By Steve Bell
The publication of Amnesty International’s report “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians” is an important development. Not because it is original in defining a system of apartheid against Palestinians, Palestinians have been documenting this for decades. Nor because it is the first “human rights” organisation to define Israeli apartheid, the respected Israeli human rights organisation B’Tslem published its report “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” in January 2021, and Human Rights Watch published its report “A Threshold Crossed” in April 2021.
What is significant is that Amnesty International, like Human Rights Watch, has an historic alignment to US State Department concerns. The report then represents the continuing frustration of US ruling circles with the impasse created by the Israeli state’s treatment of the Palestinians. No stability or security for the Israeli state is possible while it continues its systematic exclusion, dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people. Attempts to reduce all criticisms of these facts to ‘antisemitism’ will neither end Palestinian resistance, nor reverse the growing international movement in support of justice for the Palestinians.
The Amnesty International report can be downloaded from here.