One “apartheid” so, again. Amnesty international joined, Tuesday 1er February, several human rights organizations which have sought, since 2020, to renew the reading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in international opinion. In a long legal analysis, the result of four years of investigation, she denounces a “apartheid system” in the domination of the Palestinians by Israel.
It follows the positions of two Israeli NGOs, Yesh Din then B’Tselem, and Human Rights Watch. Amnesty adopts a maximalist position: like B’Tselem, the organization ignores the distinction between the Israeli state born in 1948 and the “temporary” military occupation regime in force in the Palestinian territories since their conquest in 1967. She concludes that the same system has sedimented over time, between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
Each in their own way, these NGOs question the evolution of the founding principles of the “Jewish and democratic” state, its reluctance to draw its borders and the place it gives to the Arab minority (20% of the national population). They examine the common sources of the occupation in force behind the so-called “separation wall” and of the discriminations perpetrated in the Arab villages of the Galilee and the Negev. In this, these organizations seek an echo in Western opinions, particularly in the United States, where part of the left reads the Palestinian situation in the light of the history of the struggle for the civil rights of blacks.
Israel’s struggle against the term apartheid
Amnesty, like the others, is however careful not to dwell on such historical comparisons to camp on the level of international law. The term apartheid refers to the racial segregation regime established by the South African state between 1948 and 1991. More broadly, the Rome Statute, establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002, makes it a generic crime against humanity.
The NGO therefore calls on the ICC to take up these accusations, while the institution opened an investigation, in March 2021, into the crimes committed, since June 2014, in the occupied Palestinian territories. Israel regards this procedure as a major threat. On Monday, the State reacted before the publication of the Amnesty report, denouncing the conclusions “false, biased and anti-Semitic”.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, the centrist Yaïr Lapid, has indicated in recent months that he intends to fight against the eruption of the term apartheid in a United Nations body in 2022, under pressure from these NGOs. Calling Amnesty an organization “radical”he recalled that“Israel is not perfect, but it is a democracy committed to international law, open to criticism”. ‘I don’t like to say that if Israel weren’t a Jewish state, no one at Amnesty would dare to attack it, but I don’t see any other explanation’he added.
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