2009 legal study of the South African Human Sciences Research Council
Following Dugard's report, the
Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) of South Africa commissioned a legal study, completed in 2009, of Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law.
[179] The report noted that one of South African apartheid's most "notorious" aspects was the "racial enclave policy" manifested in the Black Homelands called
bantustans, and added: "As the apartheid regime in South Africa, Israel justifies these measures under the pretext of 'security'. Contrary to such claims, they are in fact part of an overall regime aimed at preserving demographic superiority of one racial group over the other in certain areas".
[180] According to the report, Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territories correlate almost entirely with the definition of apartheid as established in Article 2 of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Comparison to South African laws and practices by the apartheid regime also found strong correlations with Israeli practices, including violations of international standards for due process (such as illegal detention); discriminatory privileges based on ascribed ethnicity (legally, as Jewish or non-Jewish); draconian enforced ethnic segregation in all parts of life, including by confining groups to ethnic "reserves and ghettoes"; comprehensive restrictions on individual freedoms, such as movement and expression; a dual legal system based on ethno-national identity (Jewish or Palestinian); denationalization (denial of citizenship); and a special system of laws designed selectively to punish any Palestinian resistance to the system. The study found: "the State of Israel exercises control in the Occupied Palestinian Territories with the purpose of maintaining a system of domination by Jews over Palestinians and that this system constitutes a breach of the prohibition of apartheid." The report was published in 2012 as
Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
[181]
The question of whether Israelis and Palestinians are "racial groups" has been a point of contention in regard to the applicability of the ICSPCA and Article 7 of the Rome Statute. The HSRC's 2009 report states that in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Jewish and Palestinian identities are "socially constructed as groups distinguished by ancestry or descent as well as nationality, ethnicity, and religion". On this basis, the study concludes that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs can be considered "racial groups" for the purposes of the definition of apartheid in international law.
[179]
2020 Yesh Din
In 2020, the Israeli human rights organization
Yesh Din found that Israeli treatment of the West Bank's Palestinian population meets the definition of the crime of apartheid under both Article 7 of the 2002 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (ICSPCA) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, which went into force in 1976.
[182]
2021 B'Tselem report
In January 2021, Israeli human rights organization
B'Tselem issued a report outlining the considerations that led to the conclusion that "the bar for labeling the Israeli regime as apartheid has been met."
[12] In presenting the report, B'Tselem Executive Director
Hagai El-Ad said, "Israel is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it: it is one regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and we must look at the full picture and see it for what it is: apartheid."
[183]
2021 FIDH statement
In March 2021, the
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) issued a statement saying, "The international community must hold Israel responsible for its crimes of apartheid", citing the work of its member organizations in Israel and Palestine.
[184]
2021 Human Rights Watch report
In April 2021,
Human Rights Watch released a report accusing Israeli officials of the crimes of apartheid and persecution under international law and calling on the
International Criminal Court to investigate "systematic discrimination" against Palestinians, becoming the first major international rights
NGO to do so.
[185] Its report said that Israeli authorities "have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity" and that "in certain areas ... these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution."
[186] Israel rejected the report, with Strategic Affairs Minister
Michael Biton saying, "The purpose of this spurious report is in no way related to human rights, but to an ongoing attempt by HRW to undermine the State of Israel's right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people."
[187] Palestinian Prime Minister
Mohammad Shtayyeh welcomed HRW's report, urging the ICC to investigate Israeli officials "implicated in the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution".
[188] The US State Department came out against HRW's report, saying, "It is not the view of this administration that Israel's actions constitute apartheid."
[189]
2022 Amnesty report
Amnesty secretary general
Agnes Callamard dismissed the criticism of its report as
shooting the messenger.
On 1 February 2022,
Amnesty International published a report,
Israel's Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity,
[190] which stated that Israeli practices in Israel and the occupied territories amount to apartheid and that
territorial fragmentation of the Palestinians "serves as a foundational element of the regime of oppression and domination".
[191] The report states that, taken together, Israeli practices, including land expropriation, unlawful killings, forced displacement, restrictions on movement, and denial of citizenship rights amount to the crime of apartheid.
[192] The report suggested the
International Criminal Court include the crime of apartheid as part of its investigations. Even before its release, Israeli officials condemned the report as "false and biased" and antisemitic,
[193][194] accusations that Amnesty secretary general
Agnes Callamard dismissed as "baseless attacks, barefaced lies, fabrications on the messenger".
[195][196] The
Anti-Defamation League criticized the report, saying, "Amnesty International's allegations that Israel's crimes go back to the sin of its creation in 1948, serve to present the Jewish and democratic state as singularly illegitimate at its foundational roots."
[197] The U.S. State Department also rejected the report's conclusions, calling them "absurd", and added: "it is important, as the world's only Jewish state, that the Jewish people must not be denied their right to self-determination, and we must ensure there isn't a double standard being applied."
[198][199] German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Christopher Burger said, "We reject expressions like apartheid or a one-sided focusing of criticism on Israel. That is not helpful to solving the conflict in the Middle East".
[200] A spokesperson for the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office said, "we do not agree with the use of this terminology".
[201][202] The Dutch foreign minister responded by saying his government "does not agree with Amnesty's conclusion that there is apartheid in Israel or the territories occupied by Israel."
[203] J Street, a nonprofit
liberal organization, did not endorse the use of the term
apartheid, while discouraging labeling those who use the term "antisemitic".
[204][205] Thirteen Israeli human rights organizations issued a statement
[206] defending Amnesty and the report.
[207] Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director of Human Rights Watch, which produced a similar report in 2021, said, "There is certainly a consensus in the international human rights movement that Israel is committing apartheid."
[208] The
Arab League and the
OIC welcomed the report,
[209] while the Palestinian Authority said in a statement, "The State of Palestine welcomes the report by Amnesty International on Israel's apartheid regime and racist policies and practices against the Palestinian people".
[210]
On 28 September 2022, Al-Haq hosted representatives of Amnesty International, the
International Federation for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch in
Ramallah. Referring to
Israel's outlawing of Palestinian NGOs, Amnesty International's France director of campaigns Nathalie Godard said: "The repression of Palestinian civic space is part of the system of apartheid. Not only are Palestinians under Israeli military occupation, conducted with manifold violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law, but then also those organizations and human rights defenders who seek to assist people in need are shut down."
[211][212]
In its March 2023 annual report, Amnesty condemned Western countries' "double standards" with respect to Israel and other countries. The report said, "Rather than demand an end to that system of oppression, many Western governments chose instead to attack those denouncing Israel's apartheid system."
[213][214][215][216][217]
2022 jurists statement
In March 2022, the
International Commission of Jurists said it "strongly condemns Israel's laws, policies and practices of
racial segregation, persecution and apartheid against the indigenous Palestinian population in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), comprising the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and against Palestinian refugees".
[218]
2022 ICC submission by Dawn
The US-based NGO
Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) filed a complaint with the ICC against senior Israeli military lawyer Eyal Toledano for
war crimes and crimes against humanity, including apartheid. The submission follows a months-long investigation by the NGO into incidents in the West Bank between 2016 and 2020 and falls within the scope of the current
International Criminal Court investigation in Palestine. DAWN Executive Director
Sarah Leah Whitson said, "The international legal community, democracies across the world, and in particular the signatories of the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute have an obligation to reject Israeli apartheid by holding Toledano accountable for his culpability in the crime of apartheid". The Israeli military said it "thoroughly rejects" the claims, which it called "baseless".
[219][220][221][222]
Overview of reports
Human rights lawyer and B'tselem director Smadar Ben-Natan analyzed the different reports in terms of temporal and spatial framing, whether they look at the situation from 1948 or from 1967, and whether they include Israel. ESCWA and the Palestinian NGOs take a very broad approach, "arguing that apartheid exists in the entire territory under Israeli control since 1948, being the constitutive logic of the State of Israel (raison d'état)", while Yesh Din focuses only on the occupied territories post-1967. B'tselem includes Israel but limits its scope to post-1967 while the HRW report differs from it in finding that while "the elements of systematic and widespread repression with the intention of maintaining the superiority of one group exist both within Israel and in the OPT, only in the OPT (including East Jerusalem) does the severity of inhumane acts make them criminal." The Amnesty report is "the only report explicitly arguing that crimes of apartheid have been perpetrated inside Israel since 1948, and accordingly considers many Israeli policies as falling under the category of inhumane acts". The UN Special Rapporteur report follows the mandate given and examines only the occupied territory, concluding "that Israel's occupation has turned into a system of apartheid, and that the crime of apartheid is being committed."
[223]
According to author Ran Greenstein, "Two features are shared by all the reports: they agree that apartheid is a relevant, indeed essential, concept for the analysis of Israeli rule, and they focus on legal analysis and political arrangements, paying scant attention to social and historical aspects of the evolution of Israeli, Palestinian, and South African societies."
[224]
Additional views
Scholarly views
In their 2005 book-length study
Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians,
Heribert Adam of
Simon Fraser University and
Kogila Moodley of the
University of British Columbia wrote that controversy over use of the term arises because Israel as a state is unique in the region. They write that Israel is perceived as a Western democracy and is thus likely to be judged by the standards of such a state. Israel also claims to be a home for the worldwide
Jewish diaspora.
[225] Adam and Moodley note that Jewish historical suffering has imbued
Zionism with a "subjective sense of moral validity" that the ruling white South Africans never had.
[226] They also suggest that academic comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa that see both dominant groups as
settler societies leave unanswered the question of "when and how settlers become indigenous", as well as failing to take into account that Israeli's Jewish immigrants view themselves as returning home.
[227] Adam and Moodley write, "because people give meaning to their lives and interpret their worlds through these diverse ideological prisms, the perceptions are real and have to be taken seriously."
[228]
Manfred Gerstenfeld quoted Gideon Shimoni, professor emeritus of Hebrew University, as saying in a 2007 interview that the analogy is defamatory and reflects a double standard when applied to Israel and not to neighboring Arab countries, whose policies towards their Palestinian minorities have been described as discriminatory.
[229] Shimoni said that while apartheid was characterized by racially based legal inequality and exploitation of Black Africans by the dominant Whites within a common society, the Israel–Palestinian conflict reflects "separate nationalisms", as Israel refuses to exploit Palestinians, on the contrary seeking separation and "divorce" from Palestinians for legitimate self-defense reasons.
[229][
self-published source?]
An August 2021 survey found that 65% of academic experts on the Middle East described Israel as a "one-state reality akin to apartheid". Seven months earlier, that percentage was 59%.
[230] The increase in only seven months was potentially because of two notable events that occurred between the two surveys: the crisis in Israel following
planned evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem pointing up the unequal treatment of Jews and Palestinians under Israeli control and the subsequent
2021 Israel-Palestine crisis, and the issue of two widely read reports by the Israeli-based
B'Tselem and the US-based
Human Rights Watch arguing respectively that there is an apartheid reality in Israel and the Palestinian territories and that Israel's behavior fits the legal definition of apartheid.
[231]
On 14 April 2023,
Foreign Policy released a feature-length piece,
Israel's One-State Reality, co-authored by
Michael Barnett,
Nathan Brown,
Marc Lynch, and
Shibley Telhami. The authors wrote that the "illusion of a two-state solution" had been shattered by the return of
Benjamin Netanyahu at the head of a far-right Israeli coalition and called on the U.S. government to "stop shielding Israel in international organizations" when confronted by accusations of violations of international law. It concluded that "the one-state reality demands more. Looked at through that prism, Israel resembles an apartheid state."
[232]
