Israel has crossed ‘apartheid’ threshold- A report by Human Rights Watch
In a report by Human Rights Watch, Israel’s approach towards the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has crossed the threshold into apartheid and suggests farreaching punitive measures, including prosecutions for crimes against humanity.
Human Rights Watch is an international group that monitors countries’ abidance to international human rights law.
This is the first time the group has used the word ‘apartheid’ to describe Israeli policy. The report mentions that Israel comprehensively discriminates against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as well as against its Arab citizens, some of whom identify as Palestinian. But the report says the apartheid designation pertains only to Israel’s policy in the West Bank and Gaza.
“In the occupied territory, the severity of the repression, including the imposition of draconian military rule on Palestinians while affording Jewish Israelis living in a segregated manner in the same territory their full rights under Israel’s rights-respecting civil law, amounts to the systematic oppression required for apartheid.”, Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967. In the West Bank, Israeli habitants are Israeli citizens with the right to vote and freedom of movement whereas West Bank Palestinians live under varying degrees of Israeli military control and Palestinian local governance, without citizenship or the right to vote in Israel.
Israel withdrew its inhabitants and troops from Gaza in 2005, and Israelis specifically reject the idea that Israel still controls the coastal strip. Israel does control most of Gaza’s border and airspace and the Human Rights Watch report considers the West Bank and Gaza as a single unit inspite of their different truths.
Within Israel’s known borders, Arab Israelis are full Israeli citizens having the right to vote, equality under the law and representation in Israel’s parliament.
Although Gilad Erdan, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. and the United States, negates the report of Human Rights Watch and calls it a campaign against Israel.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella body for U.S. Jewish groups, called the report as ‘disgraceful’ and said it was an attempt to ‘demonize, delegitimize and apply double standards to the State of Israel.’
Other International bodies also slammed and condemned the report.
Human Rights Watch is not the first group to apply the apartheid label to Israel. In January, the Israeli human rights group Btselem deduced that Israel should be observed as an apartheid state.
The main reason of Israeli and mainstream Jewish objections to using the term apartheid is that in its original South African definition, apartheid is described as a system that explicitly used race to discriminate against, oppress and disenfranchise minorities.
Human Rights Watch asserted in its report that the term apartheid has been used since the collapse of South African apartheid to represent discriminatory societies that are not absolutely based on racist laws, as it was in South Africa.
The recommendations of the report are overarching, including executions of Israeli officials for crimes against humanity and restraint on trade with Israel. It also requests the international community to commission inquiry established through United Nations to investigate systematic discrimination and repression based on group identity in Israel and Palestine occupied territories.
NGO Monitor, an Israeli watchdog of human rights groups, says such recommendations suggest a broader and more alarming plan and says that the publication of this report is attack on the foundations of Israel.
