Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
February 1,
2022
Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing
the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, Amnesty International said today
in a damning new report. The investigation details how Israel enforces a system
of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has
control over their rights. This includes Palestinians living in Israel and the
Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), as well as displaced refugees in other
countries.
The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against
Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity,
sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful
killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of
nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system
which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained
by violations that Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a
crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid
Convention.
Amnesty International is calling on the International
Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current
investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal
jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice.
“There is no possible justification for a system built
around the institutionalized and prolonged racist oppression of millions of
people. Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make
allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history.
Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from
accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the
international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people.
The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid,
and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored.”
Amnesty International’s findings build on a growing
body of work by Palestinian, Israeli, and international NGOs, who have
increasingly applied the apartheid framework to the situation in Israel and/or
the OPT.
Identifying apartheid
A system of apartheid is an institutionalized regime
of oppression and domination by one racial group over another. It is a serious
human rights violation that is prohibited in public international law. Amnesty
International’s extensive research and legal analysis, carried out in
consultation with external experts, demonstrates that Israel enforces such a
system against Palestinians through laws, policies, and practices that ensure
their prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment.
In international criminal law, specific unlawful acts
which are committed within a system of oppression and domination, with the
intention of maintaining it, constitute the crime against humanity of
apartheid. These acts are set out in the Apartheid Convention and
the Rome Statute and include unlawful killing, torture,
forcible transfer, and the denial of basic rights and freedoms.
Amnesty International documented acts proscribed in
the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute in all the areas Israel controls,
although they occur more frequently and violently in the OPT than in Israel.
Israeli authorities enact multiple measures to deliberately deny Palestinians
their basic rights and freedoms, including draconian movement restrictions in
the OPT, chronic discriminatory underinvestment in Palestinian communities in
Israel, and the denial of refugees’ right to return. The report also documents
forcible transfer, administrative detention, torture, and unlawful killings, in
both Israel and the OPT.
Amnesty International found that these acts form part
of a systematic and widespread attack directed against the Palestinian
population, and are committed with the intent to maintain the system of
oppression and domination. They, therefore, constitute the crime against humanity
of apartheid.
The unlawful killing of Palestinian protesters is
perhaps the clearest illustration of how Israeli authorities use proscribed
acts to maintain the status quo. In 2018, Palestinians in Gaza began to hold
weekly protests along the border with Israel, calling for the right of return
for refugees and an end to the blockade. Before protests even began, senior
Israeli officials warned that Palestinians approaching the wall would be shot.
By the end of 2019, Israeli forces had killed 214 civilians, including 46
children.
In light of the systematic unlawful killings of
Palestinians documented in its report, Amnesty International is also calling
for the UN Security Council to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel.
This should cover all weapons and munitions as well as law enforcement
equipment, given the thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been
unlawfully killed by Israeli forces. The Security Council should also impose
targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes, against Israeli officials most
implicated in the crime of apartheid.
Palestinians treated as a demographic threat
Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued a
policy of establishing and then maintaining a Jewish demographic majority and
maximizing control over land and resources to benefit Jewish Israelis. In 1967,
Israel extended this policy to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Today, all territories
controlled by Israel continue to be administered with the purpose of benefiting
Jewish Israelis to the detriment of Palestinians, while Palestinian refugees
continue to be excluded.
Amnesty International recognizes that Jews, like
Palestinians, claim a right to self-determination, and does not challenge
Israel’s desire to be a home for Jews. Similarly, it does not consider that
Israel labeling itself a “Jewish state” in itself indicates an intention to
oppress and dominate.
However, Amnesty International’s report shows that
successive Israeli governments have considered Palestinians a demographic
threat, and imposed measures to control and decrease their presence and access
to land in Israel and the OPT. These demographic aims are well illustrated by official
plans to “Judaize” areas of Israel and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,
which continue to put thousands of Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer.
Oppression without borders
The 1947-49 and 1967 wars, Israel’s ongoing military
rule of the OPT, and the creation of separate legal and administrative regimes
within the territory have separated Palestinian communities and segregated
them from Jewish Israelis. Palestinians have been fragmented geographically and
politically, and experience different levels of discrimination depending on
their status and where they live.
Palestinian citizens in Israel currently enjoy greater
rights and freedoms than their counterparts in the OPT, while the experience of
Palestinians in Gaza is very different from that of those living in the West
Bank. Nonetheless, Amnesty International’s research shows that all Palestinians
are subject to the same overarching system. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians
across all areas is pursuant to the same objective: to privilege Jewish
Israelis in the distribution of land and resources, and to minimize the Palestinian
presence and access to land.
Amnesty International demonstrates that Israeli
authorities treat Palestinians as an inferior racial group who are defined by
their non-Jewish, Arab states. This racial discrimination is cemented in laws
that affect Palestinians across Israel and the OPT.
For example, Palestinian citizens of Israel are denied nationality, establishing a legal differentiation from Jewish Israelis. In
the West Bank and Gaza, where Israel has controlled the population registry
since 1967, Palestinians have no citizenship and most are considered stateless,
requiring ID cards from the Israeli military to live and work in the
territories.
Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who were
displaced in the 1947-49 and 1967 conflicts, continue to be denied the right to
return to their former places of residence. Israel’s exclusion of refugees is a
flagrant violation of international law which has left millions in a perpetual
limbo of forced displacement.
Palestinians in annexed East Jerusalem are granted
permanent residence instead of citizenship – though this status is permanent in
name only. Since 1967, more than 14,000 Palestinians have had their residency
revoked at the discretion of the Ministry of the Interior, resulting in their
forcible transfer outside the city.
Lesser citizens
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise about 19%
of the population, face many forms of institutionalized discrimination. In 2018,
discrimination against Palestinians was crystallized in a constitutional law
which, for the first time, enshrined Israel exclusively as the “nation-state of
the Jewish people”. The law also promotes the building of Jewish settlements
and downgrades Arabic’s status as an official language.
The report documents how Palestinians are effectively
blocked from leasing on 80% of Israel’s state land, as a result of racist land
seizures and a web of discriminatory laws on land allocation, planning, and
zoning.
The situation in the Negev/Naqab region of southern
Israel is a prime example of how Israel’s planning and building policies
intentionally exclude Palestinians. Since 1948 Israeli authorities have
adopted various policies to “Judaize” the Negev/Naqab, including designating
large areas as nature reserves or military firing zones and setting targets
for increasing the Jewish population. This has had devastating consequences for
the tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins who live in the region.
Thirty-five Bedouin villages, home to about 68,000
people, are currently “unrecognized” by Israel, which means they are cut off
from the national electricity and water supply and targeted for repeated
demolitions. As the villages have no official status, their residents also face
restrictions on political participation and are excluded from the healthcare
and education systems. These conditions have coerced many into leaving their
homes and villages, in what amounts to forcible transfer.
Decades of deliberately unequal treatment of
Palestinian citizens of Israel have left them consistently economically
disadvantaged in comparison to Jewish Israelis. This is exacerbated by
blatantly discriminatory allocation of state resources: a recent example is the
government’s Covid-19 recovery package, of which just 1.7% was given to
Palestinian local authorities.
Dispossession
The dispossession and displacement of Palestinians
from their homes is a crucial pillar of Israel’s apartheid system. Since its
establishment, the Israeli state has enforced massive and cruel land seizures
against Palestinians and continues to implement myriad laws and policies to
force Palestinians into small enclaves. Since 1948, Israel has demolished
hundreds of thousands of Palestinian homes and other properties across all
areas under its jurisdiction and effective control.
As in the Negev/Naqab, Palestinians in East Jerusalem
and Area C of the OPT live under full Israeli control. The authorities deny
building permits to Palestinians in these areas, forcing them to build illegal
structures which are demolished again and again.
In the OPT, the continued expansion of illegal Israeli
settlements exacerbates the situation. The construction of these settlements in
the OPT has been a government policy since 1967. Settlements today cover 10% of
the land in the West Bank, and some 38% of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem
was expropriated between 1967 and 2017.
Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem are
frequently targeted by settler organizations that, with the full backing of
the Israeli government, work to displace Palestinian families and hand their
homes to settlers. One such neighborhood, Sheikh Jarrah, has been the site of
frequent protests since May 2021 as families battle to keep their homes under the
threat of a settler lawsuit.
Draconian movement restrictions
Since the mid-1990s Israeli authorities have imposed
increasingly stringent movement restrictions on Palestinians in the OPT. A web
of military checkpoints, roadblocks, fences, and other structures controls the
movement of Palestinians within the OPT, and restricts their travel into Israel
or abroad.
A 700km fence, which Israel is still extending, has
isolated Palestinian communities inside “military zones”, and they must obtain
multiple special permits any time they enter or leave their homes. In Gaza,
more than 2 million Palestinians live under an Israeli blockade which has
created a humanitarian crisis. It is near-impossible for Gazans to travel
abroad or into the rest of the OPT, and they are effectively segregated from
the rest of the world.
“The permit system in the OPT is emblematic of
Israel’s brazen discrimination against Palestinians. While Palestinians are
locked in a blockade, stuck for hours at checkpoints, or waiting for yet
another permit to come through, Israeli citizens and settlers can move around
as they please.”
Amnesty International examined each of the security
justifications which Israel cites as the basis for its treatment of
Palestinians. The report shows that, while some of Israel’s policies may have
been designed to fulfill legitimate security objectives, they have been
implemented in a grossly disproportionate and discriminatory way that fails to
comply with international law. Other policies have absolutely no reasonable
basis in security and are clearly shaped by the intent to oppress and
dominate.
The way forward
Amnesty International provides numerous specific
recommendations for how the Israeli authorities can dismantle the apartheid
system and the discrimination, segregation, and oppression which sustain it.
The organization is calling for an end to the brutal
practice of home demolitions and forced evictions as a first step. Israel must
grant equal rights to all Palestinians in Israel and the OPT, in line with
principles of international human rights and humanitarian law. It must
recognize the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to
homes where they or their families once lived, and provide victims of human
rights violations and crimes against humanity with full reparations.
The scale and seriousness of the violations documented
in Amnesty International’s report call for a drastic change in the
international community’s approach to the human rights crisis in Israel and the
OPT.
All states may exercise universal jurisdiction over
persons reasonably suspected of committing the crime of apartheid under
international law, and states that are party to the Apartheid Convention have
an obligation to do so.
“Israel must dismantle the apartheid system and start
treating Palestinians as human beings with equal rights and dignity. Until it
does, peace and security will remain a distant prospect for Israelis and
Palestinians alike.”
Please see the full report for a detailed definition of apartheid in international law.
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