Is Israel an Apartheid State? Is Amnesty International Antisemitic?
JVL Introduction
Tony Klug has been involved in issues around the Israel-Palestine conflict for over fifty years and his commitment to the cause of Palestinian rights is unwavering.
In this contribution to the Israel-Palestine Journal he asks a number of pertinent questions of the recent Amnesty Report which labelled Israel an apartheid state.
In sum
- While Israel has unquestionably constructed an apartheid regime in the occupied West Bank, might its recasting as such deflect the focus from the need to end the occupation, of which apartheid is an ugly offspring?
- The reality in Israel proper is trickier. While there is discrimination, when does it pivot into apartheid?
- Surrounding Middle-East countries, to look no further afield, are riddled with discrimination against minorities of all kinds. Should these situations be also characterised as apartheid?
- But if apartheid is everywhere, then it is nowhere.
- From this perspective, whatever the intentions of the authors, depicting sovereign Israel uniquely as an apartheid state can evoke for many people the age-old antisemitic practice of singling out the Jews (in one guise or another) for special treatment.
- How might this characterisation of the state of Israel translate into any tangible advance for the Palestinians?
And he suggests Amnesty might give serious consideration to a proposal he and the Palestinian writer Sam Bahour first put forward in 2014, to the effect of “a Palestinian state now or equal rights until there is a solution” – a practical, human-rights-focused proposal centred on the principle of equality (national or individual).
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Thanks to the Palestine-Israel Journal for permission to reproduce this article. See the contents of its special issue here.
This article was originally published by Palestine Israel Journal on Tue 24 May 2022. Read the original here.
Is Israel an Apartheid State? Is Amnesty International Antisemitic?
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Tony Klug’s makes some good points with some interesting analysis , but his conclusion is rather weird and he seems to fallen into the classic ‘both sides’ pit hole that the mainstream media perpetuates.
HRW and B’Tselem have also both come out as saying that Israel is an occupier settler state and an apartheid regime.
Are they now also anti-Semitic , especially as Tony Klug has already admitted in his article that Israel does actually practice apartheid against Palestinians? It’s just that you shouldn’t mention this truth, because if you do, then you are guilty of Israel not pursuing the path to peace!?
This is a poor article by Tony Klug and it seems he hasn’t read the Amnesty report – he doesn’t even put it in his references.
The Amnesty report is clear about the segregation of and discrimination against Arab groups in Israel. This is how the the ‘Jewish state’ was founded and what it continues to do. It is indisputable that Israeli Jews enjoy privileges that are not afforded to others.
We cannot make sense of the occupation without understanding how Israel operates – apartheid doesn’t magically disappear on the Israeli side of the green line (a line that has been politically dead in any case for decades). The Jewish ethno-state is very hard to defend and needs to be looked at on its own terms and not subjected to the whataboutery of other states.
Amnesty Internationals report is titled
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity”
and includes the following in its Introduction:
“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.”
The article by Tony Klug discusses whether such a point of view
is antisemitic or not and arrives at a partial solution.
I share his reluctance to use the word apartheid for (I think?)
the same reason. The clip I quoted from AI was correct in its statement up to the end of the first sentence***. The last sentence is I assume a necessary condition in international law for the existence of Apartheid? The next question
is the important one of sufficiency which Klug also
tackles..
I first came across the question of Apartheidt in respect of
Israel in an academic journal and it was followed by a
refutation by a different author in a possibly later Edition.
There has been much discussion about this question
and it seems to me that it is obscuring the REAL and
outrageous injustice to Palestinians in Israel and the
Occupied Territories and – more importantly how
to correct it.
I am NOT an expert in Middle East affairs and nothing
approaching it – just a scientist with nerdy propensities
so I hope you dont mind me giving my pennyworth !!
*** Whether the situation is REALLY to the benefit of
Jewish Israelis is – I think – arguable.
Tony Klug by interpreting Israeli apartheid as a form of discrimination between different ethnicities exposes the weakness of the apartheid framework when it is detached from the settler colonial dynamics to which, in Israel, it is organically linked. Israel is not the only country which as a matter of policy treat some ethnic groups less favourably than the dominant one but can Klug point to another example of a state that, by its constitution, is committed to pursue a policy of dispossessing one ethnic group in order to entrench the dominance of another? Can he point to an analogous case to a Palestinian Israeli citizen not being permitted to set up home with her/his Palestinian married partner in Israel? To cite only a brief paragraph from Adalah, the Palestinian human rights organization which has identified more than 65 laws which discriminate between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jewish citizens:
“Decades of land confiscations and discriminatory planning policies have confined many Palestinian citizens to densely populated towns and villages that have little room to expand. Meanwhile, the Israeli government nurtures the growth and expansion of neighboring predominantly Jewish communities, many built on the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. Many small Jewish towns also have admissions committees that effectively bar Palestinians from living there.” https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-land-policies-hem-palestinians Does this not amount to apartheid?
Amnesty International concluded that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians living under its control – be it in the OPT or behind the Green Line – met the Rome Statute’s definition of apartheid. AI had previously come to this conclusion with Myanmar, so it’s clear that Israel is NOT being singled out. Klug is minimizing this because he’s determined to weaponize anti-Semitism against AI, even though B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch have come to the same conclusion.
Even the former Attorney General of Israel, Michael Benyair, concurred with the AI report and admitted that his own country – ALL of it – is an apartheid regime. It’s time to grow up and face facts.
Brian Klug does make some good points. Human rights are the inalienable rights of individual people because of their common and inherent humanity. States and other collectives do not have human rights; individual people do, whether Israeli or Palestinian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish or atheist.
States can uphold, tolerate, or suppress the rights defined in the UNDHR and subsequent treaties. They can also recognise the legality of other states or withhold it, no individual can. Amnesty defines itself as the world’s leading human rights organisation (how leading is measured is unknown) and might be considered to have been better focusing on that framework.
However, apartheid is wrong precisely because it violates many of the basic tenets of human rights, particularly when enforced with violence, as it has to be, and as early Zionist writers understood their project would require. So there is considerable overlap. The aim is to secure Palestinian human rights and self determination. The apartheid label gets the attention (or should do) of international bodies because of their resolutions and laws making it a crime.
But what if the apartheid label is examined at an international level and found to be inappropriate? Would that give Israel a clean bill of health?
Thank you Tony Klug for writing what must have been a very difficult article. I expect a lot of people on both sides will now consider you a traitor, if they didn’t already. As you rightly point out, “Hundreds of thousands of learned books and millions of articles” have been written, but so few of them have done what you do here — give genuine consideration to the reactions of those who disagree. In this case, those people whose instinct is to support Israel unconditionally and who suspect antisemitic motives for any criticism. You and I may think they are wrong, but it’s desperately important that we find ways of engaging them in discussion and winning them over to support human rights.
So maybe you’re right to suggest downplaying the apartheid thing. I’m not at all sure that I agree, but because I can see that you give honest consideration to the question, I certainly want to continue debating it.
Just to clarify and correct my previous post
– what I should have said was that the picking
apart of the definition of apartheid – as l have
indeed done – it used by some to obscure the
injustices.
In fact the comparison with other countries
or “whataboutery ” referred to by one
of the responses is actually used in respect
of the word “apartheid” and not as a way
of letting Israel off the hook.
PS Sorry for mis-spellings in my previous post.
Many of us attended the ICJP (Intl Centre of Justice for Palestinians) conference entitled ”Dismantling Apartheid” at the Institute of Civil Engineers, held on 31/5/22.
Among the speakers, Hagai El-Ad of BTselem, Soloman Sacco, a South African human rights lawyer and Dep Director of Amnesty and Shawan Jabrin, DG of Al Haq, plus other estimable experts, Palestinian and others. The recording is available here:
https://www.icjpalestine.com/apartheid-conference
Facts on the ground can become antisemitic just because the label is put on the tin?
BTW, on 14th June, Amnesty Intl is hosting a ”Dismantling Apartheid” conference too.
« While there is plenty of evidential justification for characterizing the regime in the West Bank as apartheid, there is a caveat: What actually is gained by labeling it as such? … The best way to combat violations of human rights in the Israeli-Palestinian cauldron is to bring the conflict to a tolerable end. As someone who has tried to contribute to that quest for the last few decades, I struggle to see how the AI report is helpful to that goal. »
The reason why reports like those of AI, B’Tselem and Harvard Law are helpful is because they make it easier to argue that the occupation is abusive without inviting false accusations of antisemitism. Since decades of diplomacy have, by Klug’s own admission, failed, we are left with the task of motivating the international community to protest Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians: by publicising Israel’s crimes, by boycott, and by persistent well-evidenced argument.
Margaret West raises the question of whether the Israeli state’s system of Apartheid is of benefit to Jewish Israelis. This points to a flaw in the Amnesty report as the introduction of “benefits” just introduces confusion:
Do all Jewish Israelis benefit?
Are these benefits long-term, short-term of both?
How to balance out exclusive rights to land, housing, segregated education, health care etc. against living in a perpetual state of insecurity in a militarised society?
Aren’t the poorest Jewish Israelis paying for this system of Apartheid and segregation through their taxes?
Similar arguments came up in Apartheid South Africa, which has/had a significant “poor white” working class. The fact that there are poor, exploited Israeli Jews does not stop the system being one of Jewish supremacy, codified in law, and in fact it is well known that such systems tend to command the loyalty the most exploited members of the dominant ethnic group. You can see what the Amnesty report is getting at, but the phrasing is sloppy.
Tony Klug claims that the establishment of the Israeli state was endorsed by “more than two thirds of the General Assembly” of the UN. The vote was 33 for, 13 against 10 abstentions and 1 absent. 33/57 is not two thirds. but more importantly, the UN was entirely unrepresentative of the countries of the world, as by my reckoning about 90 were colonised by the British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Dutch empires and remnants of the Spanish empire. It is exemplified by the votes of the 4 African members of the General Assembly. Liberia and South Africa, both colonial-settler Apartheid states at the time, voted in favour. There are now 54 independent countries in Africa – and one colony, Western Sahara.
I take Tony’s point about lowering the bar for discriminated minorities and how it equates to other states practicing the same, although he doesn’t mention the 2018 Nation State Law and the sense that the rights of PCI’s can be withdrawn at any time and Gaza is hardly mentioned. For me the big break-through of AI’s report was to bring together all the varying forms of discrimination in the OPT, Israel, Gaza, across the whole of historic Palestine, whilst acknowledging the different realities and experiences, which collectively comprise ‘Apartheid’. This requires a totality of approach rather than just one aspect, though Tony is right to point out AI’s problematic call to end Apartheid without addressing the end of the occupation. Even if the focus was on ending Apartheid in the OPT it still leaves the question of what to do about 700,000 ultra-nationalist settlers, armed to the teeth.
Philip Ward raises the point that perhaps not all Israelis benefit from a society that prioritizes Jews.
For some time now I have considered the admittedly startling theory that Israel was NOT just created for the benefit of the Jewish community. Originated by mostly British politicians ( a group not famous for altruism) I now seriously suspect that the dilemma of Jews at the end of WW11 could have been used as a pretext for the creation of a state that was seen as being a political foothold in the Middle East for the furtherance of Western interests. Why does the US give such massive financial and military support to Israel? Are we to believe that this aid has no self interest on the part of the US? Are we to believe that Lord Balfour had only a humanitarian agenda in establishing a state for persecuted Jews.
I do not have enough information to say categorically one way or another but would it not be interesting to consider that perhaps both Palestinians AND Jews have been manipulated for Western political advancement.
You cannot separate the occupied territories from ‘green line’ Israel. Israel’s clear intention is to effect complete control ‘from the river to the sea’ and the indigenous Palestinian population to be made as powerless as possible. The Nation State law within the current state of Israel makes clear that only Jews may achieve self determination, and all other ethnicities will, therefore, be permanently de-citizenised. Israel’s laws allow communities to be Jewish only enclaves in order to maintain cultural homogeneity. Arabs are barred from residing in them. Arab communities within Israel receive far less funding for schools, for sanitation facilities and do not have free movement to visit relatives and friends. Actual ethnic cleansing has been underway in East Jerusalem for many years as Arabs are forcibly expelled from their homes to make way for Jewish citizens, and house demolitions are common. The right of return, guaranteed under international law for populations forcibly expelled from their homes during war, is, of course denied completely to Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Israel’s unambiguous intention is to exert total control over the entire geographical area of what, for centuries, has been known as Palestine and to keep the indigenous population as powerless as possible. To claim that Israel and the occupied West Bank should be seen quite separately, and to suggest that the state of Israel cannot be designated as an apartheid state does not stand up to any serious scrutiny, even without the long history of Israeli leaders making absolutely clear their intention to claim the entire area from the river to the sea as a Jewish state where only one ethnic group will have power. Zionism is not, and never can be, an ideology embracing cultural or religious diversity. It uses extreme violence to maintain its ethnic homogeneity as much as it possibly can, and, as Desmond Tutu observed, is a worse apartheid state than the old South Africa.
…ער איז נישט אזוי קלוג
Mr Klug does not come to terms with the fact that the Zionist project is one of colonisation; and the State of Israel, a product and instrument of this project has been from its inception a colonial settler state. Apartheid is a necessary tool in this project.
See corrected comment below, posted on 11th June 2022 at 18:19.
I’m afraid a lot of the above posts are well-meaning but ill-informed. Refusing to call something by its name just because some people might get upset by the truth can’t help resolve any issue.
I grew up supporting the Anti-Apartheid Movement and worked for the organisation after I left school. I know what apartheid looks like and I’ve seen it for myself in Israel/Palestine. There were close links between the white South African regime and successive Israeli governments, despite the SA government containing actual neo-Nazis.
Many of the policies implemented in the West Bank are almost identical to those of the original apartheid regime: in particular, the Bantustans and the differential application of “neutral” laws to different population groups.
SA apartheid was eventually defeated not because white South Africans suddenly changed their minds, but because of the commitment of black South Africans to the fight within the country and the support for that fight from abroad. The boycott campaign was very successful and we are slowly replicating that success with this version of apartheid.
Nobody believed that SA racism could be defeated, but it was and Israeli racism will one day be history as well. Call apartheid by its name and keep the pressure up!
Dr Klug is not the first person to raise the question why Israel is singled out for criticism rather any of the other countries whose records are just as bad, or worse. The answer, I would suggest, is that serious people do not waste time and energy attacking things that nobody is defending. Virtually nobody, in Britain or Europe at least, would try to defend or excuse the treatment of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government or of the Rohinga people by that of Myanmar.
Suppose that a substantial group of people appeared in Britain dedicated to writing and speaking in defence of China or Myanmar, and suppose that they were to receive a generally favourable response in political and media circles. It is safe to say that in reaction a very large number of people would feel impelled to draw attention to the crimes committed by these regimes.
To summarise, Israel is not the worst state in the world and its government is not the worst government. They are however the worst state and government stiil being defended by a significant number of people who are otherwise rational and even liberal-minded.
Amnesty and B’Tselem authoritatively established why Israel falls into the definition of an apartheid state. Due to Amnesty’s international standing morally, politically, and with the world’s media it’s report represented a major setback for the Israeli lobby, which has for decades fought off this characterisation of Israel.
Essentially Klug pursues a disingenuous attempt to separate ‘proper’ Israel from the Occupied Territories (which carries echos of Apartheid South Africa’s four levels of status – native, coloured, Asian, white – and its Bantustan policy of ‘combined and separate development’) . Then by posing the question ‘can the lesser quantity and nature of the violations of Palestinian human rights in Israel qualify it to be included in the qualitative definition of aparthied’, Klug seeks to undermine the credibility of the Amnesty report.
The principal point which he evades, indeed that his article serves to deflects from, is the fact that it is the Israeli state, through the deployment of huge military and financial resources, which instituted and maintains the apartheid regime in the Occupied Territories, and that most major Israeli institutions, from corporations and banks to universities and cultural bodies, engage in or invest in the Occupation.
The function for Israel of the Occupied territories as a pool of labour, as a resource for water and minerals, and as a captive market was documented twelve years ago by Shir Hever . In addition the Occupation provides a live theatre for the development of its armaments industry, giving it a leading edge. The Occupation is an integral part of the Israeli military-industrial complex and thereby of its political economy – Israel is the Occupation, the Occupation is Israel, and it takes the form of apartheid.
The apartheid regime in South Africa was formally established in 1948. A portentous date.