For many years anyone going into the occupied territories came out saying they’d seen apartheid– separate roads for Jews and Palestinians, crippling checkpoints for Palestinians, township areas to which Palestinians were confined and moved. “Apartheid on steroids,” the former chancellor of Brown University said in 2011. “Worse” than apartheid South Africa, a South African told me in 2006.
Now Human Rights Watch has joined the chorus with a bombshell 213-page deeply-documented report alleging the crimes of “apartheid and persecution” that has excited the rage of the rightwing Israel lobby and of course no substantive rebuttal.
But it’s been known on the left so long, why now? The answer is essentially political. For years, Human Rights Watch bent over backwards to give Israel the benefit of the doubt: that it intended to get out of the persecution business. But stark political events in the last few years, the disavowal of a Palestinian state by Israeli leaders, and the passage of the racist Nation State law in 2018, cast the die. HRW began compiling this report in the months after that law was passed, granting Jews the exclusive right of self-determination in the “land of Israel” and derogating Palestinian land and language rights.
The report’s author Omar Shakir told Arno Rosenfeld of the Forward that the key element of the finding was not showing the many inhumane acts against Palestinians, or the systematic oppression of Palestinians — but the Israeli government’s “intent to dominate” Palestinians.
While many of the abuses go back many years, there was long a debate about whether Israeli leaders had the intent to dominate Palestinians… In the 1990s and in the 2000s there was hope and a sense among many that maybe there would be a political resolution to this situation that would lead to and end to the systematic repression that takes place… Israeli government officials would publicly say… this is temporary. That’s how they justified settlements in the [Israeli] Supreme Court.
What’s changed in the last four or five years…. Israeli officials now openly proclaim their intent to rule over the West Bank in perpetuity and treat Palestinians there as subjects.
Secondly we have seen the massive expansion of settlements and the connection of settlements with Israel proper.
Third, we saw the passage of the Nation State Law, which… codified as a constitutional value the idea that one group of people on the ground had rights denied to the other.
When we put all those things together, it became impossible to say that there was not a clear intent to dominate.
HRW’s repeated reference to Israeli politicians’ statements reveals the larger politics of the report: rage on the part of the establishment toward Israel over the two-state solution. World leaders arrived in the ’90s through a tortuous process at a solution for the Israel-Palestine problem, two states, and insisted even as Israel moved hundreds of thousands of its citizens into occupied lands that the two-state solution was the consensus position of the global community. We on the left laughed at the folly of the notion. Still the world stuck to the program. Now Israel has made an open mockery of the two-state solution in its politics. The report often cites Israeli political decisions– including the fact that Israel’s two leading parties in the 2020 election– Likud and Blue/White– said that they would annex the West Bank.
So Israeli actions have consequences. Policymakers have had enough of Israeli bullshit– even if the Democratic Party is still singing the two-state hymn — and this report is one result.
HRW appears to have coordinated its report with other recent developments to try to gain maximum political impact and change the paradigm from A Palestinian State Alongside a Jewish State to Equal Rights for Everyone Under Israel’s Governance.
Several organizations have in recent weeks set forth the same message, we are tired of Israeli intransigence.
–In January, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said that Israel is an apartheid regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea, and it too cited the naked record of Israel’s rightwing governments in recent years.
–In February the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into war crimes by Israel including in its settlement project. Now the HRW report says that the ICC case must be pursued.
–Two weeks ago the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace issued a report urging the United States and other countries to abandon the two-state peace process, which has been an utter failure, in favor of using its levers of power to call for equal rights for Palestinians. One co-author of the report, Zaha Hassan, repeatedly described Palestinian conditions as “apartheid” in the Israel lobby conference last weekend. While another author Marwan Muasher called at Foreign Affairs for an international gut check on the death of the two state solution.
“It’s time for the international community to face a stark truth that, polls show, a majority of Palestinians have already come to understand: a two-state solution is no longer feasible.”
Finally there were the two blockbuster articles by Nathan Thrall, a contributor to the HRW report, in The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, arguing that subjugation of Palestinians is at the heart of Zionism, and liberal Zionists are denying the apartheid reality by claiming that the occupation is not Israel. Talk about softening up the resistance!
The HRW report is not a leftwing argument. While it buoys the leftwing critique of the Jewish state as a illegitimate concept, it is not rooted in that analysis. This is not a report about Zionism or settler colonialism or ethnic cleansing or the Nakba or the foundation of the state. None of those terms appear in the report, except Zionism incidentally. HRW sidestepped all such historical analysis in favor of a description of inhumane conditions on the ground now.
The soul of the report is its several case studies of Palestinians whose lives have been ripped apart by racist Israeli policies that have no security rationale, only the aim of limiting the number of Palestinians in the West Bank. I suggest you search the report for “Hadil” to find the story of a 37-year-old Palestinian woman who works on social media and in 2011 fell in love with a man from Nablus at a conference in Amman only to have Israeli authorities routinely prevent the two from getting together. They broke up after four years. In 2019, Hadil became engaged to another West Bank man and is now living illegally in the West Bank but is terrified of discovery. She and her fiance are exploring emigration.
I wish that the American Jewish Committee and Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations — which have slammed the report as antisemitic — would respond to Hadil’s story of thwarted love for even one minute. But all they’ve got is invective. This is the horror of Zionism.
The most interesting politics of the report involve liberal Zionism. Americans for Peace Now is holding a respectful webinar on the report Tuesday. It is clearly peeved by the report– “ruffling feathers in Israel and beyond” — but can justly boast that its Israeli partner helped document the abuses therein.
The report leaves J Street in a more difficult position. It just concluded a conference that said the problem over there is “deepening occupation and creeping annexation.” Now it is insisting that the HRW report is also about “occupation.”
The report goes far beyond occupation to the will of the Israeli government to dominate Palestinians inside Israel proper and the occupied territories — including by allowing any Jew to emigrate to Israel “while a Palestinian expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country, cannot.”
J Street is committed to a two-state solution. So is the Democratic Party, even progressives like Raphael Warnock and Elizabeth Warren.
The HRW report regretfully informs liberal westerners that there will not be a Palestinian state, and the state that does exist in the land is not a “Jewish democracy.” That news is the report’s largest political lesson.
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Brings to mind:
Manifesto – all (onestatecampaign.org)
One Democratic State Campaign
Manifesto
Excerpt:
Preamble
“In recent years, the idea of a one democratic state in all of historic Palestine as the best solution to the conflict has re-emerged. It started gaining increased support in the public domain. It is not a new idea. The Palestinian liberation movement, before the catastrophe of 1948 (the Nakba) and after it, had adopted this vision, including the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The PLO abandoned this idea in the framework of the diplomatic negotiations at the late eighties that led to the Oslo agreement of 1993. The Palestinian leadership hoped that this agreement would enable the building of an independent Palestinian state on the territories that Israel occupied in 1967. But on the ground Israel has strengthened its colonial control, fragmenting the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza into isolated cantons, separated from one another by settlements, checkpoints, military bases and fences.
“The two-state solution, which is basically an unfair solution, is clearly dead. Israel buried it deep under its colonial settlement policies in the territories that were supposed to become the independent Palestinian state. Israel has imposed a single repressive regime that extends over all the Palestinians who live in historic Palestine, including those with Israeli citizenship.
“In view of these dangerous developments, and, more important, based on the values of justice, freedom and democracy, we contend that the only way to achieve justice and permanent peace is dismantling the colonial apartheid regime in historic Palestine and the establishment of a new political system based on full civil equality, and on full implementation of the Palestinian refugees’ Right of Return, and the building of the required mechanisms to correct the historical grievances of the Palestinian people as a result of the Zionist colonialist project.” (cont’d)
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“On this background, many activists and groups, Palestinians and Israelis, have recently initiated the revival of the one-state idea, proposing differing models of such a state, such as a bi-national state, a liberal democratic state and a socialist state. They are all united, however, in their commitment to the establishment of a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine, as an alternative to the colonial apartheid regime that Israel has imposed over the country from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. A similar regime was toppled by the joint struggle of black and white South Africans under the leadership of the ANC in 1994.
“The goal of this political program, as formulated by the One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC), is to widen the support for this solution among the local populations, Palestinian and Israeli alike, as well as among the international public. We call on all those in the world who struggle for freedom and justice to join and support our struggle against this apartheid regime and for the establishment of a democratic state free of occupation and colonialism, based on justice and equality, which guarantees a better future for the next generations and real peace in all of historic Palestine.”
One state is inevitable! It is the only logical and workable solution!!
The Democrats in Congress have to stop pretending that they are waiting for that 2 state solution, and that it is just around the corner. Are they fooling themselves, or hoping the world will believe that lie? Israel had EVERY OPPORTUNITY to end the bloody occupation, and show good faith they wanted a genuine solution, but they never fail to choose land grabs, illegal settlements, human rights violations, and like sadists like to inflict pain on the victims. How can human beings live with their fishing rights reduced, olive trees destroyed or removed, crops stolen by vicious illegal settlers,
and their orchards destroyed. If this was the other way around the Israel will be responding with far worse than stones and home made rockets. That 2 state solution is simply a fairy tale, or in this case it is turning into a nightmare.
Haste makes waste!!
I meant to write “one democratic state is the only logical and workable solution!”
“J Street is committed to a two-state solution. So is the Democratic Party, even progressives like Raphael Warnock and Elizabeth Warren.”.
These people are just the same as Jon S,. Talk the language of peace but act the part of an occupier.
Refer to the land you occupy as your “Historic Homeland “. Johhny come lately , you know full well that you are preventing the true owners of that land from living there.
For shame.