Human Rights Watch has accused Israeli officials of committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution, claiming the Israeli government enforces an overarching policy to “maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians”.
In a report released on Tuesday, the New York-based advocacy group became the first major international rights body to level such allegations. It said that after decades of warnings that an entrenched hold over Palestinian life could lead to apartheid, it had found that the “threshold” had been crossed.
“This is the starkest finding Human Rights Watch has reached on Israeli conduct in the 30 years we’ve been documenting abuses on the ground there,” said Omar Shakir, the group’s director in Palestine and Zionist entity. Shakir said his organization had never before directly accused Israeli officials of crimes against humanity.
The report drew on years of human rights documentation, analysis of Israeli laws, a review of government planning documents, and statements by officials.
Human Rights Watch compared policies and practices towards nearly 7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories with those concerning roughly the same number of Jewish Israelis living in the same areas.
It concluded there was a “present-day reality of a single authority, the Israeli government … methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory.”
First used in relation to South Africa’s racist segregation against non-white citizens, apartheid – which is Afrikaans for “apartness” – is a crime against humanity under international law.
Under the 1998 Rome statute that established the international criminal court (ICC), apartheid is defined as an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other” with the intent of “maintaining that regime”. Persecution, which is also a crime against humanity, is defined as “the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights” of a group of people.
Human Rights Watch said that inside the Zionist entity– where about a fifth of the 9 million citizens are Palestinians – and in the occupied territories, authorities had sought to maximize the land available for Jewish communities and concentrate most Palestinians in dense population centers.
“The authorities have adopted policies to mitigate what they have openly described as a demographic ‘threat’ from Palestinians,” it said, referencing concerns expressed by Israeli politicians that a majority Palestinian population would endanger the Jewish state.
“In Jerusalem, for example, the government’s plan for the municipality … sets the goal of ‘maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the city’ and even specifies the demographic ratios it hopes to maintain.”
It said Israeli authorities “systematically discriminate against Palestinians”. This was most extreme in the occupied territories, it said, including the West Bank, which Israel captured in the six-day war in 1967. Several hundred thousand Israeli settlers now live there as citizens while about 2.7 million Palestinians are not and live under military rule.
Source: Agencies
