Critique as movement building: The apartheid reports on Palestine

One must begin with what most Palestinians consider to be incontrovertible truths. Zionism is a settler-colonial movement intent on, at best, our erasure, and at worst, elimination. It is a racist ideology rooted in the belief of Jewish supremacy in Palestine. All of Palestine is Palestinian; it is a single, indivisible territorial unit, despite the Israeli settler-colony that has been normalized on the land. The Global North, led by the United States and European member states, is biased toward Israel and quick to demonize Palestinians reiterating these facts. It follows that Western media has for the most part ridiculed, underrepresented, and/or ignored Palestinian voices in favor of Israeli or Western analysts who are given greater credence than the Palestinian lived experience to shape narratives and describe realities on the ground. And, lastly, international law, and the international legal system, is shaped by the powerful, applied hypocritically, and has largely failed us. Yet, for the most part, Palestinians continue to hold on to it as a tool for our future liberation. 

These are givens. It is within this context that, in 2021, Israeli and international organizations began to publish reports charging Israel with the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people. After decades of tireless work by Palestinians to put forward the charge that Israel is practicing apartheid, the mainstream is finally catching up. In January 2021, B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, released a report unambiguously titled A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid. Three months later, Human Rights Watch, the world’s leading international human rights organization, echoed this finding when it issued an exhaustive report, including extensive legal analysis, which concluded damningly that Israeli authorities are committing crimes against humanity, in the form of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people. A year later, in January 2022, Amnesty International, an organization with more than ten million members worldwide, issued a report titled Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime against Humanity.

Given the latent racism shaping our world order — currently on full display with the reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine compared to the coverage of past and ongoing Western military interventions in the Global South— these reports received more attention than two decades of Palestinian advocacy around this issue. This is, rightly, a disappointment and a painful reminder of the hierarchy of narratives globally — which narratives are deemed worthy of attention and which are dismissed — and it is a hypocrisy that many Palestinians latched onto. Yet it is not a surprise; if Palestinians were not dehumanized on the world stage, we would not still be fighting for survival. This erasure is, after all, precisely the reality we are working to change. 

It is not a surprise, either, that these organizations put forward reports that are imperfect, and that fall short, to varying degrees, of what Palestinians have long been advocating. The B’Tselem report, for instance, makes no mention of Palestinian refugees, while the Human Rights Watch report suggests that Israeli apartheid manifested after a “threshold” was crossed during the years of the Trump administration, rather than in 1948, at the very instant of Israel’s creation. The Amnesty report, in comparison, roots its analysis in 1948 and calls for the return of the Palestinian refugees as a critical element of decomposing Israel’s regime. It limits itself, however, as a human rights organization, from taking a position on Palestinian self-determination and sovereignty, which it views as political decisions. 

Various Palestinian scholars and analysts have critiqued these reports and explained these insights on Palestinian platforms. The main point of contention is that, in employing a human rights and international law framework, the reports underplay the settler-colonial nature of Israel’s apartheid regime and its intention at racial domination. In this liberal framing of apartheid, it follows, the resolution to the Palestinian struggle would be democratization and the offering of equality to all citizens within said regime, rather than the full dismantlement, or decolonization, of the apartheid system. In simplified terms, it would be the difference between the American settler-colonial model of achieving equality for indigenous inhabitants and African Americans within the folds of white supremacy, versus the South African model, which is an ongoing struggle to dismantle apartheid. This month, UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk explicitly attributed Israel’s apartheid to settler-colonialism, albeit while limiting his analysis to the West Bank rather than the entirety of the regime from the river to the sea. 

The Palestinian insistence on centering settler-colonialism and racial domination in understanding apartheid is justified, crucial and historically accurate. Apartheid, after all, cannot be divorced from settler-colonialism; there is no instance of apartheid that is not rooted in settler-colonialism. Even if these organizations, knowingly or otherwise, are putting a liberal hue on the charge of apartheid, or if our detractors are using it to mean a particular thing, it cannot be left unsaid: apartheid is settler-colonialism, and in Palestine’s case, apartheid is Zionism. Efforts to underplay the colonial nature of this regime are misleading, inaccurate and constitute glaring omissions that are not dismissible; they are a matter of life and death. These reports demonstrate, yet again, the limitations of human rights and international law frameworks when it comes to colonized peoples. 

Yet these too are givens; we as Palestinians have learned that international law is not the site of our liberation. It is merely a tool in a struggle that is unfolding in other arenas: political, economic, military. There can be no expectation that our liberation will be ushered in on the wings of reports written by Israeli or international organizations. Such an expectation rests on nothing other than naiveté and a poor understanding about how power and politics work. 

In reacting to these reports, we are correct to re-establish, re-iterate, re-confirm the Palestinian narrative, and to articulate, again and again, our red lines as a people. We are right to demand more, and better, from our allies. This is a central element in reaffirming our collective identity, and as an exercise, this critique is crucial in constructing and continuing to push for a unified Palestinian narrative to take precedence. This kind of corrective is particularly essential given our history, where a whole generation has been raised under a misleading discourse focused on partition and state-building, not on decolonization. In this respect, these critiques are crucial in making two important distinctions. The first is that freedom for Palestinians means freedom from domination, in other words, sovereignty and self-determination — not inclusion into the apartheid regime as Israeli citizens. Secondly, these critiques reaffirm the peoplehood of Palestinians — comprising all their constituents. Beyond Palestine, these critiques are crucial to help us as Palestinians, and our allies globally, figure out what decolonization in the 21st century might look like in practice.

Our work must not end there, however, and these critiques must not overshadow the critical development that the mainstreaming of the charge of apartheid carries with it. If we come to understand these reports as mere tools, not as the site of liberation, and if we acknowledge the skewed power of Israeli and international media to carry more weight than Palestinian voices, then this moment is imbued with political potential. With Israeli and leading international organizations coming to the fore and inching closer toward the Palestinian narrative, a turning point is in the making, one that we must encourage, capitalize and build on. These reports have the capacity to shift the narrative around Palestine in the mainstream imagination, from one focused on a conflict between two warring parties and on a faulty peace-process, to one of apartheid. Such a paradigm shift is essential, and a prerequisite to our future liberation. The battle is unfolding at the moment, and we must not get bogged down in undermining these reports, thereby missing the forest for the trees. 

Building on this, we as Palestinians must grab these reports and trigger a snowball effect, where this charge is pushed forward, rammed down every media channel, in every conversation on Palestine, in every encounter with policymakers and in every campaign against Israel's corporate and governmental backers. The association of Israel with apartheid must become intuitive to any onlooker, whether or not they are invested in the struggle for justice in Palestine. Regardless of how faulty we think these reports are, as we critique them we must also leverage them, reclaim them and reconstitute them to work in our favor. Would such an exercise fill us with resentment that it took an international or Israeli entity to say this for it to be accepted as true? Perhaps. But it could equally be filled with inspiration and energy that we are finally, finally, shifting the media landscape in our favor, after years of our own tireless advocacy. Has our history, in any case, led us to expect anything but racism, particularly from the Western world? This is the dirty game of politics that we must play in order to push the envelope of our struggle and secure our freedom. We must use these reports to lobby these organizations, and others, and to work with them, to move them closer to our narrative. In so doing, we must expand our movement to include allies that are perhaps not where we want them to be, but are on a journey nonetheless in the right direction. 

All this must be done without our compromising on red-lines. This is our elders' misstep. They compromised on the Palestinian thawabet, accepting partition, which is the bedrock of apartheid, in the name of political and diplomatic engagement. That was an error that must not be repeated. Playing politics should not entail concessions on fundamental principles, otherwise the battle is lost at the outset. This is where critique is essential if delivered with the goal of movement building, of securing power, of constructing rather than destroying. The critiques should ask: how can we utilize these interventions, and build power — use them to our advantage, incomplete as they are? We can, paradoxically, highlight the shortcomings of these reports, while simultaneously engaging with their strengths to advance our own narrative. Such a practice of critical engagement is crucial to building a politically and intellectually sophisticated movement, and it must be a fundamental constituent of our politics, particularly as our political leadership is immobilized and compromised. 

Such practices allow us to reclaim our agency, so that we, as Palestinians, define what our battle lines are. Playing politics becomes not a concession, but a source of strength, as we leverage the tools at our disposal to our advantage. As long as we, Palestinians, understand what our struggle for liberation is — dismantling a Zionist settler-colonial regime and achieving self-determination in Palestine — then that must be our guiding light. As long as the values animating our movement — freedom, justice, equality — are at the forefront of our political engagement, then we will not misstep, even if we use the compromised tools of human rights and international law.