Palestinian engagement with international legal tribunals can help build global consciousness, but ultimately the law cannot serve as a substitute for the work of social movements in dismantling Israeli colonial-apartheid.

The very political Human Rights Watch report finding that Israel commits the crime of “apartheid” is a response to recent events in Israel: passage of the racist Nation State law in 2018 and rightwing leaders dismissal of the idea of a Palestinian state. The 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.

NYT Jerusalem correspondent Patrick Kingsley gives last word to Palestinian in Jerusalem who 8 times has been denied permission to expand his home to prove apartheid charge to readers. His coverage of the Human Rights Watch report affirms its findings and should be welcome by readers seeking changes in establishment opinion.

The Human Rights Watch report accusing Israel of apartheid has gotten far more attention than similar reports in recent years. And it’s gotten an incensed vitriolic response from the right-wing Israel lobby. While the liberal Zionist lobby has tried to argue that the report is about the occupation. HRW’s finding was far more wide-reaching than just the occupation.

ApartheidIsrael has been exposed for all to see. Credible human rights organizations have investigated and reported on the crimes against humanity that Israel has committed to devastate Palestine and Palestinians for decades. The United States’ role in legitimizing, funding, and perpetuating these crimes must be cut. To the United States, to Americans, to the world: call it what it is – ApartheidIsrael.

Normally, the New York Times trusts Human Rights Watch and relies on the organization often. But the Times’s respectful view disappeared suddenly yesterday — after Human Rights Watch released a landmark report finding that “Israeli officials have committed the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.” The paper’s slanted report quotes two people in support of the finding, one of them Palestinian, and five people attacking the charge. Imagine writing a report on apartheid South Africa and quoting only one black South African.

Human Rights Watch, one of the global leaders in documenting and combating human rights abuses around the world, released a report on Tuesday accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid. Echoing the findings of leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which released its own report accusing Israel of apartheid earlier this year, the report says Israel “methodically privileges” Israeli Jews over Palestinians through discriminatory policies.

A leading American human rights group will declare this week that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, according to the Algemeiner website. The Human Rights Watch report titled, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” is said to accuse Israel of practicing apartheid appears to be part of a trend in which mainstream organizations come out for an end to Israeli impunity. It follows Carnegie Endowment call on governments to pressure Israel to give Palestinians equal rights.

COVID-19 did not invent systematic injustice, but it has exposed and sharpened injustices already there. Israel’s refusal to vaccinate Palestinians is but the latest chapter of its decades-long practice of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and, of course, apartheid against the Palestinian people. The U.S. is itself a settler-colony with centuries of systematic racism to its name, and the tolls of COVID-19 remain systematically centered around Indigenous, Black and brown people. There is a name for this, and it’s medical apartheid. It’s time to take a stand to end all military funding to an apartheid regime overseas and to demand the end to apartheid right here.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s denunciation of disparities in medical access in the U.S. will sound hollow if he accepts the Dan David Prize from Israel, a country that is denying people under its illegal military occupation access to life-saving vaccines while bribing allies with the extra doses.