NGOs raise anti-Israel tone with accusation of apartheid against Palestinians

The report published last week by Amnesty International – which defined Israel’s public policy as part of an apartheid regime, a crime against humanity – appears to embody a growing consensus among human rights organizations on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.

Prior to Amnesty International, two other major bodies had used a similar vexing term. The first was Israel’s B’Tselem in January 2021. Then came the US-based Human Rights Watch, which came to the same conclusion three months later.

The triad’s repetition of the word “apartheid” marks a change in strategy, betting on a rhetorical escalation in favor of the Palestinians. The term refers to the system experienced in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s, with the violent segregation of blacks. In 2002, the International Criminal Court defined apartheid, categorizing it as a crime against humanity.

In short, the court ruled that apartheid exists when one racial group oppresses and dominates another with the intention of perpetuating a regime. This is the case with Israel, say these groups.

Israeli officials, as well as some of their main allies on the global board, reject the accusation and the comparison with South Africa. They claim that human rights organizations have allied to delegitimize Israel — among other reasons, out of anti-Semitism. There is, they say, no systematic effort to oppress or dominate the Palestinian population.

The debate is not new, nor is it unprecedented for someone to compare Israel with South Africa in the past. Discussion is almost a genre in itself, so much so that there is an extensive entry in the Wikipedia virtual encyclopedia dedicated to it. But some of the big organizations avoided that word until now.

“Israel’s discriminatory practices had been documented for decades, but there was some hesitation from an advocacy strategy perspective,” says Saïd Benarbia, regional director of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). On previous occasions, apartheid accusations have been received as evidence of anti-Semitism. “There was a debate among human rights organizations about whether it was even productive to use the term.”

The balance now seems to have tipped in the “yes” direction. Among the reasons cited by Amnesty International for the new classification is the fact that Palestinians and Israelis are subject to different legal systems in some situations. The organization also cites the systematic demolition of Palestinian homes, unequal access to citizenship, disparity in public services and obstacles to the movement of people, among other documented accusations.

“There is a pattern of discrimination against Palestinians and Israeli Arabs that favors one group over another,” says Benarbia. “It’s a system of oppression and domination.” He also cites a law passed in 2018 that defined Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, seen as discriminatory.

Eugene Kontorovich, a professor of law at George Mason University and a legal expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict, rejects all these accusations. “It’s more than an exaggeration, it’s an inversion of the truth,” he says. Kontorovich changes the equation and claims that, in fact, it is the Palestinians who commit apartheid in the West Bank territories, discriminating against all Jews.

The professor believes that the accusations made by human rights organizations are wrong. For example, if there are different legal systems in the West Bank, according to him, it is due to an understanding between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, which governs part of these territories.

The term apartheid is useless to describe this situation, says Kontorovich, because it refers to a very specific and distinct historical experience. Israel, for him, does not meet the criteria of oppression and systematic domination defined by the International Criminal Court.

Israel’s advocates also claim that organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch pay disproportionate attention to the country — while ignoring crimes committed elsewhere, such as China, which has violently repressed Uighur Muslims, for example.

“There is no growing consensus that Israel is an apartheid regime,” says Kontorovich, refuting the report’s thesis. So much so that countries such as the United States and Germany went public with their criticism of Amnesty International’s report. These human rights organizations are, according to the professor, extremely politicized — and they represent the minority, moreover.

The strategy of such groups, he says, is to force the United Nations and the ICC to include the crime of apartheid in the investigations they are carrying out in Israel.

With this argument, Benarbia, from the committee of jurists, agrees. “It’s important that, in this consensus, other organizations come to the same conclusion that Israel is an apartheid system,” he says. “Even in the press and in public opinion, we have witnessed a paradigm shift. People have been less hesitant to criticize Israel. We hope that more countries will adopt this position.”

This paradigm shift suggested by Benarbia has, in part, to do with what happened in the middle of last year. Palestinians have mobilized – especially on social media and in foreign media – against the expulsion of some families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem.

Amnesty International cites this episode as “emblematic” of Israel’s oppression. “Discrimination, spoliation, repression of dissent, killings and wounds — all are part of a system created to privilege Israeli Jews at the expense of Palestinians,” the text reads.