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Is Israel an Apartheid State?

[Prefatory Note: This post was originally published on March 22, 2017 by The Nation under the title “The Inside Story of Our UN Report Calling Israel an Apartheid State,” the text of which can be found at this link: https://www.thenation.com/article/the-inside-story-on-our-un-report-calling-israel-an-apartheid-state/ What is below is somewhat modified.]

Is Israel an Apartheid State?

Six months ago, the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) asked Virginia Tilley and me to write a study examining the applicability of the international criminal law concept of apartheid to Israel’s policies and practices toward the Palestinian people. We were glad to accept the assignment, and conceived of our role as engaging in an academic undertaking. ESCWA, one of several UN regional commissions, requested the study as a result of an uncontested motion adopted by its 18 Arab member governments.

Almost within hours of its release on March 15, our report [bearing the title “Israel’s Practices Toward the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid”] was greeted by what can only be described as hysteria and derision. The newly appointed US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, denounced the report and demanded that the UN repudiate it. The newly elected Secretary General, Antonió Guterres, quickly and publicly called for ESCWA to withdraw the report from its website, and when Rima Khalaf, the head of the commission, resisted, Guterres insisted. Rather than comply, Khalaf resigned, explaining her reasons in a gracious, principled letter to the Secretary General, an eloquent expression of public conscience that is itself extremely rare in UN experience and worthy of the most favorable notice and commentary. [for text of letter see Soon thereafter, the report was withdrawn from the commission’s website, despite containing a very clear disclaimer at its outset noting that the report represents the views of its authors and not necessarily that of ESCWA or the UN.

What is striking about this pattern of action and reaction, which resembles in many respects the US government response to the Goldstone Report (the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict of 2008-9), is the degree to which Israel’s officials and supporters, in response to criticism, have sought to discredit and wound the messenger rather than address the message by offering a detailed substantive explanation and defense. Each time such a technique succeeds in this mission of discrediting, wounding, and diverting attention the role of the UN as a promoter of the public good is weakened, and the Organization becomes rather an instrument by which dominant geopolitical forces assert their will at the expense of truth, reason, and human wellbeing.

Virginia Tilley, a professor of political science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a leading world expert on apartheid, and I, as well as ESCWA, would welcome substantive discussion and critical feedback, and we had hoped that our analysis and conclusions would provide the basis for debate, dialogue, and further consideration of the recommendations appended at the end. ESCWA, for its part, took steps to ensure that the report lived up to scholarly standards, submitting the draft text to three prominent international jurists, who had been anonymously solicited to offer objective vetting. Each submitted a strong positive appraisal along with suggestions for revision, which we gratefully incorporated before the final text was released. Against this background, it is irresponsible for government officials and others to dismiss our report as a biased polemic, and to do so damages the authority of the UN and respect for international law.

It is also misleading to do what the American and Israeli diplomats did, as well as the media– treating this study as if a report officially endorsed by the UN. Such treatment overlooks the disclaimer on the opening page of the report, which clearly states that the analysis and interpretations presented are those of the authors alone, and are not to be attributed to the UN. In effect, it is a document initiated by a UN agency, appraised for quality by reference to scholarly standards, but not adopted nor even endorsed at this point, although this might happen in the future, a step we as authors would welcome.

During my tenure as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories (2008-14), I witnessed how defenders of Israel attempted to discredit critics. My reports in that post often included sharp criticisms of Israel and other actors, ranging across various topics including defiance of international law, unlawful expansion of settlements, excessive use of force, and complicity of international corporations and banks that do business for profit with the settlements, and others. To my surprise, I never received substantive pushback regarding these specific allegations, but I did have the unpleasant experience of having my words on completely unrelated issues torn out of context, and brought to the attention of UN high officials and important diplomats representing member states. Among my harshest critics were not only the usual ultra-Zionist NGOs, but also Barack Obama’s diplomats at the UN, including Susan Rice and Samantha Power, as well as then-Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. I mention this personal experience only to note that it falls into a longstanding pattern of diversionary rebuttal that prefers to smear rather than engage in reasoned debate about the important issues of law and justice at stake.

The international crime of apartheid was authoritatively specified in the 1973 Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. The main elements of the crime consist of deliberate and systematic acts of racial discrimination with the purpose of maintaining unlawful structures of racial domination, that is, a dominant race subjugating another race. Our report also considered whether, in the context of inquiring into the presence of apartheid, it was appropriate to consider Jews and Palestinians as distinct races; we found that there were abundant grounds for doing so. As our report shows, “race” in this legal context is treated as a socially and politically constructed category developed to identify a distinct people. It has no necessary correlation with biogenetic realities, which in this case actually shows an overlap between Jews and Palestinians.

Even Palestinian citizens of Israel, who can vote and form political parties, are subject to many discriminatory laws that impair security and the quality of life. The report also proceeds from the proposition that whether apartheid exists or not depends on the overall treatment of the Palestinian people as a whole, and not by accepting the fragmentation that has been imposed by Israel. Adopting what we believe to be an innovative methodology, we approached this challenge by dividing the Palestinians into four domains that correspond to the manner in which Israel has exercises its authority over the course of many decades, although the specific tactics of control vary through time. In the past, a thorough study by international law scholars found that Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories are consistent with apartheid [See Virginia Tilley, ed., Beyond Occupation: apartheid, colonialism and international law in the occupied Palestinian territories [Pluto: London, 2012]. It called attention to the discriminatory treatment of Palestinians, who are subject to military administration as compared to the Jewish settler population, which enjoys the full benefit of the rule of law as it is observed in Israel in relation to Jewish nationals. That study found that “settler-only roads,” dual legal systems, and the draconian separation of the two populations into regions on the basis of race hallmarks of apartheid. Repressive practices that have made the lives of ordinary Palestinians a daily ordeal are a core dimension of this racially organized system of control. It should be also noted that according to preferred readings of international law, penalizing and criminalizing nonviolent forms of resistance to apartheid itself constitutes the crime of apartheid.

A second domain investigated in the report involves Palestinians who are residents of Jerusalem. Here the apartheid character of Israeli rule is exhibited in the way the government of Israel severely undermines the human security of Palestinians living in Jerusalem, manipulating their rights of residence as well as imposing a variety of discriminatory practices, ranging from fiscal measures, demolitions, to the arbitrary withholding of building permits.

The third domain deals with the Palestinian minority living in Israel, perhaps the most problematic component in terms of establishing a definition of apartheid that encompasses the entire Palestinian population. In this category are some 1.7 million citizens of Israel, who are allowed to form political parties and vote in elections. But this minority, which makes up about 20 percent of the overall Israeli population, is prohibited by law from challenging the proclaimed Jewish character of the state and is subject to a wide range of discriminatory nationality laws as well as administrative practices that severely restrict their rights, with effects on land acquisition, property, immigration, family reunification, and marital freedom.

International law has detached apartheid from its South African origins; it’s now a stand-alone crime against humanity that does not stand or fall by whether it contains similar features to those that constituted the apartheid regime in South Africa.

A fourth domain, and the one affecting the largest demographic segment, is made up of Palestinians registered as refugees by UN procedures or living under conditions of involuntary exile. In the background is Israel’s rejection of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948), which confirms that Palestinians dispossessed or displaced by Israel in 1948 enjoy a right of return. General Assembly Resolution 3236 declares this right of return or repatriation to be an “inalienable right,” which thus presumably incorporates those additional several hundred thousand Palestinians later displaced by the 1967 war. As far as is known, no Palestinian displaced since the establishment of Israel in 1948 has been granted a right of return to resume residence.

The report argues that the crime of apartheid has been detached from its historical origins in South Africa. Neither the 1973 Convention nor the 1998 Rome Statute underlying the International Criminal Court ties apartheid to South Africa, but rather treats its practice as a stand-alone crime against humanity. Thus, there are important differences between the way apartheid operated in South Africa and the way it is currently being imposed on the Palestinians, but these differences are not relevant to the question of whether it fairly and accurately applies to Israel. One notable difference is that in South Africa the Afrikaner leadership forthrightly proclaimed apartheid as a reflection of its ideological belief in the separation of races, whereas for Israel such a structure of separation on the basis of race is denied and repudiated, and its attribution is treated as an inflammatory insult. There are other differences as well, relating to degrees of labor dependence and the demographic ratio between Jews and Palestinians.

This quasi-permanent structure of domination cannot be justified or explained by reference to Israel’s legitimate security needs.

Our report concludes that Israel has deliberately fragmented the Palestinian people in relation to these four demographic domains, relying on systematic discrimination, including “inhuman acts,” primarily to maintain its control and render resistance more difficult, while continuing to expand territorially at the expense of prospects for Palestinian self-determination. On the basis of these findings—backed up by detailed presentations of empirical data, including reliance on Israeli official sources—we conclude that the allegation of apartheid as applied to the Palestinian people is well founded and descriptive of the present situation, more so than the terminology of occupation.

As earlier suggested, we are keenly aware that our report is the work of academic investigators and does not represent an authoritative finding of apartheid by a formal judicial or governmental institution. As mentioned—contrary to media coverage and diplomatic denunciations—the report has never been endorsed or accepted by the UN, or even ESCWA. We do recommend such an endorsement, and we urge the UN, national governments, and civil society to take measures designed to encourage Israel to dismantle its apartheid regime and treat the Palestinian people in accord with the dictates of international law and human rights, as well as elementary morality.

The broader setting associated with our contention that Israel has become an apartheid state draws on the reality that there is no peaceful resolution to the conflict on the diplomatic horizon, and thus no foreseeable prospect for ending the discriminatory regime and the attendant suffering of the Palestinian people. This quasi-permanent structure of domination cannot be justified indefinitely by invoking Israeli security needs, which are themselves partly created by the unwillingness of Israel to respect Palestinian rights under international law. A people cannot be permanently repressed in by military force and administrative coercion ways without viewing the structure that has emerged as an apartheid regime. Indeed, part of the reason for not awaiting a more formal assessment of these charges of apartheid is our sense of urgency in ending a set of arrangements that have for so long been responsible for so much suffering and denial of basic rights, above all the right of self-determination.

It remains our central hope, one shared with ESCWA, that the widespread availability of this report will lead to a clearer understanding of the Palestinian plight and encourage more effective responses by the UN, by governments, and by civil society. Beyond this, it is our continuing wish that people of good will throughout the world, especially within Israel, will work toward a political solution that will finally allow Jews and Palestinians to live together in peace, with justice.

Tags: apartheid, Apartheid Convention, ESCWA, Gutteres, international crime, Israel, Palestinian people, racism, Rima Khalaf, South Africa

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Categories apartheid, Apartheid Convention, Commentary, Crimes of State, ESCWA, international law, Israel/Palestine, racism, Reflections, Rima Khalaf, South Africa, United Nations, Virginia Tilley

UN Sponsored Report on Israel’s Responsibility for Apartheid in relation to the Palestinian People

19 Mar

[Prefatory Note: Below is the text of a report co-authored by Virginia Tilley and myself, commissioned by the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) that examines the argument for regarding Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ with respect to the whole of the Palestinian people, that is, not only those Palestinians living under occupation, but also those living as residents of Jerusalem, those living as a minority in Israel, and those enduring refugee camps and involuntary exile. The report concludes that Israel is guilty of the continuing crime of apartheid as it is defined in the 1973 Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. The report reviews the evidence for such a finding, and offers recommendation for acting upon such a conclusion within the United Nations, by national governments, and by civil society. Upon the release of the report on March 15, 2017 there was an immediate reaction of condemnation by American and Israeli representatives at the UN, including calls for its removal from the UN website and the repudiation of the report. The Executive Secretary of ESCWA, Rima Khalaf, has resigned after refusing to remove the report from the ESCWA website, and has made strongly supportive statements about the quality of the report as issued. It should be noted, as stated below, that the report is an independent academic work that has at the present time been neither endorsed or repudiated by any part of the UN System. It is the hope of the authors that the report encourages debate and action that deepens involvement with the Palestinian quest for a just peace and the end to their prolonged ordeal of suffering; it is also our hope that the study will be taken seriously within Israel itself.]

Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia

Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

Palestine and the Israeli Occupation, Issue No. 1

E/ESCWA/ECRI/2017/1

Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA)

Israeli Practices towards
the Palestinian People
and the Question of Apartheid

Palestine and the Israeli Occupation, Issue No. 1

United Nations

Beirut, 2017

Photocopies and reproductions of excerpts are allowed with proper credits.

All queries on rights and licenses, including subsidiary rights, should be addressed to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), e-mail: publications-escwa@un.org.

The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its officials or Member States.

The designations employed and the presentation of material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

Links contained in this publication are provided for the convenience of the reader and are correct at the time of issue. The United Nations takes no responsibility for the continued accuracy of that information or for the content of any external website.

References have, wherever possible, been verified.

Symbols of United Nations documents are composed of capital letters combined with figures. Mention of such a symbol indicates a reference to a United Nations document.

United Nations publication issued by ESCWA, United Nations House, Riad El Solh Square, P.O. Box: 11-8575, Beirut, Lebanon.

Website: http://www.unescwa.org.

Acknowledgements

This report was commissioned by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) from authors Mr. Richard Falk and Ms. Virginia Tilley.

Richard Falk (LLB, Yale University; SJD, Harvard University) is currently Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice Emeritus at Princeton University. From 2008 through 2014, he served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. He is author or editor of some 60 books and hundreds of articles on international human rights law, Middle East politics, environmental justice, and other fields concerning human rights and international relations.

Virginia Tilley (MA and PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and MA in Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University) is Professor of Political Science at Southern Illinois University. From 2006 to 2011, she served as Chief Research Specialist in the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa
and from 2007 to 2010 led the Council’s Middle East Project, which undertook
a two-year study of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories. In addition to many articles on the politics and ideologies of the conflict in Israel-Palestine, she is author of The One-State Solution (University of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005) and editor of Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Pluto Press, 2012).

This report benefited from the general guidance of Mr. Tarik Alami, Director of the Emerging and Conflict-Related Issues (ECRI) Division at ESCWA. Mr. Rabi’ Bashour (ECRI) coordinated the report, contributed to defining its scope and provided editorial comments, planning and data. Ms. Leila Choueiri provided substantive and editorial inputs. Ms. Rita Jarous (ECRI), Mr. Sami Salloum and Mr. Rafat Soboh (ECRI), provided editorial comments and information, as well as technical assistance. Mr. Damien Simonis (ESCWA, Conference Services Section) edited

the report.

iv | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

Appreciation is extended to the blind reviewers for their valuable input.

We also acknowledge the authors of and contributors to Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A Reassessment of Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories under International Law, whose work informed this report (see annex I) and was published in 2012 as Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Preface

The authors of this report, examining whether Israel has established an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole, fully appreciate the sensitivity of the question.1 Even broaching the issue has been denounced by spokespersons of the Israeli Government and many of its supporters as anti-Semitism in a new guise. In 2016, Israel successfully lobbied for the inclusion of criticism of Israel in laws against anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States of America, and background documents to those legal instruments list the apartheid charge as one example of attempts aimed at “destroying Israel’s image and isolating it as a pariah State”.2

The authors reject the accusation of anti-Semitism in the strongest terms. First, the question of whether the State of Israel is constituted as an apartheid regime springs from the same body of international human rights law and principles that rejects anti-Semitism: that is, the prohibition of racial discrimination. No State is immune from the norms and rules enshrined in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which must be applied impartially. The prohibition of apartheid, which, as a crime against humanity, can admit no exceptions, flows from the Convention. Strengthening that body of international law can only benefit all groups that have historically endured discrimination, domination and persecution, including Jews.

1 This report was prepared in response to a request made by member States of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) at the first meeting of its Executive Committee, held in Amman on 8 and 9 June 2015. Preliminary findings of the report were presented to the twenty-ninth session of ESCWA, held in Doha from 13 to 15 December 2016. As a result, member States passed resolution 326 (XXIX) of 15 December 2016, in which they requested that the secretariat “publish widely the results of the study”.

2 Coordinating Forum for Countering Antisemitism (CFCA): FAQ: the campaign to defame Israel. Available from http://antisemitism.org.il/eng/FAQ:%20The%20campaign%20to%20defame%20Israel. The CFCA is an Israeli Government “national forum”. “The new anti-Semitism” has become the term used to equate criticism of Israeli racial policies with anti- Semitism, especially where such criticism extends to proposing that the ethnic premise of Jewish statehood is illegitimate, because it violates international human rights law. The European Union Parliament Working Group on Antisemitism has accordingly included in its working definition of anti-Semitism the following example: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavour” (see http://www.antisem.eu/projects/eumc-working-definition-of-antisemitism). In 2016, the United States passed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, in which the definition of anti-Semitism is that set forth by the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti- Semitism of the Department of State in a fact sheet of 8 June 2010. Examples of anti-Semitism listed therein include: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist.” (Available from https://2009- 2017.state.gov/documents/organization/156684.pdf).

vi | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

Secondly, the situation in Israel-Palestine constitutes an unmet obligation of the organized international community to resolve a conflict partially generated by its own actions. That obligation dates formally to 1922, when the League of Nations established the British Mandate for Palestine as a territory eminently ready for independence as an inclusive secular State, yet incorporated into the Mandate the core pledge of the Balfour Declaration to support the “Jewish people” in their efforts to establish in Palestine a “Jewish national home”.3 Later United Nations Security Council and General Assembly resolutions attempted to resolve the conflict generated by that arrangement, yet could not prevent related proposals, such as partition, from being overtaken by events on the ground. If this attention to the case of Israel by the United Nations appears exceptional, therefore, it is only because no comparable linkage exists between United Nations actions and any other prolonged denial to a people of their right of self-determination.

Thirdly, the policies, practices and measures applied by Israel to enforce a system of racial discrimination threaten regional peace and security. United Nations resolutions have long recognized that danger and called for resolution of the conflict so as to restore and maintain peace and stability in the region.

To assert that the policies and practices of a sovereign State amount to apartheid constitutes a grave charge. A study aimed at making such a determination should be undertaken and submitted for consideration only when supporting evidence clearly exceeds reasonable doubt. The authors of this report believe that evidence for suspecting that a system of apartheid has been imposed on the Palestinian people meets such a demanding criterion. Given the protracted suffering of the Palestinian people, it would be irresponsible not to present the evidence and legal arguments regarding whether Israel has established an apartheid regime that oppresses the Palestinian people as a whole, and not to make recommendations for appropriate further action by international and civil society actors.

In sum, this study was motivated by the desire to promote compliance with international human rights law, uphold and strengthen international criminal law, and ensure that the collective responsibilities of the United Nations and its Member States with regard to crimes against humanity are fulfilled. More concretely, it aims to see the core commitments of the international community to upholding international law applied to the case of the Palestinian people, in defence of its rights under international law, including the right of self-determination.

3 The Council of the League of Nations, League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, December 1922, article 2. Available from http://www.mandateforpalestine.org/the-mandate.html.

Contents

Acknowledgements iii Preface v Executive Summary 1 Introduction 9

1. The Legal Context: Short History of the Prohibition of Apartheid 11

Alternative definitions of apartheid 12

2. Testing for an Apartheid Regime in Israel-Palestine 27

A. The political geography of apartheid 27 B. Israel as a racial State 30 C. Apartheid through fragmentation 37 D. Counter-arguments 48

3. Conclusions and Recommendations 51

A. Conclusions 51 B. Recommendations 52

Annexes

I. Findings of the 2009 HSRC Report 57 II. Which Country? 63

| vii

Page

Executive Summary

This report concludes that Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole. Aware of the seriousness
of this allegation, the authors of the report conclude that available evidence establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Israel is guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid as legally defined in instruments of international law.

The analysis in this report rests on the same body of international human rights law and principles that reject anti-Semitism and other racially discriminatory ideologies, including: the Charter of the United Nations (1945), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965). The report relies for its definition of apartheid primarily on article II of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973, hereinafter the Apartheid Convention):

The term “the crime of apartheid”, which shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa, shall apply to… inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.

Although the term “apartheid” was originally associated with the specific instance of South Africa, it now represents a species of crime against humanity under customary international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, according to which:

“The crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.

Against that background, this report reflects the expert consensus that the prohibition of apartheid is universally applicable and was not rendered moot by the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and South West Africa (Namibia).

2 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

The legal approach to the matter of apartheid adopted by this report should not be confused with usage of the term in popular discourse as an expression of opprobrium. Seeing apartheid as discrete acts and practices (such as the “apartheid wall”), a phenomenon generated by anonymous structural conditions like capitalism (“economic apartheid”), or private social behaviour on the part of certain racial groups towards others (social racism) may have its place

in certain contexts. However, this report anchors its definition of apartheid in international law, which carries with it responsibilities for States, as specified in international instruments.

The choice of evidence is guided by the Apartheid Convention, which sets forth that the crime of apartheid consists of discrete inhuman acts, but that such acts acquire the status of crimes against humanity only if they intentionally serve
the core purpose of racial domination. The Rome Statute specifies in its definition the presence of an “institutionalized regime” serving the “intention” of racial domination. Since “purpose” and “intention” lie at the core of both definitions, this report examines factors ostensibly separate from the Palestinian dimension — especially, the doctrine of Jewish statehood as expressed in law and the design

of Israeli State institutions — to establish beyond doubt the presence of such a core purpose.

That the Israeli regime is designed for this core purpose was found to be evident in the body of laws, only some of which are discussed in the report for reasons of scope. One prominent example is land policy. The Israeli Basic Law (Constitution) mandates that land held by the State of Israel, the Israeli Development Authority or the Jewish National Fund shall not be transferred in any manner, placing its management permanently under their authority. The State Property Law of 1951 provides for the reversion of property (including land) to the State in any area

“in which the law of the State of Israel applies”. The Israel Lands Authority (ILA) manages State land, which accounts for 93 per cent of the land within the internationally recognized borders of Israel and is by law closed to use, development or ownership by non-Jews. Those laws reflect the concept of “public purpose” as expressed in the Basic Law. Such laws may be changed by Knesset vote, but the Basic Law: Knesset prohibits any political party from challenging that public purpose. Effectively, Israeli law renders opposition to racial domination illegal.

Demographic engineering is another area of policy serving the purpose of maintaining Israel as a Jewish State. Most well known is Israeli law conferring on Jews worldwide the right to enter Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship regardless of their countries of origin and whether or not they can show links to Israel-Palestine,

while withholding any comparable right from Palestinians, including those with documented ancestral homes in the country. The World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency are vested with legal authority as agencies of the State of Israel to facilitate Jewish immigration and preferentially serve the interests of Jewish citizens in matters ranging from land use to public development planning and other matters deemed vital to Jewish statehood. Some laws involving demographic engineering are expressed in coded language, such as those that allow Jewish councils to reject applications for residence from Palestinian citizens. Israeli law normally allows spouses of Israeli citizens to relocate to Israel but uniquely prohibits this option in the case of Palestinians from the occupied territory or beyond. On a far larger scale, it is a matter of Israeli policy to reject the return of any Palestinian refugees and exiles (totalling some six million people) to territory under Israeli control.

Two additional attributes of a systematic regime of racial domination must be present to qualify the regime as an instance of apartheid. The first involves the identification of the oppressed persons as belonging to a specific “racial group”. This report accepts the definition of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of “racial discrimination” as “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life”. On that basis, this report argues that in the geopolitical context of Palestine, Jews and Palestinians can be considered “racial groups”. Furthermore, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is cited expressly in the Apartheid Convention.

The second attribute is the boundary and character of the group or groups involved. The status of the Palestinians as a people entitled to exercise the
right of self-determination has been legally settled, most authoritatively by
the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its 2004 advisory opinion on Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. On that basis, the report examines the treatment by Israel of the Palestinian people as a whole, considering the distinct circumstances of geographic and juridical fragmentation of the Palestinian people as a condition imposed by Israel. (Annex II addresses the issue of a proper identification of the “country” responsible for the denial of Palestinian rights under international law.)

This report finds that the strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people is the principal method by which Israel imposes an apartheid regime. It first examines

Executive Summary | 3

4 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

how the history of war, partition, de jure and de facto annexation and prolonged occupation in Palestine has led to the Palestinian people being divided into different geographic regions administered by distinct sets of law. This fragmentation operates to stabilize the Israeli regime of racial domination over the Palestinians and to weaken the will and capacity of the Palestinian people to mount a unified and effective resistance. Different methods are deployed depending on where Palestinians live. This is the core means by which Israel enforces apartheid and at the same time impedes international recognition of how the system works as a complementary whole to comprise an apartheid regime.

Since 1967, Palestinians as a people have lived in what the report refers to as four “domains”, in which the fragments of the Palestinian population are ostensibly treated differently but share in common the racial oppression that results from the apartheid regime. Those domains are:

Civil law, with special restrictions, governing Palestinians who live as citizens of Israel;
Permanent residency law governing Palestinians living in the city of Jerusalem;
Military law governing Palestinians, including those in refugee camps, living since 1967 under conditions of belligerent occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip;
Policy to preclude the return of Palestinians, whether refugees or exiles, living outside territory under Israel’s control.

Domain 1 embraces about 1.7 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. For the first 20 years of the country’s existence, they lived under martial law and to this day are subjected to oppression on the basis of not being Jewish. That policy of domination manifests itself in inferior services, restrictive zoning laws and limited budget allocations made to Palestinian communities; in restrictions on jobs and professional opportunities; and in the mostly segregated landscape in which Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel live. Palestinian political parties can campaign for minor reforms and better budgets, but are legally prohibited by the Basic Law from challenging legislation maintaining the racial regime. The policy is reinforced by the implications of the distinction made in Israel between “citizenship” (ezrahut) and “nationality” (le’um): all Israeli citizens enjoy the former, but only Jews enjoy the latter. “National” rights in Israeli law signify Jewish-national rights. The struggle of Palestinian citizens of Israel for equality and civil reforms under Israeli law is thus isolated by the regime from that of Palestinians elsewhere.

Domain 2 covers the approximately 300,000 Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem, who experience discrimination in access to education, health care, employment, residency and building rights. They also suffer from expulsions
and home demolitions, which serve the Israeli policy of “demographic balance” in favour of Jewish residents. East Jerusalem Palestinians are classified as permanent residents, which places them in a separate category designed to prevent their demographic and, importantly, electoral weight being added to that of Palestinians citizens in Israel. As permanent residents, they have no legal standing to challenge Israeli law. Moreover, openly identifying with Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory politically carries the risk of expulsion to the West Bank and loss of the right even to visit Jerusalem. Thus, the urban epicentre of Palestinian political life is caught inside a legal bubble that curtails its inhabitants’ capacity to oppose the apartheid regime lawfully.

Domain 3 is the system of military law imposed on approximately 4.6 million Palestinians who live in the occupied Palestinian territory, 2.7 million of them in the West Bank and 1.9 million in the Gaza Strip. The territory is administered in a manner that fully meets the definition of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention: except for the provision on genocide, every illustrative “inhuman act” listed in the Convention is routinely and systematically practiced by Israel in the West Bank. Palestinians are governed by military law, while the approximately 350,000 Jewish settlers are governed by Israeli civil law. The racial character of this situation is further confirmed by the fact that all West Bank Jewish settlers enjoy the protections of Israeli civil law on the basis of being Jewish, whether they are Israeli citizens or not. This dual legal system, problematic in itself, is indicative of an apartheid regime when coupled with the racially discriminatory management of land and development administered by Jewish-national institutions, which are charged with administering “State land” in the interest of the Jewish population. In support of the overall findings of this report, annex I sets out in more detail the policies and practices of Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory that constitute violations of article II of the Apartheid Convention.

Domain 4 refers to the millions of Palestinian refugees and involuntary exiles, most of whom live in neighbouring countries. They are prohibited from returning to their homes in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory. Israel defends its rejection
of the Palestinians’ return in frankly racist language: it is alleged that Palestinians constitute a “demographic threat” and that their return would alter the demographic character of Israel to the point of eliminating it as a Jewish State.

The refusal of the right of return plays an essential role in the apartheid regime by ensuring that the Palestinian population in Mandate Palestine does not grow to a point that would threaten Israeli military control of the territory and/or provide the

Executive Summary | 5

6 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

demographic leverage for Palestinian citizens of Israel to demand (and obtain) full democratic rights, thereby eliminating the Jewish character of the State of Israel. Although domain 4 is confined to policies denying Palestinians their right of repatriation under international law, it is treated in this report as integral to the system of oppression and domination of the Palestinian people as a whole, given its crucial role in demographic terms in maintaining the apartheid regime.

This report finds that, taken together, the four domains constitute one comprehensive regime developed for the purpose of ensuring the enduring domination over non-Jews in all land exclusively under Israeli control in whatever category. To some degree, the differences in treatment accorded to Palestinians have been provisionally treated as valid by the United Nations, in the absence of an assessment of whether they constitute a form of apartheid. In the light of this report’s findings, this long-standing fragmented international approach may require review.

In the interests of fairness and completeness, the report examines several counter- arguments advanced by Israel and supporters of its policies denying the applicability of the Apartheid Convention to the case of Israel-Palestine. They include claims that: the determination of Israel to remain a Jewish State is consistent with practices of other States, such as France; Israel does not owe Palestinian non-citizens equal treatment with Jews precisely because they are not citizens; and Israeli treatment of the Palestinians reflects no “purpose” or “intent” to dominate, but rather is a temporary state of affairs imposed on Israel by the realities of ongoing conflict and security requirements. The report shows that none of those arguments stands up to examination. A further claim that Israel cannot be considered culpable for crimes of apartheid because Palestinian citizens of Israel have voting rights rests on two errors of legal interpretation: an overly literal comparison with South African apartheid policy and detachment of the question of voting rights from other laws, especially provisions of the Basic Law that prohibit political parties from challenging the Jewish, and hence racial, character of

the State.

The report concludes that the weight of the evidence supports beyond a reasonable doubt the proposition that Israel is guilty of imposing an apartheid regime on the Palestinian people, which amounts to the commission of a crime against humanity, the prohibition of which is considered jus cogens in international customary law. The international community, especially the United Nations and its agencies, and Member States, have a legal obligation to act within the limits of their capabilities to prevent and punish instances of apartheid that are responsibly brought to their attention. More specifically, States have a collective

duty: (a) not to recognize an apartheid regime as lawful; (b) not to aid or assist a State in maintaining an apartheid regime; and (c) to cooperate with the United Nations and other States in bringing apartheid regimes to an end. Civil society institutions and individuals also have a moral and political duty to use the instruments at their disposal to raise awareness of this ongoing criminal enterprise, and to exert pressure on Israel in order to persuade it to dismantle apartheid structures in compliance with international law. The report ends with general and specific recommendations to the United Nations, national Governments, and civil society and private actors on actions they should take in view of the finding that Israel maintains a regime of apartheid in its exercise of control over the Palestinian people.

Executive Summary | 7

Introduction

This report examines the practices and policies of Israel with regard to the Palestinian people in its entirety. This is not an arbitrary choice. The legal existence of the “Palestinian people” and its right, as a whole people, to self-determination were confirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its advisory opinion on the separation wall in occupied Palestinian territory:1

As regards the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination, the Court observes that the existence of a “Palestinian people” is no longer in issue. Such existence has moreover been recognized by Israel in the exchange of letters of 9 September 1993 between Mr. Yasser Arafat, President of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Mr. Yitzhak Rabin, lsraeli Prime Minister. In that correspondence, the President of the PLO recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” and made various other commitments. In reply, the Israeli Prime Minister informed him that, in the light of those commitments, “the Government of Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people”. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of 28 September 1995 also refers a number of times to the Palestinian people and its “legitimate rights” (preamble, paras. 4, 7, 8; article II, para. 2; article III, paras. 1 and 3; article XXII, para. 2). The Court considers that those rights include the right to self-determination, as the General Assembly has moreover recognized on a number of occasions (see, for example, resolution 58/163 of 22 December 2003).

The status of the Palestinians as a people is therefore legally settled (although Israel contests it), and so the practices and policies of Israel towards the whole Palestinian people, despite the Palestinians being fragmented geographically and politically, should be addressed as a single, unified matter. That view is reinforced by the realization that there is no prospect for achieving fundamental Palestinian rights, above all the right of self-determination, through international diplomacy as long as this question remains open.

The authors hope that this report will assist United Nations Member States in making responsible and full use of their national legal systems in the service of the

1 Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 2004, p. 136. Available from http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/131/1671.pdf.

10 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

global common good. Civil society organizations are also urged to align their agendas and priorities with the findings of this report. Nonetheless, it is primarily incumbent on Israel to comply with international criminal law. Apartheid as an international crime is now viewed by jurists as a peremptory norm (jus cogens) of international customary law, which creates obligations erga omnes. In other words, it is an overriding principle, from which no derogation is permitted, and which is therefore binding, regardless of the consent of sovereign States, and cannot be renounced by national Governments or their representatives.2 In effect, this means that even States that do not accede to the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (hereinafter the Apartheid Convention) are responsible for adhering to its obligations. Israel is thus bound by its obligations to end a crime of apartheid if authoritative findings determine that its practices and policies constitute such a criminal regime.

2 John Dugard, ”Introductory note to the Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid”, United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law, 2008. Available from http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/cspca/cspca.html.

1. The Legal Context
Short History of the Prohibition of Apartheid

The prohibition of apartheid in international human rights law draws primarily from two areas: (1) prohibitions of discrimination on the basis of race; and (2) rejection of the racist regime that governed in the Republic of South Africa between 1948 and 1992.6

The prohibition of racial discrimination traces to the earliest principles of the United Nations. While a full list would overburden this report, foundational statements include Article 55 of the United Nations Charter and article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Later instruments, particularly the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, spelled out the prohibition in greater detail. Thus Member States of the United Nations are obligated to abide by the prohibition of apartheid whether or not they are parties to the Apartheid Convention.

The juridical history of international rejection of apartheid in South Africa dates to the early years of the existence of the United Nations. General Assembly resolution 395(V) of 1950 was the first to make explicit reference to apartheid in southern Africa, which it defined as a form of racial discrimination.7 Resolution 1761(XVII) of 1962 established what came to be called the Special Committee against Apartheid.8 In the preamble to the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, alarm is expressed about “manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas of the world… such as policies of apartheid, segregation or separation” (emphasis added). In article 3, signatories to the Convention “particularly condemn racial segregation and apartheid and

6 The precise date given for the end of apartheid varies with the benchmark used: decriminalization of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1990; the launching or closure of the CODESA (Convention for a Democratic South Africa) talks in 1991 or 1993 respectively; the assassination of Chris Hani in 1993, which triggered the capitulation of the apartheid regime; the election of Nelson Mandela as President in 1994; or passage of the new Constitution in 1995. Taking the meaningful collapse of apartheid’s legitimacy as a rough signpost, the fall of apartheid is here dated to 1992.

7 Resolution 395(V) addressed racial discrimination against people of Indian origin in South Africa (A/RES/395(V)). Concern for that population had been expressed earlier, beginning with resolution 44 (I) of 1946 (A/RES/44(I)).

8 A/RES/1761(XVII).

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12 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

undertake to prevent, prohibit and eradicate all practices of this nature in territories under their jurisdiction” (emphasis added).

The Apartheid Convention of 1973 classifies apartheid as a crime against humanity (in articles I and II) and provides the most detailed definition of it in international law.9 It also clarifies international responsibility and obligations with regard to combating the crime of apartheid. In the 1977 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (hereinafter Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions), apartheid is defined as a war crime. The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), hereinafter the Rome Statute, lists apartheid as a crime against humanity (article 7 (1) (j)), bringing its investigation and possible prosecution under the jurisdiction of the ICC.

Although only 109 States are parties to the Apartheid Convention, most States (currently 177) are parties to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, under which they commit themselves to “prevent, prohibit and eradicate” apartheid (article 3). As of 31 January 2017, 124 States had ratified the Rome Statute. Hence, most States have a legal responsibility to oppose apartheid and take measures to end it wherever it may arise. That responsibility concerns not only human rights violations resulting from apartheid but the threat it poses to international peace and security. The Apartheid Convention further provides that States parties should act at the national level to suppress and prevent the crime of apartheid, through legislative action and prosecutions and legal proceedings in any competent national court.

This report proceeds on the assumption that apartheid is a crime against humanity and that all Member States of the United Nations are legally responsible for acting to prevent, end and punish its practice.

Alternative definitions of apartheid

Arguments about whether a State practices apartheid rest on how apartheid is defined. Several definitions are currently used in polemical debate with regard to Israel, which is frequently labelled an “apartheid State” for its practice of discrete

9 When the Convention was drafted, apartheid had already been described as a crime against humanity by the General Assembly, as in resolution 2202 (XXI) of 1966 (A/RES/2202(XXI) A-B).

The Legal Context: Short History of the Prohibition of Apartheid | 13

“acts of apartheid”, such as the “apartheid wall”.10 Those who insist that Israel cannot be held culpable for apartheid argue that the country’s laws are fundamentally different from those of apartheid South Africa: for example, because Palestinian citizens of Israel have the right to vote.11 These diverse arguments arguably fall outside a study grounded in the tenets of international law as set forth in the pertinent instruments, but a quick overview of them here is warranted. This brevity should not be taken to imply a dismissal of such definitions, which have their place beyond strict considerations of international law. Rather, the overview serves to explain why they are not employed in this report. Neat divisions cannot always be made between these definitions, and some clearly overlap, but they can be identified as types or tendencies.

Defining only regimes consistent with the apartheid regime in South Africa as being apartheid, so that, by definition, digressions from South African practices preclude any charge of apartheid.
Treating discrete practices considered to have qualities of apartheid, such as the so-called “apartheid wall” (“separation fence” or “separation barrier” in official Israeli discourse), as signifying that a State has established a comprehensive apartheid regime.
Defining apartheid as the outcome of anonymous structural global forces, such as global corporate influences or neoliberalism, as enforced by Bretton Woods institutions.
Defining apartheid as the aggregate body of private racist practices by the dominant society as a whole, whereby State involvement is a contingent tool for enforcing a draconian social system based on racial hierarchy, discrimination and segregation.
Treating apartheid as pertaining only to Palestinian citizens of Israel, or only to Palestinians in the occupied territory, or excluding Palestinian refugees and involuntary exiles living outside territory under Israeli control.12

These types of definition, and the reasons that make them unsuitable for this report, are elaborated upon below.

10 A literature review of such references exceeds the scope of this report.
11 CERD/C/ISR/14-16.
12 Palestinians expelled from the occupied Palestinian territory by Israel and not allowed to return.

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1. ThecomparisonwithsouthernAfrica

Arguments about whether Israel has established an apartheid regime often compare the policies and practices of Israel with the system of apartheid in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia).13 The very term “apartheid” may suggest that the system of racial discrimination as practised by the South African regime constitutes the model for a finding of apartheid elsewhere.14 The comparison does sometimes provide illuminating insights: for instance, by clarifying why existing proposals for a two-State solution in Mandate Palestine are most likely to generate a Palestinian Bantustan.15 Such insights are found by examining the South African distinction between so-called “petty apartheid” (the segregation of facilities, job access and so forth) and “grand apartheid”, which proposed solving racial tensions with the partition of South African territory and by establishing black South African “homelands” delineated by the regime. Be that as it may, the South African comparison will be mostly avoided in this report, because (1) such comparison contradicts the universal character of the prohibition of apartheid and (2) because apartheid systems that arise in different countries will necessarily differ in design. Nonetheless, because they tend to have much in common, this approach requires brief elaboration.

(a) Reasonsfortheerrorofcomparison

The first reason people turn to the South African case is that the collective memory of the South African struggle and the term “apartheid” itself encourage this error. On coming to power in 1948, the Afrikaner-dominated Nationalist Party translated its constituency’s long-standing beliefs about racial hierarchy into a body of racial laws designed to secure white supremacy and determine the life conditions and chances of everyone in the country on the basis of race. The Nationalists’ term for this comprehensive system was apartheid (Afrikaans for “apart-hood” or “separate development”).16 The opposition to apartheid (coordinated by the African National Congress, the Pan-African Congress, the domestic United Democratic Front and

13 The term “southern” Africa reflects the practice of South Africa in extending apartheid to South West Africa (now Namibia), which South Africa had held under a League of Nations mandate and refused to relinquish after the Second World War.

14 Afrikaans is the adapted Dutch of the indigenized Dutch-European “Afrikaner” settler society in southern Africa.
15 For a study of how arrangements for the Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority replicate the South African

“homelands”, or Bantustans, see Virginia Tilley, “A Palestinian declaration of independence: implications for peace”, Middle East Policy, vol. 17, No. 1 (March 2010). Available from http://mepc.org/journal/middle-east-policy-archives/palestinian-declaration- independence-implications-peace.

16 The National Party was the principal party in South Africa expressing the Afrikaner worldview and white-nationalist political goals. Hold-outs against United Nations denunciations of apartheid in South Africa included Israel, which maintained a close alliance with the regime throughout its duration, and the United States of America, which had close business ties with South Africa.

The Legal Context: Short History of the Prohibition of Apartheid | 15

other southern African actors, as well as sympathetic international human rights networks) accordingly adopted the term in order to denounce it. The General Assembly did the same, using the term for a series of measures concerning South Africa. For many people, this long history of legal activism naturalized the association between apartheid and South Africa to the point of conflation.

That this conflation is a legal error can be seen in the history of usage through which the term gained universal application:

1962 – The General Assembly established the Special Committee on the Policies of Apartheid of the Government of South Africa, later renamed the Special Committee against Apartheid;
1965 – Under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, apartheid was classified as a form of racial discrimination (preamble and article 3) with no mention of South Africa;
1973 – The Apartheid Convention clarified that “inhuman acts” that constitute the crime of apartheid would “include” acts that are “similar to” those of apartheid South Africa;
1976 – The Secretariat of the United Nations set up the Centre against Apartheid;
1998 – Apartheid was listed in the Rome Statute as a crime against humanity, with no mention of South Africa.That the term has come to have universal application is clarified by South African jurist John Dugard (a leading legal scholar of apartheid):
That the Apartheid Convention is intended to apply to situations other than South Africa is confirmed by its endorsement in a wider context in instruments adopted before and after the fall of apartheid… It may be concluded that the Apartheid Convention is dead as far as the original cause for its creation – apartheid in South Africa – is concerned, but that

it lives on as a species of the crime against humanity, under both customary international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (emphasis added).17

This report assumes that the term “apartheid” has come to have universal application in international law and is accordingly not confined to the South African case.

17 John Dugard, “Introductory note to the Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid”. Available from http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/cspca/cspca.html.

16 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

(b) The paucity of precedents

A second reason people turn to the South African comparison is that, because
no other State has been accused of the crime of apartheid, South Africa stands as the only case providing a precedent. Given the importance of precedents in the interpretation of law, it is arguably natural for people to look at the “inhuman acts” of apartheid in southern Africa as the models or benchmarks for what apartheid “looks like”. For example, some claim that Israel clearly does not practise apartheid because Palestinian citizens of Israel have the right to vote in national elections, while black South Africans did not. That the design of apartheid regimes in other States must necessarily differ — due to the unique history of their societies and the collective experience shaping local racial thought, such as settler colonialism, slavery, ethnic cleansing, war or genocide — is neglected in such a simplified search for models.

Nevertheless, the case of southern Africa does serve to expose some legal arguments as specious. For example, it might be argued that the treatment by Israel of Palestinian populations outside its internationally recognized borders (that is, in the occupied Palestinian territory and abroad) falls beyond the scope of the question, making its policies on Palestinian refugees and Palestinians living under occupation irrelevant to a charge of apartheid. That this argument is unsupportable is confirmed by reference to ICJ advisory opinions regarding the behaviour of South Africa in South West Africa (Namibia).18 In 1972, the ICJ found South African rule over Namibia illegal partly on the grounds that it violated the rights of the Namibian people by imposing South African apartheid laws there.19 South Africa was thus held to account for apartheid practices outside its own sovereign territory and in respect to non-citizens.

This report assumes that the question of formal sovereignty is not germane to a finding of apartheid.

18 In the 1960s, South Africa administered South West Africa (Namibia) as a fifth province and applied to it its doctrine of apartheid, complete with Bantustans. The policy attracted repeated criticism from the General Assembly.

19 The ICJ was addressing the legality of South Africa’s continued rule of South West Africa in violation of a Security Council resolution calling for its withdrawal. See especially the last of four opinions issued between 1950 and 1971: International Status of South-West Africa, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 1950, p. 128; Voting Procedure on Questions Relating to Reports and Petitions Concerning the Territory of South West Africa, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 1955, p. 67; Admissibility of Hearings of Petitioners by the Committee on South-West Africa, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 1956, p. 23; Legal Consequences for States of the Continued Presence of South Africa in Namibia (South West Africa) Notwithstanding Security Council Resolution 276 (1970), Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 1971, p. 16 (especially paras. 131 and 133).

The Legal Context: Short History of the Prohibition of Apartheid | 17

2. Apartheid as discrete practices

Discrete acts by Israel are frequently labelled as examples of “apartheid”: for example, as noted earlier, in references to the “apartheid wall”. Such references are useful to those wishing to highlight how the forcible segregation of groups strongly suggests apartheid. Yet it would be erroneous to take such isolated practices as indicative that a State is constituted as an apartheid regime.20 Rather, the Apartheid Convention provides a definition that stresses the combination of acts with their “purpose” or intent:

For the purpose of the present Convention, the term “the crime of apartheid”, which shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa, shall apply to the following inhuman acts committed for the purpose of (emphasis added) establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them (article II).

The Convention then lists six categories of such “inhuman acts”. In article 7 (2) (h), the Rome Statute formulates the same concept differently, but again places emphasis on such acts as reflecting an “intention”:

“The crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1 [i.e., “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack”], committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.

Both instruments thus establish that discrete acts are crimes of apartheid only if they are part of an institutionalized regime and have the “intention” or “purpose” of racial domination and oppression. The same acts, if not observably part of such a regime or lacking such a clear purpose, may be denounced as reprehensible instances of racism but do not meet the definition of a crime of apartheid. For that reason, a check-list method alone — such as looking for the “inhuman acts” mentioned in the Apartheid Convention — would be a misreading of the

20 Former special rapporteurs John Dugard and Richard Falk highlighted the problem of determining when “features of apartheid” signify that an apartheid regime is operating, which would constitute a matter that might be referred to the ICJ. For both rapporteurs, the question arose with regard to the legality of the Israeli occupation. Mr. Dugard described “road apartheid” in the occupied Palestinian territory and noted that the Israeli occupation has “features” or “elements” of apartheid. However, whether Israel is constituted as an apartheid regime remained for Mr. Dugard a question still to be legally determined (A/62/275). Mr. Falk adopted a similar position (A/HRC/25/67, p. 21).

18 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

Convention’s intention. In article II, it explicitly establishes that such acts are illustrative, not mandatory, and are crimes of apartheid only if they serve the overarching purpose of racial domination. Hence, such acts can be considered crimes of apartheid only after the existence of an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination” has been conclusively established.

The very existence of the Apartheid Convention indicates that apartheid is rightly distinguished from other forms of racial discrimination, already prohibited under instruments such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, by its character as a regime. The Rome Statute expressly refers to apartheid as a regime. In political science, a State regime is the set of institutions through which the State is governed, principally regarding its arrangements for exercising power. In the oft-cited formulation by political scientist Robert Fishman:

A regime may be thought of as the formal and informal organization of the centre of political power, and of its relations with the broader society. A regime determines who has access to political power, and how those who are in power deal with those who are not… Regimes are more permanent forms of political organization than specific governments, but they are typically less permanent than the State.21

On the basis of this definition, relevant evidence for an apartheid regime in Israel- Palestine must go beyond identifying discrete acts and determine whether the regime blocks access to “the centre of political power” on the basis of race. Moreover, the Apartheid Convention specifies that “organizations, institutions and individuals” may be culpable for the crime of apartheid (article I, para. 2). This, too, means that the State as a whole may be held accountable for committing that crime.

Finally, identifying apartheid as a regime clarifies one controversy: that ending such a regime would constitute destruction of the State itself. This interpretation is understandable if the State is understood as being the same as its regime. Thus, some suggest that the aim of eliminating apartheid in Israel is tantamount to aiming to “destroy Israel”. However, a State does not cease to exist as a result of regime change. The elimination of the apartheid regime in South Africa in no way affected the country’s statehood.

To determine whether specific acts constitute evidence of apartheid, this report examines whether they contribute to the overarching purpose of sustaining an institutionalized regime of racial oppression and domination.

21 Fishman, Robert M., “Rethinking State and regime: Southern Europe’s transition to democracy”, World Politics, vol. 42, No. 3 (April 1990).

The Legal Context: Short History of the Prohibition of Apartheid | 19

3. Apartheid as generated by anonymous structural conditions

Some writers have begun to define apartheid as the racialized impact of anonymous socioeconomic forces, such as the capitalist mode of production. It may indeed be heuristically useful to use the term “economic apartheid” to describe situations where economic inequality feeds into racial formation and stratification, even in the absence of any deliberate State policy to achieve this result.22 (Scholars of race relations will identify this as the illimitable race-class debate.) In this model, “apartheid” is used to flag discrimination that emerges spontaneously from a variety of economic conditions and incentives. Some argue that the entire global economy is generating a kind of “global apartheid”.23

The trouble with this hyper-structural approach is that it renders agency, particularly the role of a given State, unclear or implicitly eliminates it altogether. International law interprets apartheid as a crime for which individuals (or States) can be prosecuted, once their culpability is established by authoritative legal procedures. No such criminal culpability could pertain when treating apartheid as the product of the international structure itself, as this would not signify whether the State regime is configured deliberately for the purpose of racial domination and oppression — the distinguishing quality of apartheid according to the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute.

This report considers that the question of whether or not an apartheid system is in place should be analysed at the level of the State, and that the crime
of apartheid is applicable only to that level.

4. Apartheid as private social behaviour

The term apartheid is also used to describe racial discrimination where the main agent in imposing racial domination is the dominant racial group, whose members collectively generate the rules and norms that define race, enforce racial hierarchy and police racial boundaries. The primary enforcers of such systems are private, such as teachers, employers, real estate agents, loan officers and vigilante groups, but they also rely to varying degrees on administrative organs of the State, such as the police and a court system. It follows that maintaining these organs as compliant with the system becomes a core goal of private actors, because

22 For more on this, see Cass Sunstein, “Why markets don’t stop discrimination”, Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 8, issue 2 (April 1991).

23 Anthony H. Richmond, Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism, and the New World Order (Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1994).

20 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

excluding dominated groups from meaningful voting rights that might alter that compliance is essential to maintaining the system.

Social racism doubtless plays a vital role in apartheid regimes, by providing popular support for designing and preserving the system, and by using informal methods (treating people with hostility and suspicion) to intimidate and silence subordinated groups.24 Social racism is rarely entirely divorced from institutionalized racism. Law and practice are so interdependent that the difference between them may seem irrelevant to those oppressed by the holistic system they create.

Nonetheless, one significant difference distinguishes the two: the role of constitutional law. Where a State’s constitutional law provides equal rights to the entire citizenry, it can provide an invaluable resource for people challenging discrimination at all levels of the society. However, if constitutional law defines the State as racial in character — as in Israel (as a Jewish State), and apartheid South Africa (as a white-Afrikaner State) — movements against racial discrimination not only lack this crucial legal resource but find themselves in the far more dangerous position of challenging the regime itself. Such a challenge will naturally be seen by regime authorities as an existential threat and be persecuted accordingly.25

In short, it is crucial for a finding of apartheid to establish whether the State’s constitutional law (the Basic Law in Israel) renders discrimination illegal or renders resistance to discrimination illegal. The latter case fits the definition of apartheid in the Apartheid Convention, which lists as a crime against humanity “persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid” (article II (f)).

5. Apartheid and the question of race

The Apartheid Convention defines apartheid as “domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons…”. The Rome Statute uses similar wording: “…systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups…”. However, neither Jews nor Palestinians are

24 Surveys of Jewish Israeli attitudes towards “Arabs” and Palestinians are omitted here because they do not pertain to a study of the State’s institutionalized regime. This omission in no way intends to suggest that popular views are not key guardians and enforcers of that regime.

25 Although the Constitution of the United States of America states that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, race relations always complicated this principle in practice. Constitutional law favouring white supremacy included the key “separate but equal” provisions in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896). They were overturned only in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 US 483, which was later followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Legal Context: Short History of the Prohibition of Apartheid | 21

referred to as “races” today. Moreover, Jews are correctly argued to include many “races” in the sense of the old colour categories: black, white, Asian and so forth. Thus, one challenge to any accusation that Israel maintains an apartheid regime is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not racial in nature. Hence, the argument goes, Jews cannot be racist toward Palestinians (or anyone else) because Jews themselves are not a race.

Such arguments reflect a mistaken and obsolete understanding of race. Through the first half of the twentieth century, the idea of race was seen as scientifically established and measurable. Since the Second World War, however, it has come to be recognized as a social construction that varies over time and may be contested within each local context. One illustration of such variability is the North American “one-drop rule”, which has long operated to label as “black” anyone with a perceptible element of African phenotypes or known black ancestry. Yet the same “black” person, travelling to Latin America, finds the one-drop rule working in reverse, such that s/he is not considered “black” if s/he has any portion of “white” blood, instead being called mestizo or mulatto. Thus racial identity changes with the setting.

Consequently, there can be no single, authoritative, global definition of any race. The only way to determine how racial identities are perceived and practiced locally is through historical studies of racial thought and by field observations in each local setting. The question is therefore not whether Jewish and Palestinian identities are innately racial in character wherever they occur, but whether those identities function as racial groups in the local environment of Israel-Palestine.

This point raises another question on how race is handled in United Nations instruments.26 For the purposes of human rights law, a finding of racial discrimination is based less on how groups are labelled than how they are treated. For example, although Jews today are not normally referred to as a “race”, anti- Semitism is correctly seen as a form of racism. It would indeed be unethical and politically regressive sophistry to argue that Jews cannot be subject to racial discrimination simply because they are not normally referred to as a “race”.

The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination captures that point by defining “racial discrimination” as embracing a range of identities:

26 The exception that proves the rule regarding definitions of race is the isolated effort by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: see Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgement (TC), 2 September 1998, Akayesu Trial Judgment, paras. 511-515.

22 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

In this Convention, the term “racial discrimination” shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life (part I, article 1) (emphasis added).

By invoking that Convention in its preamble, the Apartheid Convention suggests that its language regarding “racial group or groups” embraces the same range of identities.

Recognizing this contextual meaning of “race” is not haphazard. Since the mid- twentieth century, scholars of international law have joined social scientists in coming to understand racial identity as fundamentally a matter of perception, rather than objectively measurable qualities. Racial identities are usually signally somatic and so are seen as stable and permanent, acquired at birth and thus immutable. That races are actually social constructions is evidenced by how such constructions vary from society to society: that is, the significance of specific somatic criteria, such as skin colour or eye shape, to a racial typology. Where such perceptions of an essential identity persist, the difference disappears between language about groups understood as racial or “ethnic”, as descent groups, and that which sees them as sharing a particular national or ethnic origin. What matters in all those cases is that all members of a group — including infants and others who cannot possibly constitute a “racial threat” — are embraced by one policy. A pertinent example of this conflation of terms has been discrimination against Jews, for whom a mix of labels (race, religion and ethnicity) has been used by those pursuing anti-Semitic segregation, persecution or genocide. The question here is, therefore, whether relations between Jews and Palestinians in Mandate Palestine rest on ideas that each group has an immutable character, such that their relations fit the definition of “racial” discrimination.

A comprehensive review of how Jewish and Palestinian identities are understood locally in Israel-Palestine would overburden this report. Fortunately, one factor confirms the racial quality of both identities in this context: both are considered descent groups (one of the categories in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination). Palestinian identity is explicitly based on origins or ancestral origins in the territory of Mandate Palestine. The 1964 Charter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)27 expresses this

27 See https://web.archive.org/web/20101130144018/http://www.un.int/wcm/content/site/palestine/pid/12363.

the Arab countries and which together form the great Arab homeland.

The Legal Context: Short History of the Prohibition of Apartheid | 23

principle by affirming that Palestinian identity is passed down through the paternal line and is intergenerational:

Article 5: The Palestinian personality is a permanent and genuine characteristic that does not disappear. It is transferred from fathers to sons.

Palestinian national identity has always been nested within pan-Arabism, an ethno- national identity formulated first as a modern territorial nationalism by Sherif Hussein of Mecca. “Arab” was certainly the generic term for Arabic-speaking people in Palestine when the Zionist movement began to settle the area. General Assembly resolution 181(II) of 1947,28 which recommended the partition of Mandate Palestine into an “Arab State” and a “Jewish State”, drew from that discourse. Updated and promoted especially by Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser to craft an anticolonial Arab identity bloc across the Middle East and North Africa, Arab identity became a vital identity and political resource for the PLO, as reflected in its Charter:

In this conception, Palestinians are integral members of the Arab “Nation”, but
it is the “Palestinian people” that holds the right to self-determination in Mandate Palestine, thus conveying the international legal meaning of “nation” to the Palestinian people.

In contrast, Jewish identity combines several contradictory elements.29 “Jewish” is certainly a religious identity in the sense that Judaism is a religious faith to which anyone may convert if willing and able to follow the required procedures. On that basis, opponents of Israeli policy insist that Jewishness is not a national identity but simply a religious one, and so Jews qua Jews are not a “people” in the sense of international law and therefore lack the right to self-determination. Supporters of Israel use the same point to deny that Jewish statehood is racist, on the grounds

28 A/RES/181(II).

29 Internal debates about “who is a Jew” are irrelevant to the State’s construction of Jewishness as a single people, and thus not pertinent to this report. On such debates, see, for example, Noah Efron, Real Jews: Secular Versus Ultra-Orthodox: The Struggle For Jewish Identity In Israel (New York, Basic Books, 2003).

Article 1: Palestine is an Arab homeland bound by strong Arab national ties to the rest of

… Article 3: The Palestinian Arab people has the legitimate right to its homeland and is an

inseparable part of the Arab Nation. It shares the sufferings and aspirations of the Arab

Nation and its struggle for freedom, sovereignty, progress and unity…

24 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

that Zionism and Israel cannot be racist if Jews are not a race. However, those arguments are flawed, even disingenuous, as religious criteria alone are not adequate for defining what it is to be “Jewish”.

Like many other groups that today are now commonly called “ethnic” or “national”, until the mid-twentieth century Jews were often referred to as a “race”. Jewish-Zionist thinkers adopted the same approach, reflecting contemporary concepts of what races were, how races composed peoples and nations, and how on that basis they had the right to self-determination. For example, Zionist philosopher and strategist Max Nordau commonly used the term “race” for Jews in speaking of Jewish interests in Palestine.30 For decades, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, wrote passionately about the Jewish “race” and how the “spiritual mechanism” associated with it granted transcendental value to a Jewish State.31 Today, this usage persists in the Memorandum of Association of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which in article 2 (c) cites one of its objectives as being to “benefit, directly or indirectly, those of Jewish race or descent”. In none of those sources is religious faith even mentioned (because it is recognized to vary): the concern is entirely with descent. Halachah (often translated as “Jewish law”) and social norms in Jewish communities provide that Jewish identity is conveyed from mother to child, irrespective of the individual’s actual religious beliefs or practice. The State of Israel enshrined the central importance of descent in its Law of Return of 1950 (amended in 1970),32 which states that:

For the purposes of this Law, “Jew” means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.

Descent is crucial to Jewish identity discourse in Israel because direct lineal descent from antiquity is the main reason given by political-Zionist philosophers for why Jews today hold the right to self-determination in the land of Palestine. In this view, all Jews retain a special relationship and rights to the land of Palestine, granted by covenant with God: some schools of Zionism hold that Israel is the successor State to the Jewish kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon. That claim is

30 See, for example, Max Nordau, “Address to the First Zionist Congress”, 29 August 1897. Available from http://www.mideastweb.org/nordau1897.htm.

31 See Vladimir Jabotinsky, A lecture on Jewish history (1933), cited in David Goldberg, To the Promised Land: A History of Zionist Thought (London, Penguin, 1996), p. 181.

32 Passed by the Knesset on 5 July 1950 and amended on 10 March 1970.

The Legal Context: Short History of the Prohibition of Apartheid | 25

expressed, inter alia, in the Declaration of Independence of Israel,33 which affirms that Jews today trace their ancestry to an earlier national life in the geography of Palestine and therefore have an inalienable right to “return”, which is given precedence over positive law:

The Land of Israel 34 was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book
of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. […]

That claim to unbroken lineal descent from antiquity attributes collective rights to the “land of Israel” to an entire group on the basis of its (supposed) bloodlines. The incompatible claim that Jewishness is multiracial, by virtue of its character as a religion to which others have converted, is simply absent from this formula.

The emphasis on descent implicitly portrays all other descent groups — including Palestinians — as lacking any comparable right by virtue of their different descent. Thus the claim to Palestine as the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people rests on an expressly racial conception of both groups. This means that Jews and Palestinians are “racial groups” as defined by the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and, accordingly, for the purposes of the Apartheid Convention.

33 Provisional Government of Israel, The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, Official Gazette, No. 1 (Tel Aviv, 14 May 1948). It is also commonly referred to as the Declaration of Independence. Available from https://www.knesset.gov.il/docs/eng/megilat_eng.htm.

34 Eretz-Israel in Hebrew.

2. Testing for an Apartheid Regime in Israel-Palestine

The design of an apartheid regime in any State will necessarily reflect the country’s unique history and demography, which shape local perceptions of racial hierarchy and doctrines of racial supremacy. The first task here is, therefore, to consider how local conditions in Israel-Palestine constitute such an environment. The main feature, stemming from the history of wars and expulsions, is the geographic fragmentation of the Palestinian people into discrete populations that are then administered differently by the State regime. Those components include Palestinians living under direct Israeli rule in three categories (as citizens of the State of Israel, residents of occupied East Jerusalem, and under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza) and Palestinians living outside direct Israeli rule: refugees and involuntary exiles expelled from the territory of Mandate Palestine who

are prohibited by Israel from returning. The next section clarifies how those four categories have emerged from the territory’s history of warfare and incremental annexation.

A. Thepoliticalgeographyofapartheid

The geographic unit of “Mandate Palestine” was established by the League of Nations in 1922 with the stated intention of fostering the future independence of Palestine as a State, as specified in the League of Nations Charter.35 Famously, the Palestine Mandate included contradictory provisions for a Jewish “national home” (not a State) and the special authority of the Jewish Agency in establishing that “home”. Later British commissions and white papers specified that “national home” had not been intended to signify a Jewish State, but that position was not

35 The borders of Mandate Palestine were derived from the Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided Ottoman imperial territory after the First World War and placed it under British or French Mandates. Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations provided for various classes of mandate territory. Palestine was considered one of the most advanced areas, whose “existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone”. In that context, “independent nations” signified independent statehood, thus informing language in the Mandate for Palestine. The early history of Palestine’s mandate borders, which combined Transjordan and Palestine, is not considered material to this report, but for that history, see especially Victor Kattan, From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949 (London, Pluto Press, 2009).

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28 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

accepted by the Zionist leadership. Endemic violence that emerged from this contradictory formula, combined with imperial exhaustion after the Second World War, ultimately led Great Britain to withdraw from its role as Mandatory Power and submit the fate of Palestine to the United Nations. In 1947, the General Assembly passed resolution 181(II) by a modest majority of 36 Member States, recommending the territory’s partition into a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State”. The same resolution specified conditions and measures deemed essential to make partition viable, including borders that provided for racial majorities in each titular State, constitutional protections for minorities, economic union between the two States and a special international regime for the city of Jerusalem.36

In the 1948 war, however, the Zionist movement took over territory far beyond what had been assigned to the Jewish State under resolution 181(II) and, by so doing, rendered moot its labyrinthine provisions, including acquiescence by the internationally recognized representatives of the Palestinian people. In 1948, the Zionist leadership declared the independence of Israel in territory under its military control, although its final borders had yet to be established. In 1949, the General Assembly recommended admission of the State of Israel to membership even though its borders had still not been finalized. Palestinians remaining in Israel, who had not fled or been expelled in the 1948 war, became citizens of Israel, but Israel administered them under emergency laws and denied them civil rights, such as the franchise, until 1966.

From 1948 until 1967, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) was governed by Jordan, while the Gaza Strip was administered by Egypt. As a result of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, both territories came under Israeli military occupation and rule, yet were not formally annexed.37 The geographic separation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has suggested the existence of two discrete territories. However, the United Nations commonly refers to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the singular as the “occupied Palestinian territory”, treating both as geographic fragments of “Palestine” as established under the League of Nations Mandate.38 Pursuant to article XI of the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and

36 Resolution 181(II) was the result of work by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), with its two subcommittees providing options for a partitioned or unified State.

37 Although effectively annexed, the occupied Syrian Golan is excluded from the scope of this report because that territory was not part of the Palestine Mandate and is considered legally to be Syrian territory. However, many of this report’s findings could apply to Israeli policy in the Golan and may be consistent with apartheid, as Israel has used Jewish settlement to stake a claim to the land and the population of the four Druze villages there live in conditions of relative deprivation.

38 Steps taken by the General Assembly to recognize a “State of Palestine” have prompted some to suggest that occupied Palestinian territory should now be referred to as “occupied Palestine”. However, since recognition of such a State still lacks any final agreement about its borders, the authors here continue to use the term “occupied Palestinian territory” to refer to territory delineated by the 1949 Armistice Agreement and occupied by Israel in the 1967 war.

the Gaza Strip (also known as the Oslo II Accord or Oslo II), for the purposes of negotiation those areas were considered a “single territorial unit” (article XI). Hence, international jurists and the United Nations consider Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be under one legal category: that is, civilians under belligerent occupation, whose rights and protections are stipulated primarily in the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War (1949).

East Jerusalem (that part of Jerusalem on the east side of the Armistice Line or “green line” of 1949) obtained a special status. Although seamlessly integrated with the West Bank between 1948 and 1967, East Jerusalem retained the aura of the diplomatic character, proposed by resolution 181(II), of a corpus separatum, reflecting its vital importance to all three Abrahamic faiths. After the 1967 war, however, Israel passed legislation making East Jerusalem part of the unified city of Jerusalem, radically expanding the city’s borders, and extending Israeli civil law throughout. After the second intifada (from September 2000), parts of East Jerusalem were re-segregated from Jewish areas physically by the separation wall and its security gates and Israeli checkpoints. This forced separation has allowed Israel to separate East Jerusalem from the West Bank in juridical terms and so has generated the category of Palestinian “residents” of East Jerusalem, whose rights stem largely from Israeli law on permanent residency.39

The territory’s history has further generated the separate case of Palestinian citizens of Israel: people who remained inside the internationally recognized borders of Israel after 1949 and their descendants. Granted Israeli citizenship although not full “national” equality as non-Jews in a Jewish-national State, this Palestinian population now makes up 20 per cent of the country’s citizenry.40
How Israeli law and doctrine has defined this population as citizens but not “nationals” of the State is addressed below. Here it is incumbent only to recognize that Palestinian citizens of Israel comprise a distinct legal category. The situation of refugees and involuntary exiles comprises the final category, distinct from the others in that they are governed by the laws of the other States in which they reside.

39 The Knesset passed Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel on 30 July 1980 (published in Sefer Ha-Chukkim No. 980 of 5 August 1980, p. 186).

40 Jewish Virtual Library, Vital Statistics: Latest Population Statistics for Israel (January 2017). Available from http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/latest-population-statistics-for-israel.

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30 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

By developing discrete bodies of law, termed “domains” in this report, for each territory and their Palestinian populations, Israel has both effected and veiled a comprehensive policy of apartheid directed at the whole Palestinian people.41 Warfare, partition, de jure and de facto annexation and occupation in Palestine have, over the decades, generated the complex geography in which the Palestinian people have become fragmented into different juridical categories and are administered by different bodies of law. What matters for the purposes of a study of apartheid is how Israel has exploited this fragmentation to secure Jewish-national domination.

B. IsraelasaracialState

A test of apartheid cannot be confined, methodologically, to identifying discrete policies and practices, such as those listed under the Apartheid Convention. Such policies and practices must be found to serve the purpose or intention of imposing racial domination and oppression on a subordinated racial group. In somewhat circular reasoning, international law provides that discrete “inhuman acts” acquire the status of a crime against humanity only if they intentionally serve that purpose, but establishes that such a purpose requires the identification of related inhuman acts. The solution is to examine the context in which acts and motives are configured: that is, whether the State itself is designed to ensure “the domination of a racial group or groups over any other racial group or groups”. (For example, in South Africa, State institutions were designed to ensure incontestable domination by whites and, particularly, Dutch-Afrikaners.)

In this study, it is vital to establish the racial character of the regime that the system of domains is designed to protect. Otherwise, their internal diversity — the laws that comprise them — can convey the incorrect impression of discrete systems.

That Israel is politically constructed as the State of the Jewish people requires
no extended explanation here, but will be discussed briefly.42 Since the turn of the twentieth century, the history of the Zionist movement has been centred on creating and preserving a Jewish State in Palestine. That aim remains the cornerstone of

41 “Domain” is used in the report in the sense of logic or discourse analysis, in which concepts and actors are understood as part of one “universe” of references. Hence, the domains in Israeli policy consist of definitions of the populations themselves (domestic, foreign, citizens or otherwise, “Palestinians” oriented toward Palestinian self-determination or “Arabs” as an Israeli minority, and so forth), as well as the laws, practices, norms and other measures, formal and informal, by which Israeli definitions of those identities are imposed on Palestinian populations in each domain.

42 For a more complete discussion, see Tilley (ed.), Beyond Occupation, chaps. 3 and 4.

Israeli State discourse. During the Mandate years, the Jewish Agency and Zionist leadership argued that the “Jewish national home” promised under the Mandate was to be a sovereign Jewish State. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel specifically referred to the new State as a “Jewish State in Eretz- Israel”. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty43 and Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation44 specify concerns with “the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic State”.45 The 1952 World Zionist Organisation–Jewish Agency (Status) Law,46 which establishes those organizations as “authorized agencies” of the State on a range of responsibilities, including land settlement, specifies that Israel is “the creation of the entire Jewish people, and its gates are open, in accordance with its laws, to every Jew wishing to immigrate to it”.

The mission of preserving Israel as a Jewish State has inspired or even compelled Israel to pursue several general racial policies.

1. Demographicengineering

The first general policy of Israel has been one of demographic engineering, in order to establish and maintain an overwhelming Jewish majority in Israel. As in any racial democracy, such a majority allows the trappings of democracy — democratic elections, a strong legislature — without threatening any loss of hegemony by the dominant racial group. In Israeli discourse, this mission is expressed in terms of the so-called “demographic threat”, an openly racist reference to Palestinian population growth or the return of Palestinian refugees. Related practices have included:

1. A global programme, organized by the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency, launched at the end of the nineteenth century and accelerating into the early 1930s, to bring Jewish immigrants to Palestine in numbers large enough to ensure the demographic majority needed for building a Jewish State with democratic characteristics;

43 Passed by the Knesset on 17 March 1992 (published in Sefer Ha-Chukkim No. 1391 of 25 March 1992). Available from https://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/basic3_eng.htm.

44 The law amending the original 1992 legislation was passed by the Knesset on 9 March 1994 (published in Sefer Ha-Chukkim No. 1454 of 10 March 1994). Available from https://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/basic4_eng.htm.

45 A controversial bill to declare this principle as a central tenet had been tabled in the Knesset but not yet passed at the time of writing. See Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, Ministry of Justice. Available from http://index.justice.gov.il/StateIdentity/InformationInEnglish/Documents/Basic%20Law%20110911%20(1).pdf. Accessed 5 February 2017.

46 The Status Law was amended in 1975 to restructure this relationship: see World Zionist Organisation–Jewish Agency for Israel (Status) (Amendment) Law, 1975.

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32 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

Ethnic cleansing (forcible displacement) in 1948 of an estimated 800,000 Palestinians from areas that became part of the internationally recognized territory of Israel;47
Subsequent measures undertaken by Israel to maintain an overwhelming Jewish majority within its internationally recognized territory, including by:(a) PreventingPalestinianrefugeesfromthewarsof1948and1967from returning to homes in Israel or in the occupied Palestinian territory, which they had abandoned due to fighting, dispossession, forced expulsion and terror;48
(b) Composing the Law of Return and Citizenship Law (often wrongly translated as Nationality Law) to provide Israeli citizenship to Jews from any part of the world, while denying citizenship even to those Palestinians who have a documented history of residency in the country;

(c) A range of other policies designed to restrict the size of the Palestinian population, including harsh restrictions placed on immigration, the return of refugees, and rules prohibiting Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens from gaining legal residency rights in Israel.
The affirmation in the Basic Law that Israel is a “Jewish and democratic State”, thus establishing Jewish-racial domination as a foundational doctrine.

Together, those measures have been highly effective in maintaining an overwhelming Jewish majority in Israel. In 1948, the ratio of Palestinians to Jews in Palestine was approximately 2:1 (some 1.3 million Arabs to 630,000 Jews).49 Today, Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute only about 20 per cent of the population, rendering them a permanent minority.

2. Bansonchallengestoracialdomination

Israel reinforces its race-based immigration policy with measures designed to prevent Palestinian citizens of Israel from challenging the doctrine and laws that purport to establish Israel as a Jewish State. Article 7 (a) of the Basic Law: Knesset (1958), for instance, prohibits any political party in Israel from adopting a platform that challenges the State’s expressly Jewish character:

47 See Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London, Oxford One World Press, 2006).
48 Ibid. The right of refugees to return is specified in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial

Discrimination (article 5 (d) (ii)).

49 Censuses categories under the British Mandate were ordered by “religion” rather than ethnicity. Statistics therefore grouped together Arab and non-Arab Christians. In 1947, Christians and Muslims numbered 143,000 and 1,181,000 respectively.

A candidates list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset, and a person shall not be a candidate for election to the Knesset, if the objects or actions of the list or the actions of the person, expressly or by implication, include one of the following:
(1) Negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic State (emphasis added)…50

Voting rights lose their significance in terms of equal rights when a racial group is legally banned from challenging laws that perpetuate inequality. An analogy would be a system in which slaves have the right to vote but not against slavery. Such rights might allow slaves to achieve some cosmetic reforms, such as improved living conditions and protection from vigilante violence, but their status and vulnerability as chattels would remain. Israeli law bans organized Palestinian opposition to Jewish domination, rendering it illegal and even seditious.

3. IsraeliJewish-nationalinstitutions

Israel has designed its domestic governance in such a way as to ensure that the State upholds and promotes Jewish nationalism. The term “Jewish people” in political Zionist thought is used to claim the right to self-determination. The quest of an ethnic or racial group for its own State amounts to a national project, and so Israeli institutions designed to preserve Israel as a Jewish State are referred to in this report as “Jewish-national” institutions.

In Israel, an interplay of laws consolidates Jewish-national supremacy. For example, regarding the central question of land use, Basic Law: Israel Lands51 provides that real property held by the State of Israel, the Development Authority or the Keren Kayemet Le-Israel (JNF-Jewish National Fund) must serve “national” (that is, Jewish-national) interests and cannot be transferred to any other hands. It further establishes the Israeli Lands Authority (ILA) as administrator of such lands. The ILA (as successor of the Israeli Lands Administration) is charged with administering land in accordance with the JNF Covenant, which requires that land held by the JNF be held in perpetuity for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people. The ILA also operates in accordance with the World Zionist Organization- Jewish Agency Status Law (1952), which sets forth the responsibility of those conjoined organizations for serving Jewish settlement and development. Thus, State land, which accounts for 93 per cent of land within the country’s

50 Basic Law: Knesset. Available from https://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/basic2_eng.htm.
51 Passed by the Knesset on 19 July 1960 (published in Sefer Ha-Chukkim No. 312 of 29 July 1960).

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34 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

internationally recognized borders, is managed through laws prohibiting its use by non-Jews.52

In a legal process that Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard has called “channelling”, Israel has extended the application of laws regarding land to the occupied Palestinian territory.53 Large areas of the West Bank have been declared “State lands”, closed to use by Palestinians and administered in accordance with Israeli regime policies that, as described above, by law must serve the Jewish people.54 In other words, much of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is under the authority of an Israeli State institution that is legally bound to administer that land for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people. The same arrangement once governed Israeli Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, but since the Israeli “disengagement” of 2005 and the withdrawal of Jewish settlements, such laws apply only to small portions of the Strip, such as the unilaterally imposed security zone by the fence.

The Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organisation (hereafter JA-WZO) deserve special attention for their role in establishing the racial character of the Israeli regime. According to Israeli law, they remain the “authorised agencies” of the State regarding Jewish-national affairs in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.55 Their authority is detailed in the Covenant signed on 26 July 1954 between the Government of Israel and the Zionist Executive, representing the JA- WZO.56 The Covenant provides for a coordinating board, composed half of State officials and half of JA-WZO members, which is granted broad authority to serve the Jewish people, extending to development plans for the entire country. Powers accorded to the JA-WZO by its Covenant are:

The organising of [Jewish] immigration abroad and the transfer of immigrants and their property to Israel; participation in the absorption of immigrants in Israel; youth immigration; agricultural settlement in Israel; the acquisition and amelioration of land in Israel by the institutions of the Zionist Organisation, the Keren Kayemeth Le-Israel [Jewish National Fund] and the Keren Hayesod [United Jewish Appeal]; participation in the establishment

52 ILA website. Available from http://www.mmi.gov.il/Envelope/indexeng.asp?page=/static/eng/f_general.html.
53 For details on how this is done, see Tilley (ed.), Beyond Occupation.
54 Provisions of humanitarian law prohibiting the occupant from altering the infrastructure, laws and economic institutions that

existed in occupied territory prior to its coming under belligerent occupation include articles 43 and 55 of the 1907 Hague Regulations (Convention (IV) respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land) and article 64 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. See also Tilley (ed.), Beyond Occupation, chap. 2.

55 The World Zionist Organisation–Jewish Agency (Status) Law of 1952 was amended in 1975. Available from https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/534.

56 See http://www.israellobby.org/ja/12311970_JAFI_Reconstitution.pdf, appendix I.

and the expansion of development enterprises in Israel; the encouragement of private capital investments in Israel; assistance to cultural enterprises and institutions of higher learning in Israel; the mobilisation of resources for financing these functions; the coordination of the activities in Israel of Jewish institutions and organisations acting within the sphere of these functions with the aid of public funds.

A principle task of the JA-WZO is to work actively to build and maintain Israel as a Jewish State, particularly through immigration policy:

… 5. The mission of gathering in the [Jewish] exiles, which is the central task of the State of Israel and the Zionist Movement in our days, requires constant efforts by the Jewish people in the Diaspora; the State of Israel, therefore, expects the cooperation of all Jews, as individuals and groups, in building up the State and assisting the immigration to it of the masses of the [Jewish] people, and regards the unity of all sections of Jewry as necessary for this purpose (emphasis added).57

Such explicit language by the State’s authorized agencies conclusively underlines the State’s essentially racist character.

The World Zionist Organisation-Jewish Agency (Status) Law is linked to a second body of Israeli law and jurisprudence that distinguishes between citizenship (in Hebrew, ezrahut) and nationality (le’um). Other States have made this distinction: for example, in the former Soviet Union, Soviet citizens also held distinct “national” identities (Kazakh, Turkmen, Uzbek and so forth), but all nationalities had equal legal standing. In Israel, by contrast, only one nationality, Jewish, has legal standing and only Jewish nationality is associated with the legitimacy and mission of the State. According to the country’s Supreme Court, Israel is indeed not the State of the “Israeli nation”, which does not legally exist, but of the “Jewish nation”.58 National rights are reserved to Jewish nationality. For instance, the Law of Return serves the “in-gathering” mission cited above by allowing any Jew to immigrate to Israel and, through the Citizenship Law59, to gain immediate citizenship. No other group has a remotely comparable right and only Jews enjoy any collective rights under Israeli law.

57 World Zionist Organisation-Jewish Agency (Status) Law of 1952.
58 George Rafael Tamarin v. State of Israel (20 January 1972), Decisions of the Supreme Court of Israel (Jerusalem: Supreme

Court, 1972), vol. 25, pt. 1, 197 (in Hebrew). See also Roselle Tekiner, “On the inequality of Israeli citizens”, Without Prejudice, vol. 1, No. 1 (1988), pp. 9-48.

59 Passed by the Knesset on 1 April 1952 and amended in 1958, 1968 and 1971.

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36 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

The operational platform of the JA-WZO, reformulated in 2004 as the Jerusalem Programme, further clarifies how the State of Israel will serve as a “Jewish State”. Its language is illuminating, especially in the light of the broad powers held by the JA-WZO, cited above:

Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, brought about the establishment of the State of Israel, and views a Jewish, Zionist, democratic and secure State of Israel to be the expression of the common responsibility of the Jewish people for its continuity and future. The foundations of Zionism are:

The unity of the Jewish people, its bond to its historic homeland Eretz Yisrael, and the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, its capital, in the life of the nation.
Aliyah to Israel from all countries and the effective integration of all [Jewish] immigrants into Israeli Society.
Strengthening Israel as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic State and shaping it as an exemplary society with a unique moral and spiritual character, marked by mutual respect for the multi-faceted Jewish people, rooted in the vision of the prophets, striving for peace and contributing to the betterment of the world.
Ensuring the future and the distinctiveness of the Jewish people by furthering Jewish, Hebrew and Zionist education, fostering spiritual and cultural values and teaching Hebrew as the national language.
Nurturing mutual Jewish responsibility, defending the rights of Jews as individuals and as a nation, representing the national Zionist interests of the Jewish people, and struggling against all manifestations of anti-Semitism.
Settling the country as an expression of practical Zionism (emphasis added, bullet points in the original).60This discussion, although incomplete, should suffice to demonstrate that Israel is designed to be a racial regime. To remain a “Jewish State,” uncontested Jewish- nationalist domination over the indigenous Palestinian people is essential — an advantage secured in the democracy of Israel by population size — and State laws, national institutions, development practices and security policies all focus on that mission. Different methods are applied to Palestinian populations depending on where they live, requiring variations in their administration. Within Israel that discriminatory feature is exhibited by the deceptive distinction between citizenship laws that treat all Israelis more or less equally, and nationality laws that are blatantly discriminatory in favour of Jews. The distinction allows Israel to continue

60 See http://www.wzo.org.il/The-Jerusalem-Program. Accessed 19 February 2017.

its insistence on being “a democracy”, while discriminating in fundamental ways against its non-Jewish citizens.

Most important here is that Israel uses different methods of administration to control Palestinian populations depending on where they live, generating distinctive conditions. Fragmentation of the Palestinian people is indeed the core method through which Israel enforces apartheid.

C. Apartheid through fragmentation

Different methods of administration are used to control Palestinian populations depending on where they live. The practical onus of that administrative complexity also benefits Israel, as the fragmentation of the Palestinian people is the core method through which Israel enforces apartheid.

It would be an error to assume that, although comprising one regime, apartheid is effected through a single monolithic body of laws, applied everywhere to everyone without variation. The South African case is relevant here: even within the comprehensive body of law that defined life chances for everyone in the country, apartheid included important variations: for instance, different laws for black South Africans living in townships and in the Bantustans and different privileges for Indians and Coloureds. Similarly, the apartheid regime of Israel operates by splintering the Palestinian people geographically and politically into different

legal categories.

The international community has unwittingly collaborated with this manoeuvre by drawing a strict distinction between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory, and treating Palestinians outside the country as “the refugee problem”. The Israeli apartheid regime is built on this geographic fragmentation, which has come to be accepted as normative. The method of fragmentation serves also to obscure this regime’s very existence. That system, thus, lies at the heart of what is to be addressed in this report.

The four domains

This report finds that Israel maintains an apartheid regime by administering Palestinians under different bodies of law, identified here as constituting four legal domains:

• Domain 1: laws curtailing the capacity of Palestinian citizens of Israel to obtain equal rights within the State’s democracy.

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Domain 2: permanent residency laws designed to maintain a highly insecure legal status for Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem.
Domain 3: military law governing Palestinians in occupied Palestinian territory as a permanently alien population, which rejects any claim they may want to make on Israeli political representation for equal rights and conditions.
Domain 4: policy preventing Palestinian refugees and involuntary exiles from returning to their homes in Mandate Palestine (all territory under the direct control of Israel).These domains interplay so as to enfeeble Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid oppression in each of them, thereby reinforcing oppression of the Palestinian people as a whole. The following sections describe how the system works.61

Palestinian citizens of Israel

Palestinian residents
of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem)

Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem

Palestinian refugees and exiles

61 Much of the following section represents an edited version of the discussion in Tilley (ed.), Beyond Occupation, chap. 4.

Domain 1: Palestinian citizens of Israel

Approximately 1.7 million Palestinians are citizens of Israel and have homes within its internationally recognized borders. They represent those who were not expelled or did not flee in the 1948 or 1967 wars. As citizens, they purportedly enjoy equal rights along with all Israeli citizens. For the first 20 years of the country’s existence, however, they were subjected to martial law and they continue to experience domination and oppression solely because they are not Jewish. Empirically, this policy of domination is manifest by the provision of inferior social services, restrictive zoning laws, and limited budget allocations benefitting their communities, in formal and informal restrictions on jobs and professional opportunities, and in the segregated landscapes of their places of residence: Jewish and Palestinian citizens overwhelmingly live separately in their own respective cities and towns (the few mixed areas, as in some neighbourhoods in Haifa, are exceptional).62

Those problems are not only the result of discrete policies. The dilemma for Palestinian Muslim, Christian and other non-Jewish citizens is to seek equal rights in a regime that openly privileges Jews.63 Any actions to weaken or eliminate that regime are considered “national” (that is, Jewish-national) threats. Even constitutional law providing for equal treatment before the law, such as Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation (see above), allows for discrimination on those “national” grounds. Israeli constitutional law therefore, rather than providing tools for combatting oppression, makes resistance to oppression illegal.

The concern of the regime is that Palestinian citizens of Israel could eliminate its discriminatory design if they were able to revise the Basic Law and other key legislation (such as the Law of Return). Such changes require only a simple majority vote in the Knesset. However, as long as Palestinians represent only 20 per cent of the population, they will be unable to win the necessary proportion of Knesset seats. For example, even after forming an unprecedented unity list for elections to the Knesset in 2015, Palestinian parties held only 13 (10.6 per cent) of 120 seats. Because the Basic Law: Knesset disallows political parties from adopting a platform containing any challenge to the identity of Israel as a Jewish State,

62 See Ian Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1980); Nadim Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) and Ben White, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy (London, Pluto Press, 2011).

63 Druze citizens of Israel have fallen into a different category under Israeli policy. They serve in the military and are accorded rights and treatment superior to those of Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

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Palestinian parties can campaign only for minor reforms and better municipal budgets. They are legally prohibited from challenging the racial regime itself. Thus the right to vote is circumscribed by laws regarding party platforms.64

Any study of domain 1 will involve interpreting coded language. For example, the Admissions Committee Law of 2011 authorizes the creation of private Jewish councils in small rural Jewish towns to exclude applications for residency on the basis of the applicants’ “social suitability”. This is a proxy term for Jewish identity and provides a legal mechanism for such communities to reject Palestinian applicants.65

Israeli law must be evaluated in its application in order to determine whether a racist agenda lies beneath the apparently neutral legal language. A plethora of Israeli laws reserve public benefits to those who qualify as citizens under the Citizenship Law and the Law of Return — an oblique reference to Jews — thus creating a nested system of covert racism that is invisible to the casual observer.

Effectively interchangeable under international law, the terms “citizenship” (ezrahut) as “nationality” (le’um) have distinct meanings in Israel, where citizenship rights and national rights are not the same thing. Any citizen enjoys the former, but only Jews enjoy the latter, as only Jewish nationality is recognized under Israeli law. These and other laws comprise a regime of systematic racial discrimination that imposes second-class citizenship on Palestinian citizens of Israel.66 The broad impact is confirmed even by Israeli data, which detail, for instance, inferior funding for Palestinian schools, businesses, agriculture and health care, as well as limits on access to jobs and freedom of residence.

Thus, domain 1 sustains the myth that one portion of the Palestinian people enjoys the full benefits of democracy, while at the same strengthening the apartheid

64 The Arab-Israeli party Balad has uniquely adopted an openly anti-Zionist platform and calls for Israel to become a State of all its citizens. The arrests, attacks, investigations and Supreme Court cases involving Balad illustrate the determination of the Israeli authorities not to let this stand spread.

65 Human Rights Watch, “Israel: New Laws Marginalize Palestinian Arab Citizens”, 30 March 2011: “The “admissions committee” law requires anyone seeking to move to any community in the Negev and Galilee regions with fewer than 400 families to obtain approval from committees consisting of town residents, a member of the Jewish Agency or World Zionist Organization, and several others. The law empowers these committees to reject candidates who, among other things, “are ill- suited to the community’s way of life” or “might harm the community’s fabric”. Available from https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/03/30/israel-new-laws-marginalize-palestinian-arab-citizens.

66 A particularly valuable source on this discrimination is the database of discriminatory laws maintained by Adalah: Centre for Legal Rights of the Arab Minority in Israel, which in 2016 listed more than 50 discriminatory laws of Israel, and reports on related legal challenges. Available from http://www.adalah.org/en/law/index.

regime that serves to preserve Israel as a Jewish State. Israel uses the trappings of token universal democracy to lead many observers astray and deflect international opprobrium. The success of this approach depends on limiting Palestinian citizens to a politically ineffectual minority. However, it is impossible to fully appreciate this outcome without examining Israeli policies and practices in the other three domains. Indeed, the success of domain 1 depends on the workings of the

other three.

Domain 2: Palestinians in East Jerusalem

Israeli policies towards the some 300,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem can be addressed more concisely.67 The discrimination evident in domain 1 is reproduced: Palestinians in East Jerusalem experience discrimination in areas such as education, health care, employment, residency and building rights, experience expulsion from their homes and house demolitions consistent with a project of ethnic engineering of Greater Jerusalem, and suffer harsher treatment at the hands of the security forces.68

The central question here, however, is not whether Israel discriminates against Palestinians — amply confirmed by the data — but how the domain for Palestinians in East Jerusalem operates as an integral element of the apartheid regime. In brief, domain 2 situates Jerusalem Palestinians in a separate category designed to prevent them from adding to the demographic, political and electoral weight of Palestinians inside Israel. Specific policies regarding their communities and rights are designed to pressure them to emigrate and to quell, or at least minimize, resistance to that pressure. The “grand apartheid”69 dimension of this domain can be appreciated by observing how the Israeli Jerusalem municipality has openly pursued a policy of “demographic balance” in East Jerusalem. For instance, the Jerusalem 2000 master plan seeks to achieve a 60/40 demographic balance in favour of Jewish residents.70 As long ago as the 1980s, the municipality had drafted master plans to fragment Palestinian neighbourhoods

67 The figure of 300,000 was provided by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel in March 2015.
68 For more details, see A/HRC/31/73; B’Tselem, “Statistics on Palestinians in custody of the Israeli security forces” (January

2017, available from http://www.btselem.org/statistics/detainees_and_prisoners); Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Humanitarian Bulletin (16 November 2015, available from https://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_the_humanitarian_monitor_2014_12_11_english.pdf); Alternative Information Center (AIC), “OCHA: One in two Palestinians to need humanitarian assistance in 2017” (26 January 2017, available from http://alternativenews.org/index.php/headlines/329-ocha-one-in-two-palestinians-to-need-humanitarian-assistance-in-2017).

69 See Tilley, “A Palestinian declaration of independence”.
70 A/HRC/22/63, para. 25.

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with intervening Jewish ones, stifling the natural growth of the Palestinian population and pressuring Palestinians to leave.71 Describing Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem as “neighbourhoods” is part of the wider tactic of disguising violations of international humanitarian law through the use of non-committal language.

Such policies have a significant impact because Jerusalem has such importance for the collective identity of Palestinians as a people. For them, the city is the administrative, cultural, business and political capital of Palestine, home to the Palestinian elite, and site of hallowed places of worship and remembrance. Although many Palestinians in East Jerusalem maintain networks of family and business connections with Palestinian citizens in Israel, the West Bank and (now to a lesser extent) the Gaza Strip, their primary interest is to go about their lives and pursue their interests in the city where they have homes, businesses, a vigorous urban society, strong cultural resonances, and, in some cases, ancestral roots going back millennia.

Israel pursues efforts to weaken the Palestinians politically and contain their demographic weight in several ways. One is to grant Palestinians in East Jerusalem the status of permanent residents: that is, as foreigners for whom residency in the land of their birth is a privilege rather than a right, subject to revocation. That status is then made conditional on what Israeli law terms their “centre of life”, evaluated by documented criteria such as home and business ownership, attendance at local schools and involvement in local organizations. If the centre of life of an individual or family appears to have shifted elsewhere, such as across the Green Line, their residency in Jerusalem may be revoked.

A Palestinian resident of Jerusalem who has spent time abroad may also find that Israel has revoked his or her residency in Jerusalem.

Proving that Jerusalem is one’s “centre of life” is burdensome: it requires submitting numerous documents, “including such items as home ownership papers or a rent contract, various bills (water, electricity, municipal taxes), salary slips, proof of receiving medical care in the city, certification of children’s

school registration”.72 The difficulty in meeting the criteria is suggested

71 For further discussion of the Jerusalem master plans, see Francesco Chiodelli, “The Jerusalem Master Plan: planning into the conflict”, Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 51 (2012). Available from http://www.palestine-studies.org/jq/fulltext/78505. For related maps, see Bimkom, Trapped by Planning: Israeli Policy, Planning and Development in the Palestinian Neighborhoods of East Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 2014). Available from http://bimkom.org/eng/wp-content/uploads/TrappedbyPlanning.pdf.

72 B’tselem, “Revocation of residency in East Jerusalem”, 18 August 2013. Available from http://www.btselem.org/jerusalem/revocation_of_residency.

by the consequences of failure to do so: between 1996 (a year after the “centre of life” legislation was passed) and 2014, Jerusalem residency was revoked for more than 11,000 Palestinians.73 To avoid that risk, a growing, albeit relatively low, number of Palestinians are seeking Israeli citizenship. Israel has granted only about half of those requests.74

Their fragile status as permanent residents leaves Palestinians in East Jerusalem with no legal standing to contest the laws of the State or to join Palestinian citizens of Israel in any legislative challenge to the discrimination imposed on them. Openly identifying with Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory politically carries with it the risk of Israel expelling them, for violating security provisions, to the West Bank and removing their right even to visit Jerusalem. Thus, the urban epicentre of Palestinian nationalism and political life is caught inside a legal bubble that neutralizes Palestinians’ capacity to oppose the apartheid regime.75

Domain 3: Palestinians in occupied Palestinian territory

The roughly 4.6 million Palestinians who live in the occupied Palestinian territory (2.7 million in the West Bank and 1.9 million in the Gaza Strip) are governed not by Israeli civil law, but by military law, codified as orders issued by the commander of the territories and administered by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and other designated arms of the occupying power.76 Since the Israeli “disengagement” and withdrawal of settlers in 2005, the Gaza Strip has been internally governed by the Hamas Government (elected in 2006 to head the Palestinian Authority but later deposed). Still, Israeli military law continues to apply for Gaza regarding exclusive Israeli control over Palestinian movement and trade in and out of the territory, the unilaterally imposed “security zone” along the perimeter fence, and Palestinian

73 Data from B’tselem, Statistics on Revocation of Residency in East Jerusalem. Available from http://www.btselem.org/jerusalem/revocation_statistics.

74 Maayan Lubell, “Breaking taboo, East Jerusalem Palestinians seek Israeli citizenship in East Jerusalem”, Haaretz, 5 August 2015. Available from http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.669643. According to the article, the number of Jerusalem Palestinians applying for Israeli citizenship has grown to between 800 and 1,000 annually, although in 2012 and 2013 only 189 out of 1,434 applications were approved.

75 Nonetheless, Palestinians in Jerusalem have made formidable contributions to critiques of Israeli policies, the more impressive for their having done so under such conditions.

76 Until the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, governance of the occupied Palestinian territory was assigned to a “civil administration” operating within the IDF. In 1994, much of its authority was transferred to the Palestinian Authority (also known as the Palestinian National Authority), an interim self-government body.

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access to fishing areas and sea routes. Gaza remains, therefore, under military occupation in the eyes of the United Nations.77

In 2009, a comprehensive report by the Human Rights Research Council of South Africa found that Israeli practices in the occupied Palestinian territory were overwhelmingly consistent with apartheid (see annex I). Israel has not accepted those findings, however, on several grounds. Those who claim that Israel does not govern Palestinians in an apartheid regime invariably cite conditions and rights for Palestinians in domain 1 (citizens of Israel). Leaving aside the issue of domain 2, they say that the situation of Palestinians in the occupied territory is irrelevant to the question. That approach can be persuasive at first glance. Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory are not citizens of Israel and, under the laws of war (cf. the Fourth Geneva Convention), are not supposed to be. The differential treatment by Israel of citizens and non-citizens in the occupied Palestinian territory could therefore seem admissible or, at least, irrelevant. In this common view, Israel would be practicing apartheid only if it annexed the territory, declared one State in all of Mandate Palestine and, thereafter, continued to deny equal rights to Palestinians. Influential voices such as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former United States President Jimmy Carter, former United States Secretary of State John Kerry, and a host of Israeli, American and other critics and pundits have warned that Israel should withdraw from the West Bank precisely to avoid that scenario.

However, those warnings rest on flawed assumptions. First, Israel already administers the occupied Palestinian territory in ways consistent with apartheid, given that the territory has not one population but two: (a) Palestinian civilians, governed by military law; and (b) some 350,000 Jewish settlers, governed by Israeli civil law. The racial character of this situation is evidenced by the fact that all West Bank settlers are administered by Israeli civil law on the basis of being Jewish, whether they are Israeli citizens or not.78 Thus, Israel administers the West Bank

77 The authors of this report concur with those scholars who have concluded that Gaza remains under military occupation. Although governed entirely by Palestinians, key elements of apartheid as defined by the Apartheid Convention remain. In particular, Israel has exclusive control of the borders of Gaza and, since 2007, has imposed a blockade, which translates into draconian restrictions on Palestinian movement that affect trade, work, education and access to health care (article II (c)), and repression of any resistance to those conditions (article II (f)). The Palestinian Authority has suffered from de facto separation, particularly since the 2006 legislative election victory of Hamas and the clashes that led to its taking effective control over the Gaza Strip in 2007. Between then and 2014, there were two de facto Palestinian Governments, one in Gaza and the other in Ramallah, controlled by Hamas and the Fatah movement respectively. In 2014, they formed a national unity Government, although Hamas retained effective control of the Gaza Strip.

78 Limor Yehuda and others, One Rule Two Legal Systems: Israel’s Regime of Laws in the West Bank (Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), October 2014), p. 108. Available from http://www.acri.org.il/en/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Two-Systems-of- Law-English-FINAL.pdf.

through a dual legal system, based on race, which has led to expressions of concern by, among many others, former special rapporteurs Mr. Dugard and Mr. Falk.

Secondly, the character of this dual legal system, problematic in itself, is aggravated by how the State of Israel manages land and development on the basis of race. By denying Palestinians essential zoning, building and business permits, Israeli military rule has crippled the Palestinian economy and society, leaving Palestinian cities and towns (outside the Ramallah enclave) increasingly under- resourced and suffocating their growth and the welfare of their inhabitants. The Israeli blockade of Gaza has resulted in even worse living conditions for the entrapped Palestinian population there.

In contrast, Jewish settlements in the West Bank are flourishing. All State ministries provide support for their planning, funding, building and servicing; some, such as the Ministry of Construction and Housing and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, have been entirely committed to doing so. They also offer financial incentives for Jews to move to the settlements, including interest-free loans, school grants, special recreational facilities, new office blocks, agricultural subsidies, job training and employment guarantees. State complicity is further demonstrated by measures to integrate the economy, society and politics of Jewish settlements into those of Israel, generating seamless travel and electricity networks, a unified banking and finance system for Jews, Jewish business investment, and, in particular, a customs union.79

This vast State involvement belies any claim that the settlements are the work of maverick religious zealots, and challenges the plausibility of claims that Israel will leave the West Bank as soon as a negotiated settlement is achieved.80 The scale, complexity and cost of the settlement grid, estimated by some researchers at hundreds of billions of United States dollars, further underline the intensity of the Israeli commitment to the settlements. The potential cost of (and political resistance to) withdrawal far exceed the political will or capacity of any Israeli Government.

The dual legal system applied by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory justifies two brief digressions from the report’s method: of eschewing a check-list method (comparing a State’s behaviour with the Apartheid Convention’s sample “inhuman acts”) and avoiding comparisons with southern Africa. A check-list

79 Eyal Benvenisti, The International Law of Occupation (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 135.
80 In July 2014, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced: “I think the Israeli people understand now what I

always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” See David Horovitz, “Netanyahu finally speaks his mind”, The Times of Israel, 13 July 2014.

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approach helps to clarify how Israel imposes apartheid on one racial group in order to ensure the domination of another. Such an item-by-item comparison of Israeli practices with the “inhuman acts” listed in the Apartheid Convention was undertaken for the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) report issued in 2009. The findings of that study, summarized in annex I, were conclusive: except for the provision on genocide (which was not practiced in southern Africa either), every “inhuman act” listed in the Apartheid Convention is practiced by Israel in the West Bank.

The architects of South African apartheid adopted a strategy of “grand apartheid” to secure white supremacy in the long term through the country’s geographic partition into white areas (most of the country) and disarticulated black areas. That policy inspired the clause in the Apartheid Convention denouncing as a crime the creation of “separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups” (article II (d)). “Bantu” or “black” reserves were controlled by black South Africans appointed as leaders by the State. In the rhetoric of “grand apartheid”, those reserves or “homelands” were slated to become independent States that would provide self-determination to black South African peoples (language groups). Black South African governors were authorized (and armed) to suppress resistance by their African inhabitants, many of whom had been forcibly transferred into them, and to govern their territories in ways compatible with white development interests. That model so closely resembles current premises supporting a two-State solution in Palestine that it calls for sober reflection, not least because of the violent and destabilizing effects it had throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

The question arises as to whether Israel has deliberately pursued fragmentation of the West Bank into an archipelago of Palestinian cantons, divided by intervening Jewish-only areas (the Bantustan model). Certainly, this geography will permanently enfeeble any putative Palestinian sovereignty, preserving the prerogative of Israel to administer intervening land for the Jewish people. Oslo II, paradoxically, facilitated this “grand” strategy by establishing borders for the Palestinian autonomy enclaves. The comparison with South Africa helps to clarify an essential observation: with Israeli Jewish-national domination over an area dotted with Palestinian autonomy zones, apartheid is expressed as fully in a partition strategy as it is in a unified State.

In sum, domain 3 has been configured to exclude indefinitely the 4.6 million Palestinians living under Israeli military law from mounting any claim against the State of Israel for rights under Israeli civil law. International law and diplomacy, with its commitment to reject the acquisition of territory by force, has led to the population of the occupied Palestinian territory being projected as a permanently separate and distinct Palestinian-national entity. Well intentioned and based on

international law, this approach has had the effect of splitting Palestinians in the occupied territory from the 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in East Jerusalem. In that way, the demographic balance in Israel can be maintained as Jewish and a united Palestinian challenge to its apartheid regime can be avoided.

Domain 4: Palestinian refugees and involuntary exiles

In early 2016, 3,162,602 Palestinians living outside Mandate Palestine were officially registered as refugees by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).81 Estimates of the entire refugee population, including those not registered with UNRWA and people who left Palestine under other circumstances and are not allowed to return (referred to as “involuntary exiles” in this report), range from six to eight million people. Although an exact count is difficult given the global diaspora of Palestinians now in their fourth and fifth generations, by any responsible estimate more Palestinians live outside Mandate Palestine than in it.82

Palestinian refugees are widely distributed. Approximately two million live in the occupied Palestinian territory: 792,000 in camps in the West Bank and 1.3 million in the Gaza Strip. Living under Israeli occupation, these people fall under domain 3, although they benefit from some protections and special services from UNRWA. The rest live mostly in the frontline States of Jordan (around 2.1 million), Lebanon (around 458,000) and the Syrian Arab Republic (around 560,000).83 Only about 5 per cent live outside the Middle East. Lacking any citizenship, they are subject, without recourse, to the laws of their host State (not always comfortably, as some States — notably Lebanon — impose special restrictions on Palestinian refugees).84 Those conditions have contributed to sustaining a strong nationalist nostalgia and sentiment among the great majority of Palestinian refugees regarding their origins in Palestine and a potent sense of enduring injustice resulting from Israeli policies. Their inability to return to their country thus remains a central grievance and a key

81 UNRWA lists of total of 5,266,603 refugees, the difference being accounted for by those living in the occupied Palestinian territory. See https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work. Accessed 8 February 2017.

82 The figure is a middle estimate, as the number of Palestinians who fled in the 1948 war has not been firmly established. Some scholars suggest 700,000 and 750,000 left; the Israelis provide a figure of 520,000; and Palestinian authorities estimate the number at between 900,000 and 1 million.

83 UNRWA, UNRWA in figures as of 1 Jan 2016. Available from https://www.unrwa.org/sites/default/files/content/resources/unrwa_in_figures_2016.pdf.

84 For a short summary of the conditions in which Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon, see Meghan Monahan, Treatment of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Human Rights Brief (2 February 2015). Available from http://hrbrief.org/2015/02/treatment-of- palestinian-refugees-in-lebanon.

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issue in peace talks. Politically, no Palestinian leadership can acquiesce to a peace agreement that ignores the refugees.

In 1948, General Assembly resolution 194(III) resolved that “the [Palestinian] refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so” and that compensation should be provided to the rest. Israel has rejected the application of that resolution on security grounds and on the basis of the “demographic threat” of a Palestinian majority: in the unlikely event that the entire Palestinian population of refugees and involuntary exiles returned to Palestine en masse, the Palestinian population under Israeli rule would total some 12 million, electorally overwhelming the 6.5 million Jews in Israel. Even if that refugee population returned in numbers sufficient only to generate a Palestinian majority (as is far more likely), Israel would be forced into either adopting an explicitly apartheid policy in order to exclude them, and abandoning democracy altogether, or enfranchising them and abandoning the vision of Israel as a Jewish State. As expressed in an article posted on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website:

According to Palestinian sources, there are about 3.5 million Palestinian refugees nowadays registered with UNRWA. If Israel were to allow all of them to return to her territory, this would be an act of suicide on her part, and no State can be expected to destroy itself (emphasis added).85

Thus, domain 4 plays an essential role in the apartheid regime of Israel. Its refusal to allow refugees and involuntary exiles to return ensures that the Palestinian population never gains the demographic weight that would either threaten Israeli military control of the occupied Palestinian territory, or provide the demographic leverage within Israel to allow them to insist on full democratic rights, which would supersede the Jewish character of the State of Israel. In short, domain 4 ensures that Palestinians will never be able to change the system in ways that would lead to political equality between the two peoples.

D. Counter-arguments

Several arguments can be and have been made to deny that the Apartheid Convention is even applicable to the case of Israel-Palestine. Some of them, such

85 Ruth Lapidoth, “Do Palestinian refugees have a right to return to Israel?”, posted on Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 15 January 2001. Available from http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/do%20palestinian%20refugees%20have %20a%20right%20to%20return%20to.aspx.

as the contention that Jews and Palestinians are not “races” and that, because Palestinian citizens of Israel enjoy the right to vote, the treatment of them by the Israeli State cannot constitute apartheid, are addressed and rejected above. Other arguments include:

1. Consistency with international practice: The Israeli doctrine of maintaining a Jewish majority, enabling the Jewish people to have its own nation-State, is consistent with the behaviour of States around the world, such as France, which express the self-determination of their respective ethnic nations. It is therefore unfair and exceptional treatment — and implicitly anti-Semitic — to target Israel as an apartheid State when it is only doing the same.

This common argument derives from miscasting how national identities function in modern nation States. In France, for example, anyone holding French citizenship, regardless of whether they are indigenous or of immigrant origin, are equal members of the French nation and enjoy equal rights. According to the Supreme Court, Israel is not the State of the “Israeli nation” but of the “Jewish nation”.86 Collective rights in Israeli law are explicitly conferred on Jews as a people and on no other collective identity: national rights for Jews, embedded in such laws as the Law of Return and the Citizenship Law (discussed above) do not extend to any other group under Israeli rule. Hence, racial-nationalist privileges are embedded in the legal and doctrinal foundations of the State. That is exceptional and would meet with opprobrium in any other country (as it did in apartheid South Africa).

2. The standing of Palestinians as foreigners: Palestinian residents of the occupied Palestinian territory are not citizens of the State and so the State does not owe them rights and treatment equal to that accorded to Israeli Jewish citizens and settlers.

The similarities between the legal situation in Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation and in Namibia under South African occupation have already been noted. Israel has denied Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory Israeli citizenship because they are not Jews. As the “in-gathering” of Jews is a central mission of Israeli State institutions and the State promotes naturalisation of Jews from other parts of the world, it is fair to assume that the Palestinians, born in territory under the State’s exclusive control, would have been granted Israeli citizenship had they been Jewish (and had they wanted it). In its General Recommendation No. 30 on discrimination against non-citizens, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial

86 George Rafael Tamarin v. State of Israel (1972) C.A.630/70.

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Discrimination recommends that States parties to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination should:

Recognize that deprivation of citizenship on the basis of race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin is a breach of States parties’ obligations to ensure non-discriminatory enjoyment of the right to nationality.87

The Apartheid Convention cites as crimes of apartheid “measures calculated to deny members of a racial group or groups” basic human rights, including “the right to a nationality” (article II (c)). Thus, the argument that Israel cannot be responsible for Palestinians who are non-citizens reinforces a finding of apartheid when one asks why they are not citizens. At the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is indeed the exclusion of the Palestinians, as non-Jews, from citizenship in the State that governs their country. (The liminal condition of living in a “State of Palestine” recently recognized by the General Assembly yet lacking all attributes of sovereignty has not provided Palestinians with a “citizenship” that has concrete application.)

3. The purpose clause. Israeli policies that oppress Palestinians are motivated by security concerns, and not the intention or desire to impose racial domination.

The Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute define crimes of apartheid as acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group over another. It could be argued that Israeli practices are only temporary measures, the purpose of which is not racial domination, but only to maintain order until a peace agreement removes the need for such measures. However, the security issues related to Israeli measures relevant to this study are usually cited only in relation to the occupied Palestinian territory, while the apartheid regime is applied to the Palestinian people as a whole. Moreover, apartheid is prohibited under international law irrespective of its duration.88 The Apartheid Convention makes no distinction in terms of the period of time apartheid is carried out or the State’s ultimate vision for the future.89

87 CERD/C/64/Misc.11/rev.3, para. 14.
88 The uniquely extended character of the Israeli occupation has generated a new body of literature on the legal implications

of “prolonged occupation”. For more on this, see Tilley (ed.), Beyond Occupation, chap. 2.

89 The Government of apartheid South Africa also argued that racial domination was not a goal in itself but a defensive measure designed to preserve the way of life of the white population. Apartheid was presented as merely a stage on the path to a mutually beneficial end, in which all “peoples” of South Africa would enjoy self-determination and peaceful coexistence. In practice, the “homelands” system was geared towards stabilizing the low-cost workforce and white land tenure.

3. Conclusions and Recommendations A. Conclusions

This report establishes, on the basis of scholarly inquiry and overwhelming evidence, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. However, only a ruling by an international tribunal in that sense would make such an assessment truly authoritative. The authors therefore urge the United Nations to implement this finding by fulfilling its international responsibilities in relation to international law and the rights of the Palestinian people as a matter of urgency, for two reasons. First, the situation addressed in the report is ongoing. Many investigations of crimes against humanity have concerned past behaviour or events, such as civil wars involving genocides, which have formally concluded. In such cases, the international community faces no particular pressure to act in a timely way to terminate an ongoing crime prior to investigating the legal facts of culpability. In the case of Israel-Palestine, any delay compounds the crime by prolonging the subjugation of Palestinians to the active practice of apartheid by Israel. Prompt action is accordingly imperative to avert further human suffering and end a crime against humanity that is being committed now.

Secondly, the extreme gravity of the charge requires prompt action. Since the 1970s, when the international campaign to oppose apartheid in southern Africa gathered momentum, apartheid has been considered in the annals of the United Nations and world public opinion to be second only to genocide in the hierarchy of criminality.90 This report accordingly recommends that the international community act immediately, without waiting for a more formal pronouncement regarding the culpability of the State of Israel, its Government and its officials for the commission of the crime of apartheid.

While urging swift action to oppose and end this apartheid regime, the authors of this report urge as a matter of highest priority that authoritative bodies be requested to review its findings. Opinions of the General Assembly, ICJ and ICC are especially crucial, although assessments by national courts would also be relevant to interpreting international criminal law and appraising its

90 Genocide and apartheid are the only two international crimes, the commission of which States have a duty to prevent.

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implementation by Member States. On the basis of such findings, States and United Nations bodies could deliberate on a firm foundation of international law how best to discharge their responsibility to address and bring to an end the crime of apartheid and domination of the Palestinian people. In any event, pending that longer deliberative process, the authors of this report conclude that the weight of the evidence supports beyond a reasonable doubt the contention that Israel is guilty of imposing an apartheid regime on the Palestinian people.

The prohibition of apartheid is considered jus cogens in international customary law. States have a separate and collective duty (a) not to recognize an apartheid regime as lawful; (b) not to aid or assist a State in maintaining an apartheid regime; and (c) to cooperate with the United Nations and other States in bringing apartheid regimes to an end. A State that fails to fulfil those duties could itself be held legally responsible for engaging in wrongful acts involving complicity with maintaining an apartheid regime. The United Nations and its agencies, and all Member States, have a legal obligation to act within their capabilities to prevent and punish instances of apartheid that are responsibly brought to their attention.

Civil society institutions and individuals also have a moral duty to use the instruments at their disposal to raise awareness of this ongoing criminal enterprise, and to exert pressure on Israel to dismantle apartheid structures and negotiate in good faith for a lasting peace that acknowledges the rights of Palestinians under international law and makes it possible for the two peoples to live together on the basis of real equality.

Apartheid in southern Africa was brought to an end, in part, by the cumulative impact of a variety of measures, including economic sanctions and sports boycotts, undertaken with the blessing of United Nations bodies and many Member States, and with grassroots support in States with strong strategic and economic ties with South Africa. The effectiveness of the anti-apartheid campaign was in large part due to the transnational activism of civil society, which reinforced the intergovernmental consensus that took shape in the United Nations.

B. Recommendations

The following recommendations cover general responsibilities and those of specific institutional actors. Their purpose is, first of all, to focus attention on the principal finding of this report, that Israel has imposed a regime of apartheid on the Palestinian people as a whole, thereby challenging the United Nations and other international, national and civil society actors (including private citizens) to act in

response. They are also designed to encourage the implementation of practical measures in accordance with international law to exert pressure on Israel to dismantle its apartheid regime and end the unlawful status quo by engaging in a peace process that seeks a just solution.

General Recommendations

United Nations bodies, national Governments and civil society actors, including religious organizations, should formally endorse the principal finding of this report that the treatment by Israel of the Palestinians is consistent with the crime of apartheid.
On that basis, those actors should examine what measures can be taken in accordance with their legal obligations, as set forth under the Apartheid Convention. As the crime of apartheid qualifies as a peremptory or jus cogens norm of international law, States are bound by the Convention even if they are not parties to it, and would have similar legal obligations even in the absence of the convention, because the crime of apartheid is prohibited under customary international law.

Recommendations for the United Nations

Each United Nations body should promptly consider what action to take in view of the finding that Israel maintains a racist regime of apartheid in its exercise of control over the Palestinian people, taking due account of the fragmentation of that people by Israel, which is itself an aspect of the control arrangements that rely on “inhuman acts” for the purpose of systematic racial domination.
ESCWA should take a central role in advocating international cooperation to end the apartheid regime. Its special role in this respect derives not only from the Commission’s geographic position but also its mandate.
United Nations entities should cooperate with one another, and in particular with ESCWA, to discuss and disseminate this report. They should consider, possibly in cooperation with the Palestinian Government and other Palestinian institutions, convening a special meeting to assess how to follow up on and implement the recommendations of the report.
The General Assembly should, taking inspiration from resolution 1761(XVII) of 6 November 1962, revive the Special Committee against Apartheid, and the United Nations Centre against Apartheid (1976-1991), which would report authoritatively on Israeli practices and policies relating to the crime of apartheid, including the legal and administrative instrumentalities used to carry out the underlying criminal enterprise. Those bodies gathered and

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54 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

disseminated vital legal analysis and information with respect to South African apartheid. Those resources benefited not only jurists and scholars, but also civil society activists around the world, helping them to shape media presentations and public opinion, legitimating calls for boycotts, divestments and sanctions, and contributing overall to the formation of a transnational movement against apartheid in South Africa.

The Human Rights Council should be vested with particular responsibility for examining the findings of this report and reinforcing its recommendations. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967 should be instructed to report annually to the Council and the Third Committee of the General Assembly on steps taken to comply with the terms of the Apartheid Convention and to encourage member States of the Council to take appropriate action.
The competent bodies of the United Nations should consider seeking an advisory opinion from the ICJ as to whether the means used by Israel to maintain control over the Palestinian people amount to the crime of apartheid and, if so, what steps should be taken to end that situation promptly.
Pursuant to article 7 (1) (j) of the Rome Statute, the ICC should be formally encouraged to investigate, as a matter of urgency, whether the State of Israel, its Governments and individuals, in implementing policies and practices with respect to the Palestinian people, are guilty of the crime of apartheid and, if so, to act accordingly.
On the basis of this report, the Secretary-General should be respectfully urged to recommend to the General Assembly and the Security Council that a global conference be convened at an early date in order to consider what action should be taken by the United Nations and what might be recommended to civil society and private sector actors.

Recommendations for national Governments of Member States

National Governments should be reminded of their legal duty under international law to take appropriate action to prevent the crime of apartheid and punish its perpetrators, taking cognizance of the findings of this report and any parallel findings by competent bodies.
National Governments should, within the limits of their legislative, executive and judicial institutions, take appropriate action, including allowing criminal prosecutions of Israeli officials demonstrably connected with the practices of apartheid against the Palestinian people.
National Governments, especially of member States of ECSWA, should explore ways of cooperating in the discharge of their duty to oppose and overcome the regime of apartheid.

4. National Governments should support boycott, divestment and sanctions activities and respond positively to calls for such initiatives.

Recommendations for civil society and private sector actors

Civil society actors should be invited to submit to the Human Rights Council reactions to this report. A special meeting should be convened to consider those reactions and to plan appropriate next steps, including recommendations to the Human Rights Council and to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Efforts should be made to broaden support for boycott, divestment and sanctions initiatives among civil society actors.
Private sector actors should be made aware of the findings of this report and requested to act accordingly, including by informing the public about the criminality of the apartheid regime, and urging Governments to fulfil their obligations under the Apartheid Convention and to propose initiatives that could be undertaken by civil society. Private sector actors should also be reminded of their legal, moral and political responsibility to sever ties with commercial ventures and projects that directly or indirectly aid and abet the apartheid regime imposed.

Conclusions and Recommendations | 55

Annex I

Findings of the 2009 HSRC Report

Legal analysis cited here from Beyond Occupation draws from work by contributors to a study conducted between 2007 and 2009, under the auspices of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) and at the request of the South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Coordinated, co-authored and edited by Virginia Tilley, that study was issued in 2009 under the title Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A Reassessment of Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories under International Law. Principal contributors included Iain Scobbie, Professor and Chair of International Law, University of Manchester (Great Britain); Max du Plessis, Associate Professor of Law, University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban) and Senior Research Associate, Institute for Security Studies; Rina Rosenberg, Esq., International Advocacy Director of Adalah/Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Haifa); John Reynolds, formerly researcher at Al-Haq (Ramallah) and now lecturer in international law and critical legal studies, National University of Ireland-Maynooth; Victor Kattan, Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute and an Associate Fellow at the Faculty of Law at the National University of Singapore; and Michael Kearney, now Senior Lecturer in Law at Sussex University (Great Britain).

The method was to review Israeli practices in accordance with the list of “inhuman acts” described in the Apartheid Convention. The team determined that Israel was practicing every act listed in the Convention except genocide and the ban on mixed marriages. Subsequently, Israel passed a law banning mixed marriages by people registered as having different religious identities. The revised version of the report published in 2012 was amended accordingly.

The list provided here is a summary of findings regarding those acts. Detailed empirical evidence, data and citations on each category are available in Beyond Occupation (chapter 4).

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Apartheid Convention, article II

(a) denialtoamemberormembersofaracialgrouporgroupsoftherighttolife and liberty of person:

(i) by murder of members of a racial group or groups;
(ii) by the infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups ofserious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;
(iii) by arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups;

Article II (a) is satisfied by Israeli measures serving to repress Palestinian dissent against the occupation and its system of domination. Israeli policies and practices include murder, in the form of targeted extrajudicial killings; torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees; a military court system that falls far short of international standards of due process, including fair trial; and arbitrary arrest and detention of Palestinians, including administrative detention imposed, often for extended periods, without charge or trial and lacking adequate judicial review. All of those practices are discriminatory, in that Palestinians are subject to different legal systems and different courts, which apply different standards of evidence and procedure that result in far more severe penalties than those applied to Jewish Israelis.

(b) deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part;

Article II (b) takes its language from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crime of Genocide and is interpreted here as signifying a policy of genocide. Israeli policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territory are not found to have the intent of causing the physical destruction of the Palestinian people in this sense. Israel pursues policies that are inimical to human health and life and so are serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law: they include policies that cause human suffering, such as closures imposed on the Gaza Strip, thereby depriving Palestinians of access to essential health care, medicine, fuel and adequate nutrition. However, those policies do not meet the threshold of a deliberate policy of mass physical extermination.

(c) any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association;

Article II (c) is satisfied on all counts:

(ii)

(iii)

(iv)

(i)

Restrictions on the Palestinians’ right to freedom of movement are endemic, stemming from Israeli control of the occupied Palestinian territory border crossings, the wall in the West Bank, a matrix of checkpoints and separate roads, and obstructive and all-encompassing permit and ID systems.

The right of Palestinians to choose their own place of residence within their territory is severely curtailed by systematic administrative restrictions on residency and building in East Jerusalem, by discriminatory legislation that operates to prevent Palestinian spouses from living together on the basis of which part of the occupied Palestinian territory they originate from, and by the strictures of the permit and ID systems.
Palestinians are denied the right to leave and return to their country. Palestinian refugees living in the occupied Palestinian territory are not allowed to return to their homes inside Israel, while Palestinian refugees and involuntary exiles outside Israel and the territory are not allowed to return to their homes in either the territory or Israel. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 have been prevented from returning. Many Palestinian residents of the occupied territory must obtain Israeli permission (often denied) to leave it; political activists and human rights defenders are often subject to arbitrary and undefined “travel bans”, and many Palestinians who travelled abroad for business or personal reasons have had their residence IDs revoked and been prohibited from returning.
Israel denies Palestinian refugees living in the occupied Palestinian territory the right to a nationality, denying them citizenship of the State (Israel) that governs the land of their birth, and also obstructing the exercise by the Palestinians of the right to self-determination and preventing the formation of a Palestinian State in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip.

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(v) Palestinians are denied the right to freedom and residence through the cantonization of the West Bank, which confines them to designated areas on the basis of race; through bans on their returning to homes in the occupied Palestinian territory from which they were displaced by fighting and terror; and through restrictions on building permits that prevent them from establishing homes where they wish to live.
(vi) Palestinians are restricted in their right to work through Israeli policies that severely curtail Palestinian agriculture and industry in the occupied Palestinian territory, restrict exports and imports, and impose pervasive obstacles to internal movement that impair access to agricultural land and travel for employment and business. Since the second intifada, access for Palestinians to work inside Israel, once significant, has been dramatically curtailed and is now negligible. The unemployment rate in the occupied Palestinian territory as a whole has reached almost 50 per cent.
(vii) Palestinian trade unions exist but are not recognized by the Israeli Government or by the Histadrut (the largest Israeli trade union) and cannot effectively represent Palestinians working for Israeli employers and businesses in the occupied Palestinian territory. Palestinian unions are not permitted to function at all in Israeli settlements. Although they are required to pay dues to the Histadrut, the interests and concerns of Palestinian workers are not represented by the Histadrut; nor do they have a voice in its policies.
(viii) Israel does not operate the school system in the occupied Palestinian territory, but severely impedes Palestinian access to education on a routine basis through extensive school closures; direct attacks on schools; severe restrictions on movement, including travel to schools; and the arrest and detention of teachers and students. The denial by Israel of exit permits, particularly for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, has prevented thousands of students from pursuing higher education abroad. Discrimination in education is further underlined by the parallel and greatly superior Jewish Israeli school system in Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank, to which Palestinians have no access.
(ix) Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory are denied the right to freedom of opinion and expression through censorship laws enforced by the military authorities and endorsed by the Supreme Court. Palestinian newspapers must have a military permit and articles must be pre-approved by the military censor. Since 2001, the Israeli Government Press Office has drastically limited press accreditation for Palestinian journalists, who are also subjected to systematic harassment, detention and confiscation of materials, and in some cases assassination. The accreditation of foreign journalists working in the occupied territory may be revoked at the

discretion of the Government Press Office Director on security grounds, which include writing stories that are deemed to “delegitimize” the State.1 Foreign journalists are regularly barred from entering the Gaza Strip.

(x) The right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association is impeded through military orders. Military legislation bans public gatherings of 10 or more persons without a permit from the Israeli military commander. Non- violent demonstrations are regularly suppressed by the Israeli army with live ammunition, tear gas and arrests. Most Palestinian political parties have been declared illegal and institutions associated with those parties, such as charities and cultural organisations, are regularly subjected to closure and attack.
(xi) The prevention of full development in the occupied Palestinian territory and participation of Palestinians in political, economic, social and cultural life is most starkly demonstrated by the effects of the ongoing Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.

(d) any measures, including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof;

Article II (d) is satisfied in the following ways:
(i) Israeli policies have divided the occupied Palestinian territory into a series

of non-contiguous enclaves (Areas A and B in the West Bank, as a whole separated from the Gaza Strip) in which Palestinians are allowed to live and maintain a degree of local autonomy. Land between those enclaves is reserved exclusively for Jewish and State use: the Jewish settlement grid, nature reserves, agro-industry, military zones and so forth. Land not already used is considered “State land” and administered by State institutions for the benefit of the Jewish people. Segregation of the populations is ensured by pass laws that restrict Palestinians from visiting Jewish areas without a permit and ban Jewish-Israeli travel into Palestinian zones. The wall and its infrastructure of gates and permanent and “floating” checkpoints enforce those restrictions.

1 “Cards will not be given under these rules to any applicant if the Director is of the opinion, after consultation with security authorities, that providing the Cards may endanger the State security”, article 3 (f), Rules regarding cards for foreign media journalists, press technicians and media assistants. Available from http://gpoeng.gov.il/media/54705/gpo-rules.pdf.

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62 | Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid

(ii) Inter-faith marriages between Muslims or Christians with Jews are prohibited by law.2 No civil marriage exists in Israel except for the tiny minority whose faith is not declared. Mixed-faith couples must leave the State to marry. Mixed marriages conducted outside of Israel are recognized by the State, provided that marriages among Jews accord with Orthodox Jewish law.
(iii) Israel has extensively appropriated Palestinian land in the occupied Palestinian territory for exclusively Jewish use. Private Palestinian land comprises about 30 per cent of the land unlawfully appropriated for Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Approximately 40 per cent of the West Bank is completely closed to use by the Palestinians, and significant restrictions are placed on access by them to much of the rest.

(e) Exploitationofthelabourofthemembersofaracialgrouporgroups,in particular by submitting them to forced labour;

Article II (e) is today not significantly satisfied, as Israel has raised barriers to Palestinian employment inside Israel since the 1990s and Palestinian labour is now used extensively only in the construction and services sectors of Jewish-Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory. Otherwise, exploitation of labour has been replaced by practices that fall under article II (c), regarding the denial of the right to work.

(f) Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.

Arrest, imprisonment, travel bans and the targeting of Palestinian parliamentarians, national political leaders and human rights defenders, as well as the closing down of related organisations by Israel, represent persecution for opposition to the system of Israeli domination in the occupied Palestinian territory, within the meaning of article II (f). Article II (f) is especially important in the occupied Palestinian territory, where “security” measures are focused on resistance to occupation.

2 The Israeli prohibition of mixed marriages is mainly concerned with marriages involving Jews. This is effected by requiring that all marriages be conducted by religious authorities. Since Muslim law permits mixed marriages, marriage between Muslims and Christians is not prohibited. The aim of this arrangement is clear: to avoid blurring the social divisions between Jews and non-Jews. Similarly, under apartheid in South Africa, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 banned marriages between “Europeans and non-Europeans” but not between non-Europeans and other non-Europeans.

Annex II

Which Country?

Israeli policies confuse the issue in relation to the categorization under the Apartheid Convention of all acts fitting the purpose clause and preventing “participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country” (article II (c)) as crimes of apartheid. The question is, from which “country” are Palestinians being denied equal rights and full participation? This question engages larger questions about the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself.

The “country” from which Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory are excluded could arguably be Mandate Palestine as established by the League of Nations. The League’s intention was for it to gain independence as a State representing the shared patrimony of the entire multi-sectarian population of Palestine. That model, overtaken by events, was confused from the start by language about a “Jewish national home” and in any case was rendered moot by war, expulsion and other events on the ground. However, exclusive Israeli control since 1967 over all of Mandate Palestine has preserved the original geographical unit of Palestine. Hence the “country” in which Palestinians are being deprived of rights could be the Palestine that was never allowed to form, and arguably should form. The remedy in that case is to restore the standing of the original Mandate, which holds that the region is properly one country that has wrongfully been divided by racial agendas.
The country from which Palestinians are excluded could be the “Arab State” recommended by resolution 181(II), which also never formed. This view accepts as authoritative the findings of the Special Committee on Palestine in 1947 and as irreversible the events of the 1948 war, in which a “Jewish State” was formed in part of Mandate territory. What in more recent times has been declared the State of Palestine and sought recognition by the United Nations is a much reduced version of that “Arab State”. Israeli policies remain aimed at depriving such a State of the essential attributes of sovereignty; those policies would have to be reversed for this approach to generate a true State. Since Israel shows no indication of changing its position, the alternative is that a Palestinian State be granted some political rights as “reserves” enjoying local autonomy, comparable to the Bantustans of southern Africa or Native American reservations in the United States. Such an arrangement is unlikely to

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satisfy Palestinian aspirations for self-determination, however. It is more likely to lead ultimately to violence and insurrection by a terminally frustrated Palestinian population.

3. The “country” from which Palestinians are wrongfully deprived of equal rights may be the State of Israel. Accepting as irreversible the annexation measures of Israel in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, this approach would see Israel incorporating the occupied Palestinian territory fully into its governing institutions but dismantling the policies of racial oppression and domination that make Israel an apartheid State. Jews and Palestinians may, however, fear the consequences: enduring security perils for the former and enduring discrimination against the latter.

This report examines, based on key instruments of international law, whether Israel has established an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole. Having established that
the crime of apartheid has universal application, that the question of the status of the Palestinians as a people is settled in law, and that the crime of apartheid should be considered at the level of the State, the report sets out to demonstrate how Israel has imposed such a system on the Palestinians in order to maintain the domination of one racial group over others.

A history of war, annexation and expulsions, as well as a series of practices, has left the Palestinian people fragmented into four distinct population groups, three of them (citizens of Israel, residents of East Jerusalem and the populace under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza) living under direct Israeli rule and the remainder, refugees and involuntary exiles,

living beyond.This fragmentation, coupled with the application of discrete bodies of law to those groups, lie at the heart of the apartheid regime.They serve to enfeeble opposition to it and to veil its very existence.This report concludes, on the basis of overwhelming evidence, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid, and urges swift action to oppose and end it.

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Tags: apartheid, crime of apartheid, Israel, Jewish State, Palestinian people, South Africa

Comments 63 Comments
Categories apartheid, Apartheid Convention, Commentary, Human Rights, Israel/Palestine, Palestinian people, Reflections, South African apartheid, United Nations

Border Control: Blocking Uncivil Comments

11 Jul

On Blog Despair

Once again I feel deeply frustrated by the lack of civility in the flow of comments on this website, especially relating to Israel-Palestine, and the broader relations between Islam and Judaism. And again I feel that those who seem to have chosen as a vocation the validation of Israeli behavior however far it strays from international law and minimal ethical standards are determined to personalize the debate via the submission of defamatory and demonizing comments. There are also disingenuous attempts to engage me in senseless discussion where a cascade of questions will follow upon whatever responses I try to provide to the initial inquiry. I have been down that weary road before, and don’t intend to be so foolish as to attempt once more to explain what is self-evident to those committed to unconditionally justifying whatever Israel chooses to do or to claim. My interest is in dialogue, not argument or polemics. And I must say that the rabbi who often submits lengthy comments has no trouble finding severe fault with whatever I have to say, and manages to construe even posts far removed from the Israeli-Palestine battleground as evidence of my supposed ‘hatred’ of everything Israeli, alleging that I harbor an intention to destroy Israel. The only exception of any merit to such defaming allegations is that he encouraged me a while ago to write in detail and in the public sphere so to elaborate upon my mention in a post that it is time for Hamas to revise its Charter.

It seems that those who defend Israel to the outer limit are unable to refrain in their comments from repeatedly attacking me and others who hold similar views, or lecturing me as if I am their wayward pupil. I have been lax of late in blocking such comments, partly because there are often substantive issues also present, but I now re-commit myself to doing so, and also to those so deeply offended by such comments that they deliver their own insulting broadsides directed at those who seem so intent to attack my character and reputation. I appreciate this support, but do not wish it to take this form on this website.

I make no secret of my dislike of Israel’s policies and practices in relation to Palestine and its people. I believe these policies and practices are the root cause of decades of Palestinian suffering and of the failure to achieve sustainable peace. I take this opportunity to affirm my support for the growing global solidarity movement seeking the full realization of Palestinian rights. Israel’s disregard and defiance of international law has been so flagrant and persistent that the country stands shamefully alone in the world today.

Having said that, I remain comfortable with my Jewish identity, and always have. I believe that all ethnic identities touch the deepest wellsprings of our experience as human beings, and I regard them as all worthy of respect and even love, although sometimes tough love that interrogates and sharply criticizes to ensure conformity with ‘our better angels’ and in support of human wellbeing. After all, it is the tough love of the Old Testament prophets that makes this ancient biblical text live so vividly in our minds, hearts, and souls today.

As I have said often in the past, despite the disproportionate injustices done to the Palestinians for more than a century, I believe that the two peoples, along with other identities inhabiting the Holy Land, need to find ways to embody peace-with-justice in their modes of living together. Now they live together in the most wretched imaginable manner, essentially characterized by oppression, violence, and exploitation on one side and victimization and resistance on the other side. Regardless of ethnic identity if we align ourselves with the nonviolent quest for justice and dignity, we must given the lopsided relations between Israelis and Palestinians in my opinion side with the Palestinians. Also, bear in mind that what most Palestinians and their designated representatives have been willing to accept since the 1980s is moderate, modest, and reasonable, and what Israel has offered is the opposite, oblivious to Palestinian rights and scaled back expectations.

For those who reject this statement of unabashed political and spiritual faith on my part, I would urge them to abandon this website, and find a more congenial setting, especially if their assessment of the conflict rest on either or both of these two premises: (1) the Israelis are basically right, have sought a fair peace in the past, are victims of Palestinian terrorism, and do what any sovereign state will do to uphold its security; (2) both Israelis and Palestinians have prevented the end of the conflict, and are both essentially and more or less equally responsible for the present terrible circumstances.

As I have long indicated, I welcome and believe in the give and take of substantive discussion so long as it is not accompanied by insulting language and nasty innuendo. Please relieve me of this odious role of acting as monitor and censor! I fully understand that my fiercest critics detest my views, and seem unable to disentangle their content from my authorship. The idea that I should be told by a comment writer to show my good faith by denouncing this or that is also unacceptable. This is a forum of opinion, not a political platform; I have neither power nor influence, and have no ambitions in these directions, and never have had. If dissatisfied, go elsewhere!

Again, I thank those who have found the posts of interest, and have remained loyal, despite the many (who like me) dislike the daily skirmishes. My hope remains to continue writing on a range of themes, and to invite dialogue pro and con, and in between, hoping to realize occasional moments of illumination, even aspiring to spiritual excess.

Let me end by observing that given the Israeli violence against besieged Gaza that has occurred in recent days, continuing the appalling orgy of collective punishment inflicted on the Palestinian people that has followed upon the terrible crime of kidnapping and killing of the three Israeli teenage boys on June 12, it feels almost indulgent to be concerned about blog civility. Yet I feel that harsh incivility in discourse wherever it occurs is not unrelated to the official and unofficial forms of Israeli incitement to violence that is taking place as I write, and that in some ways, the mentalities blend, producing tragic results, especially for those living under the heels of an oppressor.

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Tags: blog discourse, blog ethics, civility, Israel-Palestine, Palestinian people

Comments 66 Comments
Categories blog comments, Blog ethics, civility, Israel-Palestine

2014: International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People

31 Dec

In a little noted initiative the General Assembly on November 26, 2013 voted to proclaim 2014 the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People was requested to organize relevant activities in cooperation with governments, the UN system, intergovernmental organizations, and significantly, civil society. The vote was 110-7, with 56 abstentions, which is more or less reflective of the sentiments now present in international society. Among the seven opponents of the initiative, in addition to Israel, were unsurprisingly its three staunchest supporters, each once a British colony: the United States, Canada, Australia, with the addition of such international heavyweight states as Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands. Europe and assorted states around the world were among the 56 abstentions, with virtually the entire non-West solidly behind the idea of highlighting solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for peace with justice based on rights under international law.

Three initial observations: those governments that are willing to stand unabashedly with Israel in opposition to the tide of world public opinion are increasingly isolated, and these governments are under mounting public pressure from their own civil societies that seeks a balanced approach that is rights based rather than power dominated; the West, in general, is dominated by the abstaining governments that seek the lowest possible profile of being seen as neither for or against, and in those countries where civil society should now be capable of mobilizing more support for the Palestinian struggle; and the non-West that is, as has long been the case, rhetorically in solidarity with the Palestinian people, but have yet to match their words with deeds, and seem ready to be pushed.

What is also revealing is the argumentation of UN Watch, and others, that denounce this latest UN initiative because it unfairly singles out Israel and ignores those countries that have worse human rights records. Always forgotten here are two elements of the Israel/Palestine conflict that justify singling it out among others: Israel owes its existence, to a significant degree, to the organized international community, starting with the League of Nations, continuing throughout the British Mandate, and culminating with the Partition Plan of 1947, as set forth in GA Res. 181. The latter overrode the decolonizing principle of self-determination with a solution devised and imposed from without; such antecedents to the current Israel/Palestine situation also expose the colonialist foundations of the current struggle as well as call attention to the settler colonial elements that are associated with Israel’s continuous expansion of territorial, resource, and ethnocratic claims far beyond what the Western dominated international community had proposed, and then approved of, after the end of World War II.

To be sure there were delicate and complex issues all along that make this problematic role of the international community somewhat more understandable. Up to 1945 there was a generalized acceptance of European colonial administration, although in the Middle East, colonial legitimacy was balanced for the first time against an obligation by the colonial powers to prepare a dependent people to stand eventually on its own, an ambivalent acknowledgement of the ethos of self-determination if not yet in the form of a legal norm. This affirmation of self-determination, as an alternative to colonial rule, was the special project of the American president, Woodrow Wilson, who insisted that such an approach was a moral imperative, especially in dealing with the regional aftermath of the Ottoman Empire that had long ruled over many diverse ethnicities.

Beyond this, the Jewish experience during the reign of fascist regimes throughout Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, created a strong empathetic urge in Europe to endorse the Zionist project for a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. As is known, this empathy although genuine in many quarters, also exhibited a deferred sense of guilt on the part of the Western liberal democracies that had done so little to challenge the genocidal policies of Hitler and the Nazis, refusing to act at all until their national interests were directly engaged by German aggression. European support was also forthcoming because the Zionist proposed solution for the Jewish Problem, which has long been present in Europe, could be enacted elsewhere, that is, at the expense of non-Europeans. This elsewhere was far from empty and was coveted by others for various reasons. Palestine was a land long lived in mainly by Arabs, but also by some Jews and Christians, and associated centrally with the sacred traditions of all three monotheistic religions. Normally in the modern world, the demographics of residence trump biblical or other claims based on claims of national tradition, ethnic identity, and ancient historical presence. Yet despite these factors, there were ethical reasons in the aftermath of such extreme victimization of the Jewish people to lend support to a reasonable version of the Zionist project as it had evolved in the years since the Balfour Declaration, even if from a variety of other perspectives it was deeply unfair to others and disruptive of peaceful relations, and throughout its implementation, produced an unfolding catastrophe for most non-Jewish Palestinians.

Taking account of this historical and moral complexity what seems evident is the failure of the UN to carry out its responsibility in a manner that was effective and responsive to the human circumstances prevailing in Palestine. The UN overall record is quite disappointing if considered from the perspective of accommodating these contradictory clusters of consideration in a manner that was reflective of international law and global justice. The military prowess of Zionist forces in Israel inflicted a major defeat on the Palestinian people and neighboring Arab governments, and in the process expanded the territorial dominion of Israel from the 55% decreed by the UN in its partition plan to 78% where the green line established an armistice arrangement in 1948. Such an outcome was gradually endorsed by a geopolitical consensus, exhibited through the admission of Israel to the UN without any solution to the underlying conflict, leaving the Palestinians out in the cold and allowing Israel to constitute itself within borders much larger than what the UN had a mere year earlier decreed as fair.

This situation was further aggravated by the 1967 War in which Israel occupied all of the remaining territory of historic Palestine, purporting even to annex East Jerusalem while greatly enlarging the area of municipal Jerusalem by incorporating land belonging to the West Bank. Since 1967 this Palestinian territorial remnant has been further decreased by the massive settlement phenomenon, including its network of settler only roads, carried out in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law, by the separation wall constructed and maintained in defiance of the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, and by a variety of moves to change the demography of East Jerusalem. In other words, Israeli forces on the ground in what had been Palestine have undermined the vision set forth in the partition plan which was itself a controversial UN solution to the conflict that was rejected by Palestinians and by neighboring countries.

Despite much propaganda to the contrary, the Palestinian leadership has over most of the period of their struggle, shown an unusual readiness to abandon maximal goals, and put forward forthcoming proposals in recognition of the realities of a situation that had become unfavorable for the realization of their earlier hopes. Palestinian willingness, expressed formally since 1988, to accept Israel as a legitimate state within the green line borders of 1967 remains more than twenty-five years after its articulation an unacknowledged and unreciprocated major initiative for peace. That such a proposal has been ignored and continuously undermined by Israel with de facto Western acquiescence, and in the face of feeble UN rhetorical objections, displays the inability of the UN to fulfill its responsibilities to the people of Palestine.

As might be expected, Palestinians have long become disillusioned about the benefits of having UN authority and international law on their side. Over the years the backing of international authority has failed to bring about an improvement in the life circumstances and political position of the Palestinian people. The UN is helpless, and designed to be helpless, whenever a UN position is effectively resisted by a combination of military force and geopolitical alignment. Israel’s military capabilities and American geopolitical leverage have completely nullified the expressed will of the United Nations, but have not overcome the sense of frustration or excused the Organization from its failure to act responsibly toward the Palestinian people.

In light of this background, the wonder is that the UN has done so little to repair the damage, not that it has done so much, or more than it should in relation to Israel/Palestine. Arguably, yes, there are a variety of other situations in which the abuse of human rights has been worse than what is being attributed to Israel, but the rationale for focusing on Palestine is not only a question of the denial of rights, it is also an issue of fundamental justice, of the seemingly permanent subjugation of a people, partly due to arrangements that were devised and endorsed over a long period of time by the organized international community. Yet, witnessing the dire current emergency plight of the people of Gaza, makes it perverse to contend that the human rights challenges facing this large and vulnerable Palestinian community is not among the worst human rights abuses in the entire world, and makes us wonder anew why the UN seems unwilling and unable to do more!

We can hope at the dawn of 2014 that the UN will be vigorous in giving the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People a political meaning that goes beyond words of empathy and support. There is an opportunity to do more. The UN resolution calls for working with civil society. Recent moves in America to join boycotts of Israeli academic institutions and in Europe to hold corporations responsible under international law for dealing commercially with Israeli settlements are major successes of civil society activism, being led by the BDS Campaign that has the important legitimating virtue of Palestinian leadership and backing. The UN can help build a momentum in the global solidarity movement that encourages nonviolent militant forms of coercive action that alone will give ‘solidarity’ a good name.

Palestinians are starting to win the Legitimacy War that is being waged against unlawful Israeli policies and on behalf of the attainment of Palestinian rights. The turning point in world public opinion can probably be traced back to the way Israel waged the Lebanon War of 2006, especially the avowed reliance on disproportionate force directed at residential neighborhoods, especially in south Beirut, a tactic that became known as the Dahiya Doctrine. The tipping point in shifting the Israeli collective identity from that of victims and heroic underdogs to that lawless perpetrators of oppressive warfare against a totally vulnerable people came in Operation Cast Lead, the sustained assault with high technology weaponry on the people of Gaza for three weeks at the end of 2008. After these developments, the Palestinians were understood more widely to be a victimized people, engaged in a just struggle to gain their rights under international law, and needing and deserving an international movement of support to offset the Israeli hard power and geopolitical dominance.

Israeli leaders and think tanks try their hardest to discredit this Palestinian Legitimacy War by falsely claiming that it is directed against the legitimacy of Israel as a state rather than is the case, against the unlawful policies of the Israeli state. This is a crucial difference, and the distinction seems deliberately obscured by Israeli propaganda that inflated what Palestinians are seeking so as to make their activism appear hyperbolic, with unreasonable and unacceptable demands, which makes it easier to dismiss than by addressing critically the Palestinian grievances in their actual form. It is to be hoped that the International Year of Solidarity in its work clarifies this distinction between Israel as a state and Israeli policies. Within such a framework the UN will deserve credit for contributing to victories throughout the world that advance the agenda of the Legitimacy War being waged by and on behalf of the Palestinian people, and by so doing, move the debate somewhat closer to the realization of a just and sustainable peace for both peoples.

Tags: Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Israel, Jew, Palestine, Palestinian people, United Nations, United States, West Bank

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Categories Commentary, Palestine

Nelson Mandela’s Inspiration (Revised)

9 Dec

Prefatory Note: Thanks to my friend Nader Hashemi, I have added this important comment on the role of violence in emancipatory struggles for freedom that Nelson Mandela articulated after his release from prison in 1993; it is highly relevant to the demands by Israel that Palestinians renounce violence while Israel sustains a structure of occupation and oppression that includes nakba as process, that is, continuous dynamics of dispossession and dispersal of the oppressed and encroachment on their remaining rights via unlawful settlement, ethnic cleansing, discriminatory policies. What follows is an excerpt from an appearance by Mandela on Charlie Rose’s interview program:

Rose: You have, at this moment, no reservation or indecision – along with the counsel that you’ve taken with your colleagues – that the decisions made by you and them are right for South Africa – the sacrifices, the toll, the price you’ve paid, the blood that’s been spilled was necessary, painful, but necessary?

Mandela: nods

Rose: Yes.

Mandela: Absolutely. We are an organization which, from its foundation, committed itself to building a nation through peaceful, nonviolent, and disciplined struggle. We were forced to resort to arms by the regime, and the lesson of history is that for the masses of the people, the methods of political action which they use are determined by the oppressor himself. If the oppressor uses peaceful means, the oppressed would never resort to violence. It is when the oppressor – in addition to his repressive policies – uses violence, that the oppressed have no alternative but to retaliate by similar forms of action. And, therefore, the pains, the blood that was spilled, and the responsibility for that lies squarely on the shoulders of the regime.

Source: Interview with Charlie Rose, September 30, 1993

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Fifteen years ago I had the extraordinary pleasure of meeting Nelson Mandela in Cape Town while he was serving as President of South Africa. It was an odd occasion. I was a member of the International Commission on the Future of the Oceans, which was holding a meeting in South Africa. It happened that one of the vice chairs of the Commission was Kader Asmal, a cherished friend and a member of the first Mandela cabinet who himself played a major role in the writing of the South African Constition. Kader had arranged for Mandela to welcome the Commission to his country, and asked me if I would prepare some remarks on his behalf, which was for me an awesome assignment, but one that I undertook with trepidation, not at all confident that I could find the words to be of some slight help to this great man. Compounding my personal challenge, the Brazilian Vice Chair of our oceans commission who was supposed to give a response on behalf of the Commission became ill, and I was asked by our chair to respond to Mandela on behalf of the commission. I did have the thrill of hearing 90% of my text delivered by Mandela, which years later I remember much better than my eminently forgettable words of response to the President.

What moved me most, and has led me to make this rather narcissistic introduction, is the conversation after the event. Mandela thanked me for my efforts and proceeded then to talk with each of our 40 commission members, making a specific reference to circumstances of relevance and concern in each of their particular countries. He went from person to person with such grace and composure as I had never encountered before on the part of a public figure of renown. It was above all Mandela’s spiritual presence that created such a strong impression of moral radiance on the part of all of us fortunate enough to be in the room. I was reinforced in my guiding belief that political greatness presupposes a spiritual orientation toward the meaning of life, not necessarily expressed by way of a formal religious commitment, yet always implies living with an unconditional dedication to values and faith that transcend the practical, the immediate, and the material.

The political imaginary that accompanies such a life also has an integrity that challenges the proprieties and associated boundaries of conventional liberal thought. It is easy for almost everyone now to celebrate Mandela for his long struggle against South African apartheid that included 27 years in jail. It is less common to recall that as late as the 1980s leaders in Britain and the United States were condemning Mandela as ‘terrorist’ and ‘revolutionary’ who deserved to be indefinitely jailed, if not worse. It is even less often remembered that Mandela rejected early offers to obtain his release from prison if he would ‘renounce violence’ and call for an end to ‘armed struggle.’ Although Mandela is justly honored for his role in achieving a non-violent transition to multi-racial constitutionalism in South Africa, he was never willing to say that those who were oppressed must renounce whatever means was available to them to gain their freedom. Indeed, Mandela as leader of the African National Congress, endorsed the creation of its military wing, and at one stage was supportive of armed resistance to obtain liberation and overcome the racist crimes being committed by the apartheid regime on a massive and systematic basis.

The Palestinian people, in the midst of their seemingly endless ordeal, have particular reason to esteem the exemplary life and solidarity exhibited by Nelson Mandela for their cause. Mandela’s words reflected a deep intuition that what the Palestinians were seeking had a deep affinity with his own struggle: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

In Israel’s apartheid there exist a network of separated roads for Israeli settlers and the Palestinians, as well as a discriminatory dual legal administrative structure.

Mandela regarded Yasser Arafat as a ‘comrade in arms,’ identifying him as “one of the outstanding freedom fighters of his generation,” adding that “it is with great sadness that his and his people’s dream of a Palestinian state has not been realized.” By affirmations of Arafat, Castro, and even Qaddafi, Mandela made plain to the West in reaction to criticism, “Our enemies are not your enemies.” Such a voice of peace and justice that never submitted to Western liberal notions of good behavior was fully appreciated by Indian followers of Gandhi who regarded Mandela as a natural political heir to their national hero despite his more contextual views on the role of political violence. Like Gandhi, Mandela stood so firmly for dignity, independence, human development, and the end of colonial domination in all its manifold forms wherever it was to be found in the world.

It is also notable that Marwan Barghouti confined to an Israeli jail for five consecutive life sentences looked to Mandela for inspiration, writing an open letter from his prison cell not long ago. He wrote, “And from within my prison, I tell you that our freedom seems possible because you reached yours.” Beyond this he hailed Mandela whose torch of freedom burned so brightly as to cast universal light: “You carried a promise far beyond the limits of your country’s borders, a promise that oppression and injustice will be vanquished, paving the way to freedom and peace..All sacrifices become bearable by the sole prospect that one day the Palestinian people will also be able to enjoy freedom.” Barghouti is for Palestinians their strongest symbol of collective identity in resistance and struggle, and a comparison to Mandela’s lifelong journey is inevitable, including Barghouti’s clear turn toward the embrace of militant forms of nonviolent resistance.

I believe that when Israel is ready for a sustainable and just peace it will signal this to itself, to the Palestinians, and to the world by releasing Barghouti from prison and by treating Hamas as a political actor with genuine grievances and aspirations that needs to be included in any diplomacy of accommodation that deserves the label of ‘peace process.’ Until that most welcome moment arrives, the Palestinian march toward victory in the ongoing Legitimacy War must be continued with renewed vitality and dedication.

Mandela’s journey, like that of Gandhi, was not without its major disappointments. To gain the political end of apartheid, Mandela deferred challenges to social and economic apartheid. Part of his legacy to South Africa is to carry forward this mission to free the great majority of the country from the many disadvantages and burdens of their still segregated, subordinated, and humiliating reality.

Tags: African National Congress, Israel, Mandela, Marwan Barghouti, Nelson Mandela, Palestinian people, South Africa, Yasser Arafat

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Categories Commentary, Human Rights, Palestine

Invisible Horizons of a Just Palestine/Israel Future

4 Nov

I spent last week at the United Nations, meeting with ambassadors of countries in the Middle East and presenting my final report to the Third Committee of the General Assembly as my term as Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine comes to an end. My report emphasized issues relating to corporate responsibility of those companies and banks that are engaged in business relationships with the settlements. Such an emphasis seemed to strike a responsive note with many delegations as a tangible way of expressing displeasure with Israel’s continuing defiance of its international law obligations, especially in relation to the unlawful settlements being provocatively expanded in the West Bank and East Jerusalem at the very moment that the resumption of direct negotiations between the Palestine Authority and the Government of Israel is being heralded as a promising development.

There are two reasons why the corporate responsibility issue seems to be an important tactic of consciousness raising and norm implementation at this stage: (1) it is a start down the slippery slope of enforcement after decades of UN initiatives confined to seemingly futile rhetorical affirmations of Israeli obligations under international law, accompanied by the hope that an enforcement momentum with UN backing is underway; (2) it is an expression of tacit support for the growing global movement of solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people for a just and sustainable peace agreement, and specifically, it reinforces the claims of the robust BDS Campaign that has itself scored several notable victories in recent months.

My intention in this post is to put aside these issues and report upon my sense of the diplomatic mood at the UN in relation to the future of Israel/Palestine relations. There is a sharp disconnect between the public profession of support for the resumed peace negotiations as a positive development with a privately acknowledged skepticism as to what to expect. In this regard, there is a widespread realization that conditions are not ripe for productive diplomacy for the following reasons: the apparent refusal of Israel’s political leadership to endorse a political outcome that is capable of satisfying even minimal Palestinian aspirations; the settlement phenomenon as dooming any viable form of a ‘two-state’ solution; the lack of Palestinian unity as between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas undermining its representational and legitimacy status.

The most serious concern on the Palestinian side is whether protecting the interests and rights of the totality of the Palestinian people in a peace process can be achieved within the present diplomatic framework. We need to be constantly reminded that ‘the Palestinian people’ cannot be confined to those Palestinian living under Israeli occupation: refugees in neighboring countries; refugees confined within occupied Palestine, but demanding a right of return to their residence at the time of dispossession; the Palestinian minority living in Israel; and 4-5 million Palestinians who constitute the Palestinian diaspora and its underlying reality of enforced exile.

It was also clear that the Palestinian Authority is confronted by a severe dilemma: either to accept the inadequate proposals put forward by Israel and the United States or reject these proposals and be blamed once again by Tel Aviv and Washington for rejecting a peace offer. Only some Israeli anxiety that the Palestinians might actually accept the U.S. proposals might induce Israel to refuse, on its side, to accept what Washington proposes, and spare the Palestinians the embarrassment posed by the dilemma of swallowing or spitting. That is, Israel when forced to show its hand may actually be unwilling to allow any solution to the conflict based on Palestinian self-determination, even if heavily weighted in Israel’s facvor. In effect, within the diplomatic setting there strong doubts exist as to whether the present Israeli leadership would accept even a Palestinian statelet even if it were endowed with only nominal sovereignty. In effect, from a Palestinian perspective it seems inconceivable that anything positive could emerge from the present direct negotiations, and it is widely appreciated that the PA agreed take part only after being subjected to severe pressure from the White House and Secretary Kerry. In this sense, the best that Ramallah can hope for is damage control.

There were three attitudes present among the more thoughtful diplomats at the UN who have been dealing with the Palestinian situation for years, if not decades: the first attitude was to believe somehow that ‘miracles’ happen in politics, and that a two state solution was still possible; usually this outlook avoided the home of the devil, that is the place where details reside, and if pressed could not offer a scenario that explained how the settlements could be shrunk sufficiently to enable a genuine two-state solution to emerge from the current round of talks; the second attitude again opted to support the resumption of the direct talks because it was ‘doing something,’ which seemed preferable to ‘doing nothing,’ bolstering this rather vapid view with the sentiment ‘at least they are doing something’; the third attitude, more privately and confidentially conveyed, fancies itself to be the voice of realism in world politics, which is contemptuous of the advocacy of rights and justice in relation to Palestine; this view has concluded that Israel has prevailed, it has won, and all that the Palestinians can do is to accommodate an adverse outcome, acknowledging defeat, and hope that the Israelis will not push their advantage toward a third cycle of dispossession (the first two being 1948, 1967) in the form of ‘population transfer’ so as to address their one remaining serious anxiety—the fertility gap leading to a feared tension between professing democracy and retaining the primary Zionist claim of being a Jewish state, the so-called ‘demographic bomb.’

As I reject all three of these postures, I will not leave my position as Special Rapporteur with a sense that inter-governmental diplomacy and its imaginative horizons have much to offer the Palestinian people even by way of understanding evolving trends in the conflict, much less realizing their rights, above all, the right of self-determination. At the same time, despite this, I have increased my belief that the UN has a crucial role to play in relation to a positive future for the Palestinian people—reinforcing the legitimacy of seeking a rights based solution rather than settling for a power based outcome that is called peace in an elaborate international ceremony of deception, in all likelihood on the lawn of the White House. In this period the UN has been playing an important part in legitimating Palestinian grievances by continuously referencing international law, human rights, and international morality.

The Israelis (and officialdom in the United States) indicate their awareness of this UN role by repeatedly stressing their unconditional opposition to what is labeled to be ‘the delegitimation project,’ which is a subtle propagandistic shift from the actual demand to uphold Palestinian rights to the misleading and diversionary claim that Israel’s critics are trying to challenge Israel’s right to exist as a state sovereign state. To be sure, the Palestinians are waging, with success a Legitimacy War against Israel for control of the legal and moral high ground, but they are not at this stage questioning Israeli statehood, but only its refusal to respect international law as it relates to the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people.

Let us acknowledge a double reality. The UN is a geopolitical actor that is behaviorally manipulated by money and hard power on many fundamental issues, including Palestine/Israel; this stark acknowledgement severely restricts the effectiveness of the UN with regard to questions of justice. Fortunately, this is not the whole story. The UN is also a normative actor that articulates the grievances of peoples and governments, influences public discourse with respect to the global policy agenda, and has great and distinctive symbolic leverage in establishing the legitimacy of claims. In other words, the UN can say what is right, without being necessarily able to do what is right. This distinction summarizes the narratives of articulating the Palestinian claims and the justice of the Palestinian struggle without being able to overcome behavioral obstacles in the geopolitical domain that block their fulfillment.

What such a gap also emphasizes is that the political climate is not yet right for constructive inter-governmental negotiations, which would require both Israel and the United States to recalculate their priorities and to contemplate alternative future scenarios in a manner that is far more congruent with upholding the panoply of Palestinian rights. Such shifts in the political climate are underway, and are not just a matter of changing public opinion, but also mobilizing popular regional and global support for nonviolent tactics of opposition and resistance to the evolving status quo. The Arab Spring of 2011 initially raised expectations that such a mobilization would surge, but counter-revolutionary developments, political unrest, and economic panic have temporarily, at least, dampened such prospects, and have lowered the profile of the Palestinian struggle.

Despite such adverse developments in the Middle East from a Palestinian perspective, it remains possible to launch within the UN a broad campaign to promote corporate responsibility in relation to the settlements, which could gradually be extended to other unlawful Israeli activities (e.g. separation wall, blockade of Gaza, prison and arrest abuses, house demolitions). Such a course of action links efforts within the UN to implement international law with activism that is already well established within global civil society, being guided by Palestinian architects of 21st century nonviolent resistance. In effect, two disillusionments (armed struggle and international diplomacy) are coupled with a revised post-Oslo strategy giving the Palestinian struggle a new identity (nonviolent resistance, global solidarity campaign, and legitimacy warfare) with an increasing emancipatory potential.

Such an affirmation is the inverse of the ultra realist view mentioned above that the struggle is essentially over, and all that is left is for the Palestinians to admit defeat and for the Israelis to dictate the terms of ‘the peace treaty.’ While admitting that such a visionary worldview may be based on wishful thinking, it is also appropriate to point out that most political conflicts since the end of World War II have reflected the outcome of legitimacy wars more than the balance of hard power. Military superiority and geopolitical leverage were consistently frustrated during the era of colonial wars in the 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, it should be understood that the settler colonial enterprise being pursued by Israel is on the wrong side of history, and so contrary to appearances, there is reason to be hopeful about the Palestinian future and historical grounds not succumb to the dreary imaginings of those who claim the mantle of realism.

Tags: Israel, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Palestine, Palestinian people, United Nation, United Nations, United States, Washington, West Bank

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Categories Commentary, Israel/Palestine, United Nations

Israel’s Politics of Deflection

30 Sep

Israel’s Politics of Deflection: Theory and Practice

General Observations

During my period as the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Palestine on behalf of the Human Rights Council I have been struck by the persistent efforts of Israel and its strong civil society adjuncts to divert attention from the substance of Palestinian grievances or the consideration of the respective rights of Israel and Palestine under international law. I have also observed that many, but by not means all of those who represent the Palestinians seem strangely reluctant to focus on substance or to take full advantage of opportunities to use UN mechanisms to challenge Israel on the terrain of international law and morality.

This Palestinian reluctance is more baffling than are the Israeli diversionary tactics. It seems clear that international law supports Palestinian claims on the major issues in contention: borders, refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, resources (water, land), statehood, and human rights. Then why not insist on resolving the conflict by reference to international law with such modifications as seem mutually beneficial? Of course, those representing the Palestinians in international venues are aware of these opportunities, and are acting on the basis of considerations that in their view deserve priority. It is disturbing that this passivity on the Palestinian side persists year after year, decade after decade. There are partial exceptions: support for recourse to the International Court of Justice to contest the construction of the separation wall, encouragement of the establishment of the Goldstone Fact-finding Inquiry investigating Israeli crimes after the 2008-09 attacks on Gaza, and the Human Rights Council’ Independent International Fact-finding Mission on Isreali settlement expansion (report 22 March 2012). But even here, Palestinian officialdom will not push hard to have these symbolic victories implemented in ways that alter the behavioral realities on the ground, and maybe even if they did do their best, nothing would change.

On the Israeli side, diversion and the muting of legal and legitimacy claims, is fully understandable as a way to blunt challenges from adversary sources: seeking to have the normative weakness of the Israeli side offset by an insistence that if there is to be a solution it must be based on the facts on the ground, whether these are lawful or not, and upon comparative diplomatic leverage and negotiating skill in a framework that is structurally biased in favor of Israel. The recently exhumed direct negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and the Government of Israel exemplify this approach: proceeding despite the absence of preconditions as to compliance with international law even during the negotiations, reliance on the United States as the convening intermediary, and the appointment by President Obama of an AIPAC anointed Special Envoy (Martin Indyk), the latter underscoring the absurd one-sidedness of the diplomatic framework. It would seem that the Palestinians are too weak and infirm to cry ‘foul,’ but merely play along as if good natured, obedient, and frightened schoolchildren while the bullies rule the schoolyard.

Such a pattern is discouraging for many reasons: it weights the diplomatic process hopelessly in favor of the materially stronger side that has taken full advantage of the failure to resolve the conflict by grabbing more and more land and resources; it makes it virtually impossible to imagine a just and sustainable peace emerging out of such a process at this stage; it plays a cruel game in which the weaker side is almost certain to be made to seem unreasonable because it will not accept what the stronger side is prepared to offer, which is insultingly little; and it allows the stronger side to use the process and time interval of the negotiations as an opportunity to consolidate its unlawful claims, benefitting from the diversion of attention.

There are two interwoven concerns present: the pernicious impacts of the politics of deflection as an aspect of conflictual behavior in many settings, especially where there are gross disparities in hard power and material position; the specific politics of deflection as a set of strategies devised and deployed with great effectiveness by Israel in its effort to attain goals with respect to historic Palestine that far exceed what the UN and the international community had conferred. The section that follows deals with the politics of deflection only in the Israel/Palestine context

The Specific Dynamics of the Politics of Deflection

—anti-Semitism: undoubtedly the most disturbing behavior by Israel and its supporters is to deflect attention from substance in the conflict and the abuses of the occupation is to dismiss criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism or to defame the critic as an anti-Semite. This is pernicious for two reasons: first, because it exerts a huge influence because anti-Semitism has been so totally discredited, even criminalized, in the aftermath of World War II that featured the exposure and repudiation of the Holocaust; secondly, because by extending the reach of anti-Semitism to address hostile commentary on Israel a shift of attention occurs—away from the core evil of ethnic and racial hatred to encompass the quite reasonable highly critical appraisal of Israeli behavior toward the Palestinian people by reference to overarching norms of law and morality.

This misuse of language to attack Jewish critics of Israel by irresponsible characterizations of critics as ‘self-hating Jews.’ Such persons might exist, but to infer their existence because of their criticisms of Israel or opposition to the Zionist Project functions as a means to move inhibit open discussion and debate, and to avoid substantive issues. It tends to be effective as a tactic as few people are prepared to take the time and trouble to investigate the fairness and accuracy of such allegations, and so once the shadow is cast, many stay clear of the conflict or come to believe that criticism of Israel is of less interest than are the pros and cons of the personal accusations. Strong Zionist credentials will not insulate a Jew from such allegations as Richard Goldstone discovered when he was vilified by the top tier of Israeli leadership after chairing a fact-finding inquiry that confirmed allegations of Israeli war crimes in the course of Operation Cast Lead. Even the much publicized subsequent Goldstone ‘retraction’ did little to rehabilitate the reputation of the man in Israeli eyes, although his change of heart as to the main allegation of his own report (a change rejected by the other three members of the inquiry group), was successfully used by Israeli apologists to discredit and bury the report, again illustrating a preference for deflection as opposed to substance.

Even such global moral authority figures as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter have been called anti-Semites because they dared to raise their voices about the wrongs that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people, specifically identifying the discriminatory legal structures of the occupation as an incipient form of apartheid.

In the unpleasant course of being myself a frequent target of such vilifying techniques, I have discovered that it is difficult to make reasoned responses that do not have the effect of accentuating my plight. To fail to respond leaves an impression among some bystanders that there must be something to the accusations or else there would be forthcoming a reasoned and well-evidenced response. To answer such charges is to encourage continuing attention to the allegations, provides the accusing side with another occasion to repeat the charges by again cherry picking the evidence. NGOs such as UN Watch and UN Monitor specialize in managing such hatchet jobs.

What is more disturbing than the attacks themselves than their resonance among those holding responsible positions in government and international institutions, as well as widely respected liberal organizations. In my case, the UN Secretary General, the U.S. ambassadors at the UN in New York and Geneva, the British Prime Minister, and the Canadian Foreign Minister. Not one of these individuals bothered to check with me as to my response to the defamatory allegations or apparently took the trouble to check on whether there was a credible basis for such damaging personal attacks. Even the liberal mainstream human rights powerhouse, Human Rights Watch, buckled under when pressured by UN Watch, invoking a long neglected technical rule to obtain my immediate removal from a committee, and then lacked the decency to explain that my removal was not ‘a dismissal’ when

UN Watch claimed ‘victory,’ and proceeded to tell the UN and other bodies that if Human Rights Watch had expelled me, surely I should be expelled elsewhere. I learned, somewhat bitterly, that HRW has feet of clay when it came to standing on principle in relation to someone like myself who has

been the victim of repeated calumnies because of an effort to report honestly and accurately on Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.

—Auspices/Messenger: A favorite tactic of those practicing the politics of deflection is to contend that the auspices are biased, and thus whatever substantive criticisms might issue from such an organization should be disregarded. Israel and the United States frequently use this tactic to deflect criticism of Israel that is made in the UN System, especially if it emanates from the Human Rights Council in Geneva or the General Assembly. The argument is reinforced by the similarly diversionary claim that Israeli violations are given a disproportionately large share of attention compared to worse abuses in other countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa. Also, there is the complementary complaint that some of the members of the Human Rights Council themselves have appalling human rights records that disqualify them from passing judgment, thereby exhibiting the hypocrisy of criticisms directed at Israel.

It is tiresome to respond to such lines of attack, but important to do so.

First of all, in my experience, the UN has always made fact-based criticisms of Israeli policies and practices, appointed individuals with strong professional credentials and personal integrity, and painstakingly reviewed written material prior to publication to avoid inflammatory or inaccurate criticisms. Beyond this, Israel is almost always given an opportunity to review material critical of its behavior before it is released, and almost never avails itself of this chance to object substantively. In my experience, the UN, including the Human Rights Council, leans over backwards to be fair to Israel, and to take account of Israeli arguments even when Israel declines to make a case on its own behalf.

Further, the heightened attention given to Palestinian grievances is a justified result of the background of the conflict. It needs to be remembered that it was the UN that took over historic Palestine from the United Kingdom after World War II, decreeing a partition solution in GA Resolution 181 without ever consulting the indigenous population, much less obtaining their consent. The UN approach in 1947 failed to solve the problem, consigning Palestinians to decades of misery due to the deprivation of their fundamental rights as of 1948, the year of the nakba, a national experience of catastrophic dispossession. Through the years the UN has provided guidelines for behavior and a peaceful solution of the conflict, most notably Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which have not been implemented. The UN has for more than a decade participated in The Quartet tasked with implementing ‘the roadmap’ designed to achieve peace, but not followed, allowing Israel to encroach more and more on the remnant of Palestinian rights via settlement expansions, wall construction, residence manipulations, apartheid administrative structures, land confiscations, house demolitions. The UN has been consistently frustrated in relation to Palestine in a manner that is unique in UN experience, making the issue a litmus test of UN credibility to promote global justice and overcome the suffering of a dispossessed and occupied people.

Usually, the attack on the sponsorship of a critical initiative is reinforced by scathing screed directed at anyone prominently associated with the undertaking. The attacks on the legendary Edward Said, the one Palestinian voice in America that could not be ignored, were rather vicious, often characterizing this most humanist among public intellectuals, as the ‘Professor of Terror.’ The most dogmatic defenders of Israel never tired of trying to make this label stick by showing a misleadingly presented picture of Said harmlessly throwing a stone at an abandoned guard house during a visit to southern Lebanon not long before his death as if a heinous act of violence against a vulnerable Israeli soldier. This effort to find something, however dubious, that could be used to discredit an influential critic disregard the ethics of fairness and decency. In my case, an accidentally posted cartoon, with

an anti-Semitic angle has been endlessly relied upon by my most mean-spirited detractors, although any fair reading of my past and present scholarship, together with the blog psot in which it appeared in which Israel is not even mentioned, would conclude that its sole purpose of highlighting the cartoon was to defame, and by so doing, deflect.

In like manner, the use of the label ‘terrorist’ has been successfully manipulated by Israel in relation to Hamas to avoid dealing with its presence as the elected governing authority in Gaza or in responding to its offers of long-term coexistence provided the blockade of Gaza is ended and Israeli forces withdraw to 1967 borders. The Hamas demands are really nothing more than a call for the implementation of international law and UNSC resolutions, and thus highly reasonable from the perspective of fairness to both sides, but Israel is not interested in such fairness, and hence avoids responding to the substance of the Hamas proposals by insisting that it is unwilling to respond to a terrorist organization. Such a stubborn position is maintained, and supported by the United States and EU, despite Hamas’ successful participation in an electoral process, its virtual abandonment of violent resistance, and its declared readiness for diplomatic accommodations with Israel and the United States.

If the messenger delivering the unwelcome message lacks prominence or the campaign of vilification does not altogether succeed, then at governmental levels, Israel, and the United States as well, will do its best to show contempt for criticism for the whole process by boycotting proceedings at which the material is presented. This has been my

experience at recent meetings of the Human Rights Council and the Third Committee of the General Assembly where my reports are presented on a semi-annual basis and Israel and the United States make it a point to be absent. There is an allocation of the work of deflection: at the governmental end substance is often evaded by pretending not to notice, while pro-Israeli NGOs pound away, shamelessly repeating over and over the same quarter truths, which often are not even related to their main contention of biased reporting. In my case, UN Watch harps on my supposed membership in the ranks of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, an allegation that I have constantly explained to be contrary to my frequently articulated views on the 9/11 attacks. It makes no difference what I say or what are the facts of my position

once the defamatory attack has been launched.

Diplomatic Deflection: The entire Oslo peace process, with its periodically revived negotiations, has served as an essential instrument of deflection for the past twenty years. It diverts the media from any consideration of Israel’s expansionist practices during the period that the parties are futilely negotiating, and succeeds in making critics and criticism of Israel’s occupation policies seem obstructive of the overarching goal of ending the conflict and bringing peace to the two peoples.

Geopolitical Deflection: Although not solely motivated by the goals of deflection, the bellicose focus by Israel on Iran’s nuclear program, has seemed so dangerous for the region and the world that it has made Palestinian grievances appear trivial by comparison. It has also led outside political actors to believe that it would be provocative to antagonize Israeli leadership in relation to Palestine at a time when there were such strong worries that Israel might attack Iran or push the United States in such a direction. To a lesser extent the preoccupations with the effects of the Arab upheavals, especially in Syria and Egypt, have had the incidental benefit for Israel of diminishing still further regional and global pressures relating to Palestinian grievances and rights. This distraction, a kind of spontaneous deflection, has given Israel more time to consolidate their annexationist plans in the West Bank and Jerusalem, which makes the still lingering peace image of a two-state solution a convenient mirage, no more, no less.

A Concluding Comment: Overall, the politics of deflection is a repertoire of techniques used to shift the gaze away from the merits of a dispute. Israel has relied on these techniques with devastating effects for the Palestinians. The purpose of my analysis is to encourage Palestinians in all settings to do their best to keep the focus on substance and respective rights. Perhaps, it is time for all of us to learn from the brave Palestinian hunger strikers whose nonviolent defiance of Israeli detention abuse operated with laser like intensity to call attention to prison and administrative injustice. Unfortunately, the media of the world was silent, including those self-righteous liberal pundits who had for years urged the Palestinians to confront Israel nonviolently, and then sit back, and find satisfaction in the response from Tel Aviv. Waiting for Godot is not a matter of patience, but of ignorance!

Tags: Antisemitism, Desmond Tutu, International Court of Justice, Israel, Palestine, Palestinian people

Comments 73 Comments
Categories Commentary, International & Global Law, Israel/Palestine

Blog Ethics and Politics

16 Jun

During this apprentice period as a blogger I have learned and relearned how difficult it is to reconcile my interest in constructive dialogue on highly contested subject-matters with sustaining a tone of civility. Especially with respect to the Palestine/Israel struggle I have periodically failed, angering especially those who feel that their support of Israel is either inappropriately rejected or ignored. This anger is turned in the direction of personal insults directed either at me or at writers of comments, which induces those at the receiving end to reply in kind, and the result is a loss of civility, which alienates many other readers who tire of such futile and mean-spirited arguments.

By way of clarification, let me acknowledge that I regards two types of interaction as satisfying my goal of ‘constructive dialogue’: conversations between likeminded on matters of shared interest; exchange of views between those who adopt antagonistic positions on an array of concerns ranging from cultural assessment to political analysis. To favor conversations with likeminded means favoring those who share my convictions with respect to the themes addressed in posts, and is viewed as ‘bias’ by those who do not share these convictions. I feel unapologetic about this encouragement of conversation among the likeminded.

Some of my harshest critics complain that I am one-sided or stifle the freedom of expression of those whose comments I exclude on grounds of civility, the avoidance of hate speech, and the rejection of serial submissions of views. It is true that I have decided against an open comments section in which anything goes, and seek to avoid having the debate on attitudes toward Israel dominate the blog, although it is admittedly my own recurring preoccupation and commitment. It is also the case that I feel a need to be protective toward the Palestinians who are massively victimized by their prolonged conditions of displacement, occupation, statelessness, and acute insecurity, a historical circumstance that combines tragedy and injustice. And I will not hide my solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinians to realize their rights under international law, which has been my overriding commitment during the past five years while having serving in the position of Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council. My attempt to be an honest witness has from the outset prompted accusations of bias by defenders of Israel. Such accusations have been substantiated by my detractors through distorted presentations of my views on an array of unrelated issues including 9/11, American foreign policy, the Iranian Revolution. I mention this personal embattlement only becausthese personal attacks use as evidence statements from my posts that are taken out of context and given inflammatory interpretations, especially by the NGO, UN Watch. What has been most disturbing for me is the extent to which such

a defamatory campaign, broadly centered on allegations that I am an anti-Semitic and a self-hating Jew, has led to calls for my resignation or dismissal by highly placed individuals at the UN or in leading governments. In my view, a toxic political environment has been deliberately generated, which pepper sprays anyone, especially if in a formal position of some influence, who dares to offer strong criticisms of Israel’s behavior or shows clear support for the Palestinian struggle.

Perhaps, in the end, there is no way around monitoring the flow of comments, seeking to make difficult choices as to which seem to inform or

usefully challenge and those that are merely arguing from fixed positions or submitting a comment that demeans others. Often comments contain a mixture of what is usefully substantive and what I find destructively mean-spirited, and it necessitates a choice.

One of the difficulties I have found is that there is a genuine disagreement as to the scope of ‘anti-Semitism.’ The maximalist Zionist position, that has proved very influential in North America and Western Europe, is that harsh criticism of Israel, given that Israel is a self-proclaimed Jewish state and a reality shaped by the experience of the Holocaust, is properly classified as a hateful form of ‘anti-Semitism.’ In effect, such a broad view of anti-Semitism, provides an all-purpose shield of impunity, which has allowed Israel to defy international law in the most flagrant ways (2004 World Court Advisory Opinion on the Separation Wall; 2006 attacks on Lebanon; Gaza military operations of 2008-09, 2012—Goldstone Report; Mavi Marmara incident of 2010; settlement expansion) without enduring any serious adverse diplomatic consequences.

I reject this broad conception of anti-Semitism, and limit this term of extreme opprobrium to hatred of Jews as an ethnicity and religiona, expressed by opinions and hostile behavior. I recommend reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s excellent essay “Portrait of an Anti-Semite” to obtain a deep psycho-philosophical understanding of the mentality that has led to the persecution of the Jewish people over the centuries. To obscure this core sense of ethnic and religious hatred by merging it with political attitudes that are critical of the behavior of a sovereign state or of some aspects of cultural and religious tradition embodied in the Jewish experience (‘chosen people’; biblical treatment of enemies) is, in my view, intellectually, politically, and morally regressive. In addition, it is harmful to the Palestinian people, unlawfully victimized for more than six decades by Israel’s state policies.

Does such an outlook imply that moral purity is exclusively on the Palestinian side and all wrongdoing attributable to Israel? Of course, not. Yet what is true is that Israel has been the aggressor throughout the struggle, and Palestine the outgunned defender that has constantly lost ground. I believe it is misleading to create a false symmetry between the two sides based on the claim of pursuing ‘a balanced approach,’ which seems to be the general position of most moderates and liberals. When the reality is so unbalanced, apportioning blame to both sides equally for the persistence of the struggle is profoundly misleading, and unwittingly supportive of the unjust and exploitative status quo.

I have dwelled on the Palestine/Israel agenda because it is what has provoked most of these blog concerns about tone and substance, the constituents of dialogue. I suppose it is the test of my approach, generating objections associated from some about ‘freedom of expression’ and from others about ‘an unhealthy polemical atmosphere.’ In my view, the domain of a blog is a quasi-private space that can set its desired limits on permissible expression that may be far narrower than what should be allowed in public spaces. The blog space may legitimately choose to be one-sided. Also, the objective is often different. I am not seeking to establish a marketplace of ideas, but a setting designed to encourage an exchange of views, opinions, and proposals in the spirit of civil conversation and dialogue, embedding a commitment of respect for ‘the other.’ And yet I have come to realize that the abstraction is difficult to apply concretely, especially if objectionable views are dogmatically stated and repeated. I will do my best to promote constructive dialogue, but I know that some will be disappointed along the way, especially those who disagree with me on substance, and therefore are put off by conversations among the likeminded.

Tags: Antisemitism, Holocaust, Israel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jew, Palestinian people, Semitism, United Nations Human Rights Council

Comments 59 Comments
Categories Commentary, Israel/Palestine, Reflections

Gaza: 7th Year of Unlawful Blockade (UN HRC SR Press Release)

15 Jun

Prefatory Note: I am posting a press release of yesterday, 14 June 2013, to take note of the start of the seventh year of the Israeli blockade. After the Mavi Marmara incident, 31 May 2010 and the more recent November ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Gaza government there was an undertaking to ease the blockade with respect to the flow back and forth of people and goods, but the situation remains desperate for the civilian population of Gaza that remains essentially locked into the Gaza Strip where economic destitution has reached epidemic extremes and where the water is mostly unfit for human consumption. The international community, and its main leaders, have commented adversely on the blockade, but nothing happens! It is this sense of powerlessness that is undermining the legitimacy and relevance of the United Nations to the suffering of the Palestinian people, and with particular relevance to the extreme ordeal of the civilian population of Gaza.

**********************************************************

UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner

Press Release on start of 7^th year of Gaza Blockade

Collective punishment in Gaza must end: Israel’s blockade enters its 7^th year – UN Special Rapporteur

GENEVA, 14 June 2013 – The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967, Richard Falk, called today on Israel to end its blockade over the Gaza Strip, six years after it was tightened following the Hamas takeover in June 2007. The human suffering of the land, sea and air blockade imposed on the 1.75 million Palestinians living in one of the most densely populated and impoverished areas of the world has been devastating.

“Six years of Israel’s calculated strangulation of the Gaza Strip has stunted the economy and has kept most Gazans in a state of perpetual poverty and aid dependency,” said the UN expert. “Whether it is fishermen unable to go beyond six nautical miles from the shore, farmers unable to access their land near the Israeli fence, businessmen suffering from severe restrictions on the export of goods, students denied access to education in the West Bank, or patients in need of urgent medical attention refused access to Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank, the destructive designs of blockade have been felt by every single household in Gaza. It is especially felt by Palestinian families separated by the blockade,” he added.

“The people of Gaza have endured the unendurable and suffered what is insufferable for six years. Israel’s collective punishment of the civilian population in Gaza must end today,” said the Special Rapporteur.

“Israel has the responsibility as the Occupying Power to protect the civilian population. But instead of allowing a healthy people and economy to flourish, Israeli authorities have sealed off the Gaza Strip. According to statistics released by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, last month’s exports out of Gaza consisted of 49 truckloads of empty boxes, three truckloads of spices, one truckload of cut flowers, and one truckload of furniture,” he said. In 2012, the total number of truckloads of exports leaving Gaza was 254, compared to 9,787 in 2005 before the tightening of the blockade.

“It does not take an economist to figure out that such a trickle of goods out of Gaza is not the basis of a viable economy,” noted the UN expert. “The easing of the blockade announced by Israel in June 2010 after its deadly assault on the flotilla of ships carrying aid to the besieged population resulted only in an increase in consumer goods entering Gaza, and has not improved living conditions for most Gazans. Since 2007, the productive capacity of Gaza has dwindled with 80 percent of factories in Gaza now closed or operating at half capacity or less due to the loss of export markets and prohibitively high operating costs as a result of the blockade. 34 percent of Gaza’s workforce is unemployed including up to half the youth population, 44 percent of Gazans are food insecure, 80 percent of Gazans are aid recipients,” he said.

“To make matters worse, 90 percent of the water from the Gaza aquifer is unsafe for human consumption without treatment, and severe fuel and electricity shortage results in outages of up to 12 hours a day. Only a small proportion of Gazans who can afford to obtain supplies through the tunnel economy are buffered from the full blow of the blockade, but tunnels alone cannot meet the daily needs of the population in Gaza.”

“Last year, the United Nations forecast that under existing conditions, Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020. Less optimistic forecasts presented to me were that the Gaza Strip may no longer be viable only three years from now,” said the Special Rapporteur. “It’s clear that the Israeli authorities set out six years ago to devitalize the Gazan population and economy,” he said, referring to a study undertaken by the Israeli Ministry of Defense in early 2008 detailing the minimum number of calories Palestinians in Gaza need to consume on a daily basis to avoid malnutrition. The myriad of restrictions imposed by Israel do not permit civilians in Gaza to develop to their full potential, and enjoy and exercise fully their human rights.

ENDS

In 2008, the UN Human Rights Council designated Richard Falk (United States of America) as the fifth Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights on Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The mandate was originally established in 1993 by the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Learn more, log on to: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/countries/ps/mandate/index.htm

UN Human Rights – Occupied Palestinian Territories: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/countries/MENARegion/Pages/PSIndex.aspx

UN Human Rights – Israel: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/MENARegion/Pages/ILIndex.aspx

For more information and media requests, please contact Kevin Turner (kturner@ohchr.org) or Kiyohiko Hasegawa khasegawa@ohchr.org) or write to sropt@ohchr.org

For media inquiries related to other UN independent experts:

Cécile Pouilly, UN Human Rights – Media Unit (+ 41 22 917 9310 / cpouilly@ohchr.org)

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Tags: Blockade of the Gaza Strip, Gaza, Gaza Strip, Gazan, Israel, Palestinian people, United Nations, United Nations Special Rapporteur

Comments 20 Comments
Categories Crimes of State, Human Rights, International & Global Law, Israel/Palestine

Whose ‘Two State’ Solution? End game or Intermission?

6 Jun

From many sources there is a widespread effort to resume a peace process that has in the past led to failure, frustration, and anger, and often to renewed violence. The newly appointed American Secretary of State, John Kerry, is about to make his fifth trip to Israel since the beginning of 2013, insisting that the two sides try once more to seek peace, and warning if this doesn’t happen very soon, the prospects for an agreed upon solution will be postponed not for just a year or two, but for decades. Kerry says if this current effort does not succeed, he will turn his attention elsewhere, and that the United States will make no further effort. So far, aside from logging the air miles, seems perversely to be responsive to Tel Aviv’s demands for land swaps to allow settlement blocs to be incorporated into Israel and to promote further Palestinian concessions in relation to security arrangements, and totally unresponsive to Ramallah’s demands for some tangible signs from the Israeli government that resumed negotiations will not be another slammed door. In this vein, Kerry’s most ardent recent plea was at the Global Forum, an annual event organized under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee. Kerry told this audience that they possessed the influence to make the peace talks happen.

Somewhat surprisingly, even Marwan Barghouti writing from prison, has seemingly endorsed this Washington activism, and seemed to go further, calling upon the United States Government to use its leverage with Israel to resolve the conflict in a manner that recognizes Palestinian rights, and at the same time serves the broader American interest of stability in the Middle East. If Barghouti’s response to written questions submitted by Adnan Abu Amer of Al-Monitor, and published on May 28, 2013, is read carefully, it reinforces an extremely pessimistic assessment of current prospects for peace. Barghouti is urging the U.S. Government that it must make a 180 degree turn away from its posture of unconditional support for Israel if it wants to be credible with Palestinians in the search for a solution to the conflict that accords with natural justice. The United States would need, above all, to insist that Palestine becomes a fully sovereign state within the 1967 borders, have East Jerusalem as its capital, while supporting the full implementation of UN Resolution 194 that affirms the right of return of Palestinian refugees, and the removal of the settlements without noting any exceptions. These are all reasonable positions to take, each in furtherance of the relevant standards of international law. Yet it must be observed, and I am sure this is not news to Mr. Barghouti, Palestinian reasonableness in the context of the Israel/Palestine struggle means choosing not to be politically relevant.

It is from precisely this perspective that Barghouti words should be carefully and respectfully pondered. He calls the two-state solution “the only possible solution” and adds that it “must not be abandoned.” It is a vision of a two-state solution that comes superficially close to what the Israeli peace activist, Uri Avnery, advocates, but seems light years away from the kind of ‘solution’ that Israel might consider or Kerry advocate. In other words, there are two radically different two-state solutions that are often not being carefully distinguished: what might be called ‘the American conception,’ originally detailed in Barack Obama’s May 21, 2011 speech delivered at the U.S. State Department, which at the time of its utterance seemed to look toward Israel’s withdrawal to 1967 borders, with minor border adjusments, but included a general acceptance of Israel’s refusal to implement the Palestinian right of return behind the green line and its expectation that the main settlements would be incorporated into Israel sovereign territory . As so often has happened suring the Obama presidency, what seemed initially forthcoming, was soon altered by backpedaling in a manner that has severely damaged American credibility as a fair-minded third party. The U.S. Government in this instance has gradually come to acquiesce in, even if does not openly avow, these Israel’s unyielding demands, which makes Washington approach to the idea of two states for two peoples radically different than the Barghouti/Avnery conception of Palestinian statehood and self-determination. This latter conception is premised on the establishment of a genuinely sovereign and independent Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a genuine equality of the two states on matters bearing on security, resources, and refugee identity. There are, to be sure, important differences between Barghouti and Avnery with respect to the right of return, with Avnery opting for a more territorial view of the conflict consistent with the more moderate and humane Zionist views about limiting rights of Palestinian refugees and of the second-class status of the Palestinian minority living in Israel, but still rather far from the Barghouti position on these crucial matters so often ignored by the Western media.

In the background is the persisting unwillingness of the Netanyahu government, despite the overall backing it receives from Washington, to make Kerry’s life easier by undertaking some obvious confidence-building gestures: a settlement freeze and the release of some Palestinian political prisoners. Netanyahu insists on no preconditions for resumed negotiations, which means no letup in settlement expansion, no lifting of the Gaza blockade, and the continuing abusive treatment of the West Bank population. Kerry was probably hoping that his remarks at the AJC event would generate some pressure on Netanyahu to be somewhat more forthcoming. It is clear that if the Palestinian Authority are to enter direct negotiations while settlement expansion continued unchecked, it would likely be extremely detrimental to the claims of Mahmoud Abbas to be the sole legitimate voice of the Palestinian people, a view that Barghouti rejects despite his Fatah affiliation.

If Netanyahu was more adroit he could yield on these confidence-building prerequisites, and put Abbas in a bind. What has the Palestinian Authority to gain by entering into negotiations with an unabashedly expansionist and settler oriented Israeli government? Perhaps, it would win momentary favor in Washington. But for what benefit in relation to the struggle of the Palestinian people for a just solution? There are no signs whatsoever that Israel would even consider an outcome for negotiations that remotely resembled the Barghouti/Avnery two-state conception even if their differences are set aside for the moment. What would likely happen is that the negotiations would breakdown, as in the past, with the Palestinians receiving the lion’s share of the blame. Israel has much more spin control in the world media, especially if its narrative is backed by the United States, as has been the case in the past and would almost certainly be in the future. The likely hasbara assault would put the Palestinians in the position of once more being seen as rejecting what would be put forward to the world as generous Israeli proposals for a two-state solution that if looked at closely offered a statelet instead of a state, and even then subject to a humiliating and intrusive Israeli regime of control, all in the name of security, which should recall the disingenusous Israeli claim that its ‘disengagement’ from Gaza in 2005 put an end to the ‘occupation’ of the Gaza Strip.

Barghouti distance from what Kerry is trying to broker was also underscored by his expression of anger directed at the recent acceptance by the Arab League of modifications of its 2002 Arab Peace Initiative made in response to pressures exerted by Kerry. Barghouti’s comment on this aspect of Kerry’s diplomacy is worth reproducing: “The Arab Peace Initiative is the lowest the Arabs have gone in terms of a historical settlement with Israel. The statements of the Arab ministerial delegation to Washington in regards to amending the 1967 borders and accepting the land-swap inflict great damage on the Arab stance and Palestinian rights, and stimulate the appetite of Israel for more concessions. No one is entitled to amend borders or swap land; the Palestinian people insist on Israel’s full withdrawal to the 1967 borders, in addition to removing the settlements.” In effect, what Kerry put forward as a diplomatic coup, Barghouti denounced as an Arab betrayal. It all goes to show that there are many contradictory understandings cohabiting within the two-state tent.

It is notable that Barghouti also warns Israel and the United States that reliance on the status quo, which seems so comfortable from Tel Aviv’s perspective in recent years, is dangerously shortsighted: “security cannot be achieved without peace.” And further by implication, although not expressed in these words, “peace cannot be achieved without justice.” In this spirit of defiant nationalism, Barghouti also affirms that a right of resistance belongs to the Palestinian people, but its exercise should be sensitive to the limits of international law—“The tortured and oppressed Palestinian people have the right to defend themselves by all means approved by the UN Charter and international law. Total resistance is the most effective.” Barghouti in his responses strongly stresses the importance of moving to fulfill the tentative agreement between Fatah and Hamas to achieve Palestinian unity, while restating his awareness that resolving the refugee issue is central to a just solution while reaffirming his faith in an eventual Palestinian victory.

Both Kerry and Barghouti reject a one-state solution as not of any political interest, unfortunately leaving the peace process where it currently belongs—in an undurable limbo of indefinite extension. Netanyahu and Kerry have a Plan B that might really be their Plan A. It involves what Netanyahu shamelessly calls an ‘economic peace,’ a persistence of the occupation and status quo, but in a manner that makes life materially somewhat better for West Bank Palestinians (Gazans are no where to be found on this most dubious ‘map of conscience.’). It cannot be a coincidence that at this time Kerry is peddling a scheme to induce $4 billion of investment in the West Bank, presumably to convert the occupation and Palestinian statelessness into a new kind of ‘golden arch.’ The moment may have arrived to chase the moneychangers from the temple!

In pondering this dismal landscape of peace talk without peace, one wonders what became of ‘the roadmap’ and ‘the Quartet.’ It may be a small blessing that their irrelevance is being tacitly acknowledged. These creations never seemed more than a thin and deceitful veil thrown over a one sided American control over Israel/Palestine diplomacy. [For compelling documentation see Rashid Khalidi’s Broker of Deceit (2013)] In this sense the boldness of Kerry’s statecraft and Barghouti’s implicit recognition that the peace ball is in America’s court at least moves in the direction of ‘eyes wide open.’ For Kerry this means another set of grand gestures, for Netanyahu it means remaining immobile in the comfort zone created by the Palestinian shift away from the tactics of violent resistance, for Barghouti it means a call for resistance, a plea for more solidarity, and a kind of longing for an Israeli, or even an American, France’s DeGaulle or South Africa’s De Klerk who bothdramatically ruptured prior expectations by replacing confrontation with accommodation. Until something as drastic as this occurs, although not necessarily the work of a charismatic counter-hero, we need at least to have the honesty to admit that the end of the tunnel is dark except for occasional flickers of light. I discern such a flicker in the undertakings of those engaged in a legitimacy war against Israel, step by step gaining the high moral and legal ground, which may soon uncover political tipping points that will abruptly alter the relations of forces in support of Palestinian justice claims. The Palestinian Legitimacy War combines Palestinian resistance with a global solidarity campaign that is being waged on a global battlefield.

Tags: American Jewish Committee, Israel, John Kerry, Kerry, Marwan Barghouti, Middle East, Palestinian people, United States

Comments 77 Comments
Categories Commentary, Israel/Palestine

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Whose ‘Two State’ Solution? End game or Intermission?

Richard Falk

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