Amnesty International report concludes Israel guilty of apartheid against Palestinians

Israeli authorities are enforcing a system of apartheid — a crime against humanity under international law — against Palestinians living in Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, as well as against displaced Palestinian refugees living in other countries, Amnesty International concluded in a major new report released on Tuesday.

Based on four years of research, the 280-page investigation calls on the International Criminal Court to consider the crime of apartheid against Palestinians in its ongoing investigation into potential war crimes committed by Israel and Palestinian militants, and further calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction over anyone suspected of committing the crime of apartheid under international law. 

In light of the documented “systematic unlawful killings” of Palestinians, the report also calls on the United Nations Security Council to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel and to impose targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes, against Israeli officials most implicated in the crime of apartheid.

The report acknowledges that Palestinians “have been calling for an understanding of Israel’s rule as apartheid for over two decades and have been at the forefront of advocacy in that regard at the UN.”

Amnesty found that while Palestinians are subject to different forms of oppression and domination by Israel depending on where they live, it concludes it is all part of one system of apartheid. “Palestinian citizens in Israel currently enjoy greater rights and freedoms than their counterparts in the [Occupied Palestinian Territory], while the experience of Palestinians in Gaza is very different to that of those living in the West Bank. Nonetheless, Amnesty International’s research shows that all Palestinians are subject to the same overarching system,” the report says. 

Amnesty conducted its analysis by examining several key components of Israel’s system of domination, including: “territorial fragmentation; segregation and control through the denial of equal nationality and status, restrictions on movement, discriminatory family reunification laws, the use of military rule and restrictions on the right to political participation and popular resistance; dispossession of land and property; and the suppression of Palestinians’ human development and denial of their economic and social rights.”

Amnesty says that Israel’s policies and practices are deliberately intended to repress the Palestinian population, which is viewed as a demographic threat to a state designed since 1948 to be majority ethnically Jewish.  

As evidence of demographically oriented policies, Amnesty points to successive Israeli governments’ efforts to maximize the possession of land and control of resources to the benefit of Jewish Israelis, pointing as a recent example to the policy to “Judaize” East Jerusalem, where a series of evictions that continued this month prompted mass protests across historic Palestine and a general strike on May 18 that saw tens of thousands of Palestinians take part.

Other apartheid policies described in the report include the blatantly discriminatory allocation of resources, draconian restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in the occupied territories; the subjection of Palestinians to forcible transfer; chronic discriminatory underinvestment in Palestinian communities in Israel; the denial of refugees’ right to return and the widespread practice of administrative detention and unlawful killing in both the occupied territories and in lands that fall within Israel. 

Israel on Monday called on Amnesty International not to publish the report, saying its findings are “false, biased and antisemitic.” In a statement, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called Amnesty “just another radical organization which echoes propaganda, without seriously checking the facts.” The Foreign Ministry added that the report’s “extremist language and distortion of historical context were designed to demonize Israel and pour fuel onto the fire of antisemitism.”

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Tuesday that, “The State of Palestine welcomes the report by Amnesty International on Israel’s apartheid regime and racist policies and practices against the Palestinian people."

Asked about the apartheid finding in a press briefing on Monday, United States State Department spokesperson Ned Price said he “would reserve official comments” until they had an opportunity to see the report but added, “that is not language that we have used nor would we ever use.”

Human Rights Watch issued its own lengthy report last year, which found that the Israeli government pursued polices intended to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territories, but concluded that the crime of apartheid only applied to the occupied territories. Meanwhile, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found in a report last year that Israel enacts an apartheid regime in all the the territory it controls.