Amnesty International calls Israel an ‘apartheid’ state

Amnesty International (AI) joins Israeli organizations, such as B’Tselem, and international organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, that classify Israel as a State of apartheid for its discriminatory treatment of the Palestinian population under its control through a “system of oppression and domination.” These accusations, contained in a report presented this Tuesday in Jerusalem by the AI Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, unleashed a preventive offensive by the Israeli Foreign Ministry on Monday, which branded them “false” and based on “anti-Semitism”.

At 182 page report Israeli apartheid against the Palestinian population, Amnesty documents that “massive confiscations of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forced transfers, restrictions on movement, and denial of nationality and citizenship are elements of a system that, under international law, amounts to apartheid (…) with violations of rights that constitute a crime against humanity, according to the definition of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC)”. AI asks the ICC to include the crime of apartheid in its ongoing investigations and calls on States to exercise universal jurisdiction to try those responsible.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid asked in a video on Monday not to release the AI ​​report, an organization he called “radical.” His department claimed that the document “denies Israel’s right to exist as a nation state of the Jewish people with language that demonizes it and adds fuel to the fire of anti-Semitism.”

The unusual previous reaction of the head of Israeli diplomacy highlights the concern of his Government in the face of the growing chorus of voices in the international sphere that they define as apartheid discrimination suffered by Palestinians. The diplomatic offensive also occurs after the prosecution of the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, opened an investigation into war crimes in Palestine in March last year.

“Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem, Hebron (West Bank) or in Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group that is systematically deprived of their rights,” Amnesty’s Secretary General said in a statement. “The policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion in the territories that are under the control of Israel constitute apartheid”, concludes Callamard.

AI points out that its report is the result of more than four years of research by the organization’s 70 sections around the world, which have 10 million members. “We would have liked an exchange of information with the Israeli foreign minister, but we contacted him in October and he has not yet answered us,” the head of AI told France Presse on Monday. “Criticizing the policies of the State of Israel is not anti-Semitism, which is something that we denounce all over the world,” Callamard pointed out.

Amnesty International claims to have documented acts prohibited in the Convention against Apartheid and in the Rome Statute in all areas under Israel’s control, although it recognizes that they are committed more frequently and more violently in the territories occupied for more than half a century. “The Israeli authorities enact multiple measures to deliberately deny the Palestinian population their fundamental rights and freedoms, such as draconian restrictions on movement (…) forced transfers, administrative detentions (indefinitely and without charge), torture and unlawful killings,” he summarizes. a statement on the report, which highlights the deaths of more than two hundred Palestinians at the hands of Israeli army snipers in the 2018 and 2019 demonstrations on the Gaza border.

Follow all the international information in Facebook Y Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.