Activism

2021, the year of Israeli apartheid

More than 1000 academics, artists and intellectuals have signed a "Declaration on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid in Historic Palestine," in a sign of the growing acceptance of the term in the west.

When in a few years historians look at the year 2021 in Israel, it’s a safe bet that the salient theme will not be COVID-19 or the exit of Netanyahu but apartheid. The year began on January 12 with the publication of B’Tselem’s report A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid. Three months later, on April 27, Human Rights Watch drove the point home by publishing its report A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. Just two months later, on July 6, more than 600 academics, artists and intellectuals from more than 45 countries issued a Declaration calling for the dismantling of the apartheid regime in historic Palestine. Since then, the number of signatories has grown steadily and has now reached 1,000, including Nobel Prize winners, prominent academics and artists.

Apartheid is a crime. It has been internationally recognised as such since November 30, 1973, when the UN General Assembly adopted the “International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid“.  In the Rome Statute of 2002 which established the international criminal court, apartheid is specified as a crime against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over other racial group or groups and committed with the intension of maintaining that regime.”

The fit with Israel’s discriminatory laws and policies against Palestinians is manifest, and yet remained for decades virtually impossible to acknowledge publicly. When President Jimmy Carter in 2006 dared to publish a book about Israel with ‘apartheid’ in its title there was uproar. When more than a decade later a UN study came to the same conclusion (“Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid“, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), 2017) the reaction was convulsive. Outrage by Israel-supporting bodies and countries at the use of the ‘A’ word led to a directive from the UN Secretary General that the report be withdrawn; and ESCWA Executive Director Rima Khalaf resigned rather than implement this instruction.

Rima Khalaf, former head of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. (Photo: ESCWA)

In 2021, the year of Israeli apartheid, that log jam has broken. This year, the world’s civil societies have had enough. Across countries and continents, across age groups and ethnicities, the marches, the manifestos, the opeds, the motions passed overwhelmingly have swelled into a torrent. And Israel’s practice of apartheid now adds to its violations of international law in the compelling pressure for international action.

The Declaration on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid in Historic Palestine, now with an impressive weight of one thousand prominent endorsers, will add to that pressure. Its signatories include the former ESCWA Executive Director Rima Khalaf and the ESCWA report’s authors Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, as well as Nobel Peace Prize laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, the Nobel Chemistry Laureate George Smith, academics with legal expertise Monique Chemillier-Gendreau and John Dugard, scholars Bertrand Badie, Étienne Balibar, Hagit Borer, Ivar Ekeland, Suad Joseph, Edgar Morin, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Jacques Rancière, Roshdi Rashed and Gayatri Spivak, health researcher Sir Iain Chalmers, composer Brian Eno, musician Roger Waters, author Ahdaf Soueif, economist and former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN Sir Richard Jolly, former Vice President of the European Parliament Luisa Morgantini, South African politician and veteran anti-apartheid leader Ronnie Kasrils and Canadian peace activist and former national leader of the Green Party of Canada Joan Russow.

The endorsers declare their categorical rejection of the apartheid regime set up on the territory of historic Palestine and imposed on the Palestinian people as a whole, including refugees and exiles wherever they might be in the world.

They call for the immediate dismantling of this apartheid regime and the establishment of a democratic constitutional arrangement that gives all its inhabitants equal rights and duties, regardless of their racial, ethnic and religious identities, or gender preferences, and which respects and enforces international law and human conventions, and in particular gives priority to the long deferred right of return of Palestinian refugees expelled from their towns and villages during the creation of the State of Israel, and subsequently.

They urge their governments

  • to cease immediately their complicity with Israel’s apartheid regime;
  • to join in calling for the dismantling of apartheid structures and their replacement by an egalitarian democratic governance that treats everyone subject to its authority in accordance with their rights and with full respect for their humanity; and
  • to support this necessary transition in a manner sensitive to the right of self-determination enjoyed by both peoples presently inhabiting historic Palestine.

A French version of this op-ed appeared in Libération on July 27, 2021

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Shouldn’t the Olympics suspend apartheid Israel as apartheid South Africa was suspended from 1964-1988?

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The only real solution: One democratic state!!
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)

Time to dust off the comments that Israeli leaders made a long time ago….

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-01/hrw-s-israel-apartheid-label-gives-palestinians-a-path-to-normalcy

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter alluded in the title of his 2006 book to an Israeli choice between “peace” and “apartheid.” Several Israeli Prime Ministers, from David Ben-Gurion to Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, warned that if Israel didn’t end its occupation of Palestinian territories, it risked being transformed into an apartheid state….

Barak in particular – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/03/barak-apartheid-palestine-peace

Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, last night delivered an unusually blunt ­warning to his country that a failure to make peace with the Palestinians would leave either a state with no Jewish ­majority or an “apartheid” regime.

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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.”