In a recent report, Amnesty International claims that Israel is committing “apartheid against Palestinians” and that it must be held accountable for treating them as “an inferior racial category.”
The 25-page report, released on Tuesday by the foremost human rights organisation, outlines how Israeli authorities implement a system of oppression and dominance on Palestinians.
Its dismal report details a slew of Israeli wrongdoings, including widespread expropriation of Palestinian land and property, unlawful executions, forcible transfer, severe movement restrictions, administrative detention, and the denial of Palestinian nationality and citizenship.
These are described as elements of a system that, according to international law, amounts to apartheid.
“This system is upheld by crimes that Amnesty International has determined constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity,” the organisation stated in a statement.
Israel has maintained a policy of developing and maintaining a “Jewish demographic majority” since its founding in 1948, according to the report. Israel also has complete control over land and resources, even those in illegal settlements, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis.
Following the 1967 war, when Israeli forces captured all of ancient Palestine, Israel “extended this approach” to the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which has been under siege since 2007.
According to the London-based organisation, all Israeli-controlled lands are still handled with the “goal of enriching Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians, while Palestinian refugees remain excluded.”
“The actual depth of Israel’s apartheid policy is revealed in our report. Palestinians are treated as a second-class racial category and routinely denied their rights, whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, according to Amnesty International’s secretary-general, Agnes Callamard.
Callamard, speaking at a press conference in occupied East Jerusalem, urged the international community to take “decisive action against the crime against humanity that is being perpetrated in order to sustain the apartheid regime.”
“It’s the system’s brutality – the intricately growing administration of power, dispossession, and inequality [and] the tremendous comprehensive bureaucratisation upon which that system is based,” she explained. “Everything’s the utter banality, and at times stupidity, of it that has taken my breath away.”