally ‘in the image of.’
And since its inception in 1989 B’Tselem has fought for the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip by documenting Israeli human rights violations, and has been calling out Israel for its malodorous behaviour throughout that time.
Yet, the meaning of the verse from Genesis seems to have been lost on many Israeli’s who appear to stubbornly view the Palestinians as less than they actually are; human beings who deserve the same rights as everyone else.
In fact so lost is that meaning that Israel, for a country with a population of less than 10 million people, takes an extraordinary amount of legislative time and agenda at the UN that is way out of proportion for its size. In the current session in fact there has been a total of 19 resolutions against human rights violations globally; 14 of those have been on Israel.
Since 2015 actually Israel has been condemned by the UN in a staggering 112 resolutions. By way of comparison, the next worst nation is Russia — not normally thought of as a paragon of humanistic virtue — has been condemned only 13 times.
Yet the violations continue! In large part due to the US’s blind-spot vis-a-vis Israel and the strength of the Israeli lobbyists in DC.
In fact the US’s unequivocal support of Israel has seen it veto the vast majority of the resolutions thereby giving their tacit approval to allow the violations to continue with seeming impunity. For example, in June 2018 the UNSC drafted a resolution (PDF) expressing “grave concern at the escalation of violence and tensions” since the (2018) protests began and “deep alarm at the loss of civilian lives and the high number of casualties among Palestinian civilians, particularly in the Gaza Strip, including casualties among children, caused by the Israeli forces”.
That particular resolution was rejected by then US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, who said it was “a grossly one-sided view of what has taken place in Gaza in recent weeks”. She ended up blaming Hamas for the violence, a tired old excuse that long ago lost any weight that it ever carried.
That said, it cannot be denied that Hamas do inflict casualties on Israel, and as things run as a matter of course, Israel uses that violence as a pretext to retaliate (most often disproportionately?) saying that it is legitimately entitled to do so under international law.
But is this the case?
Under International Humanitarian Law (IHL)(which is applicable during armed conflict and/or occupation), any occupation — as we supposedly have in East Jerusalem for example, an area that incidentally Israel is not legally entitled to call its own — is by definition a temporary situation (PDF). Israel, however, has said repeatedly that it will not withdraw from those territories it has already occupied. Thus, legally, this occupation is no longer an occupation; it is an annexation, and annexations of territory are illegal under international law.
As Norm Finkelstein explains (to Mouin Rabbani in Jadaliyya’s Connections Podcast) far better than I, Israel has vacated the right to its security because of its illegal annexation of Palestinian territory. Israel, Norm explains with his customary unblemished tone, has only one remaining right (in this context) and that is ‘the right to withdraw.’
Whereas, he says, the Palestinians have every right, under international law, to ‘use every measure at their disposal to free themselves.’
As to whether this applies to Hamas’s indiscriminate firing of rockets into Israel is what Norm says is a ‘grey area’ legally. States do have the right to so-called ‘belligerent reprisals,’ but these should be proportionate (by comparison to what has been inflicted by the occupier) and should be conducted with the aim of inducing their adversary to fall back in line with letter of the IHL.
The legal edges become fudged when the reprisals are not directed at the ‘individual authors of the initial violation’. Thus when rockets are sent aimlessly (?) into civilian areas, by Hamas or Israel, it becomes difficult to provide a legal justification for such attacks. And in this case, both sides have alleged cases to answer, and of course, then there is the added complication that Hamas is not officially a state actor, and also that these legalities apply only where a particular territory is under occupation and as we have seen, that no longer applies in this case.
Muddying the waters even more is the fact that reprisals do appear to be something of a legal conundrum, with the legal ramifications and circumstances under which reprisals may be legally carried evolving all the time. But for the moment Protocol I (Article 51[6]) of the Geneva Convention applies, and states that “attacks against the civilian population or civilians by way of reprisals are prohibited.”
Now, I am no legal scholar, but the legal entanglements here are clear to see. It might be argued that both the Palestinians and the Israelis are breaking IHL and in fact, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has already opened investigations into the 2014 Israel-Palestinian conflict and are examining both Hamas and Israel for possibles breaches of IHL, and whilst this momentous decision has been welcomed by many, those in the potential legal firing line are not so happy.
Israel is not, however, a signatory to the ICC whilst Palestine, despite vigorous Israeli protests, is. But as we have seen recently with the conviction of Syrian doctor Anwar Raslan in Germany, not being a signatory to the Rome Statute (that established the ICC) is no safeguard for individuals against prosecution and this case will have certainly caused a few sleepless nights I’m sure.
The standard Israeli defence in the face of any criticism of their handling with respect to Palestine and the Palestinians is to call out the detractors as antisemitic, something that almost became a by-word for Israeli foreign policy during the Netanyahu years.
And whilst Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennet’s foreign minister, has tried to roll back such extreme measures with a more thoughtful, constructive dialogue with most international partners, the reality on the ground for Palestinians has seen little change.
The building of illegal settlements continues apace under Bennet’s government, just with a more friendly faced, international window dressing than before that begs Western acceptance of its annexation, which Israel itself plainly already sees as a valid part of their home nation.
And friendly faced or not, the hypocrisy continues. The bellicose anti-Israel statements against any detractors continue, and even as Bennet et al insist that the Knesset’s new, forward leaning progressive coalition is only looking to improve the lives and economic standing of the Palestinians, they continue to evict residents, expropriate their land and extol the virtues of a two-state solution that no longer holds water and is no longer wanted by the Palestinians, who have after all been suffering in the single state situation the majority now say they want for generations; it is just not administered or governed in anything approaching a legally recognised manner.
That single state stretches from the much quoted ‘river to the sea’ with annexed regions cowering under Israeli policies that engender a bifurcated, two-tiered structure that gives Jews basic freedoms and human rights that the Palestinians are denied wholesale.
And this is the apartheid state that now exists across the region.
Noam Chomsky, a long standing and outspoken critic of Israel, has been calling Israel an apartheid state for a long time now. In fact he goes further than that, saying in a 2014 interview with Democracy Now that what Israel does to the Palestinians in the occupied territories is ‘much worse than apartheid.’
In South Africa, Chomsky stresses, the government needed the black population to make the state function, to be the workers, whereas “the Israeli relationship to the Palestinians (in the Occupied Territories) is totally different. They just don’t want them. They want them out, or at least in prison.”
Norm Finkelstein too, not ever a man to shy away from controversy, doesn’t hold back in his criticism of Israel. When speaking to Mouin Rabbani about both B’Tselem’s January 2021 report and HRW’s April 2021 report ‘A Threshold Crossed,’ both of which called the situation apartheid, though as Finkelstein explained the specifics of each report differed.
B’Tselem’s report, damning as it is, focuses on the current picture of apartheid as it is across what the report describes as a ‘seamless territory’ that encompasses the whole region, and does not distinguish between the occupied territory and Israel itself.
The HRW report, Finkelstein explains, says Israel practices apartheid in the occupied territories and is guilty of the crimes of apartheid and persecution which are, under international law, crimes against humanity. Elsewhere according to HRW, the crimes are less severe but amount to serious abuses of international law nonetheless.
The HRW report, Finkelstein continues, traces the origins of these crimes all the way back to day 1 of the partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel in 1947. And for the state of Israel to be created as per the vision of David Ben-Gurion, two things were required:
- The Zionist movement required a Jewish majority. This was brought about the expulsion of the Palestinians in what came to be known as the Nakba, or catastrophe, which occurred the following year, 1948.
- The mass confiscation of land from those who had been expelled, as well as from many of those who had remained in Israel, and the subsequent redistribution of this land for the use of Jews alone.
Many of the expelled Palestinians (some 19% of the population of the region as a whole) have been confined ever since on just 3% of the land in what has been described as the biggest open air prison on earth in the Gaza strip whilst millions more fled to camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
And this forced expulsion was always a likely part of the original Zionist movement going back to the late 19th Century, which aimed to create a Jewish homeland through the formation of a “…national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.”
‘As such, the Zionist enterprise combined Jewish nationalism, which it aimed to create and foster, with the colonial project of transplanting people, mostly from Europe, into Palestine drawing on the support of European imperial powers…’ (Amjad Alqasis — Jadaliyya) with the aim of creating a Jewish majority.
In fact Gamal Abdul Nasser, that erstwhile thorn in Israel’s side, was unequivocal in his assessment of Israel as an imperialist, colonial power. A virulent anti-colonist for most of life, Nasser, who fought Israel in the 1948 Palestine War as well as in the disastrous (for Egypt anyway) Six Day War in 1967, saw Israel as an existential threat to Egypt because of its imperialist nature (1).
And the Zionist movement inextricably linked Jewish nationalism to the creation of the Jewish state and a Jewish nationality. As Ilan Pappe explains (2), ‘Zionism was not… the only case in history in which a colonialist project was pursued in the name of national or otherwise non-colonialist ideals.’
And the few Palestinians who escaped the Nakba and still lived within the land (in 1948) that became Israel had their citizenship revoked by decree. And the 1.2m who reside there today remain stateless; a status forced upon them by a Jewish state where they are ineligible for citizenship, disqualified by religion and race.
This illegitimate bifurcation of citizenship is underpinned by the need to maintain the Jewish majority following the Zionist doctrine of Ben-Gurion, and is blatant discrimination against non-Jews within the boundaries of Israel.
HRW do not deny the right of Jews to a homeland — quite rightly — but stress the need for the apartheid structure as it exists in the occupied territories to be resolved — easily said, and until it is HRW stress that the very legitimacy of the Israeli state should be called into question.
As things stand the whole region labours under the ‘principle of Jewish domination’ which is a racist, discriminatory policy and, following the subsequently revoked 1975 UN Resolution, HRW restated that Zionism is, in their opinion, a racist doctrine.
This doesn’t disqualify Israel from the right to its own security, but that right alone does not in anyway justify their continued abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians.
And yet, it goes on with no end in sight. Thus we come full circle and back to the original questions at the beginning of this post. Why? Why does it carry on?
The legal arguments against Israel are, as we have seen, complex, intricate and many, but enforcing legal sanctions or bringing human rights cases before any sort of international tribunal is akin to an exercise in futility. David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee, says we are living in an age of impunity where human rights violations seem destined to go unpunished wherever they occur and by whomever they are committed, which is a deplorable state of affairs.
And in Palestine this is no exception. Land appropriation by Israel continues on an almost daily basis, a process which is brought about by the use of so-called ‘legal processes’ which have no basis in law, and are then enforced using excessively violent measures that are supposed to be about maintaining ‘security.’ But that security is for the illegal settlers alone and is directed solely at those who have the legal right to be there.
In order to prevent such measures becoming documented and more widely recognised by the international community Israel has taken the extraordinary step of declaring many Palestinian human rights groups, as well those who supply legal advice and counsel to evicted Palestinians, as terrorist organisations; a tactic that B’Tselem rightly calls an overt act of cowardice, characteristic of repressive, authoritarian regimes.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is now more than 70 years old and a solution seems no closer today than it was when it all began. Israel continues to prosper and the Palestinians continue to suffer through no fault of their own, and as far as I can see until we have a US President who is sympathetic to their plight and is strong enough to resist the immense power of the Jewish lobby, nothing will change, and an international community resilient enough to call out Israel for its behaviour even in the face of its antisemitic rhetoric.
And that, I feel, is the sad reality.
- Fawaz A. Gerges, Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the clash that shaped the Middle East. 2018.
- Ilan Pappe, Zionism as Colonialism: A Comparative View of Diluted Colonialism in Asia and Africa, South Atlantic Quarterly 107:4 (Fall 2008), pp. 611–633, p. 612. As referenced in Amjad Alqasis.
