AMNESTY JOINS RIGHTS GROUP IN CONDEMNING ISRAELI ‘APARTHEID’

Tue 01 February 2022:

Amnesty International said on Tuesday that Israel is a “apartheid” state that treats Palestinians as “an inferior racial group,” echoing the assessment of other rights organizations that the Jewish state adamantly rejects.

B’Tselem, an Israeli-based human rights organization, attracted criticism a year ago when it claimed that Israeli policies were geared to enforce “Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” and met the definition of “apartheid”.

Human Rights Watch, based in New York, was the first major international rights organization to openly level the allegation in April.

The research by the London-based Amnesty International builds on past calls, claiming that Israeli-enforced apartheid exists in occupied Palestinian territory as well as within Israel, where Arab people account for more than 20% of the population.

Amnesty International’s new investigation shows that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.

Amnesty joins rights group in condemning Israeli ‘apartheid’#Israeli #Palestine #MiddleEast pic.twitter.com/euteN1sI68

— INDEPENDENT PRESS (@IpIndependent) February 1, 2022

Laws, policies and practices which are intended to maintain a cruel system of control over Palestinians, have left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in a constant state of fear and insecurity.

The term “apartheid” was originally used to refer to a political system in South Africa which explicitly enforced racial segregation, and the domination and oppression of one racial group by another. It has since been adopted by the international community to condemn and criminalize such systems and practices wherever they occur in the world.

“Whether they live in Gaza, east Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights,” Amnesty’s secretary general Agnes Callamard said in a statement.

“Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid.”

Amnesty stressed it was not comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to conditions in apartheid-era South Africa but said Israeli conduct and policies met the criteria for the crime of apartheid as defined under international law.

Amnesty is calling for Israel to end the international wrong, and crime, of apartheid, by dismantling measures of fragmentation, segregation, discrimination, and deprivation, currently in place against the Palestinian population.

Callamard told AFP that Israel’s Arab citizens “will not experience the apartheid in the same way” as a Palestinian in Gaza but that “the regime of apartheid” exists in both places.

In a statement issued Monday, Israel’s foreign ministry called Amnesty International to “withdraw” the report.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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