MESOPOTAMA NEWS : ‘One system, one policy’: Why Human Rights Watch is charging Israel with apartheid

Israel has made it irrefutably clear it intends to make Jewish domination over Palestinians permanent between the river and the sea, says HRW’s Omar Shakir in interview following landmark report.

By Amjad Iraqi April 27, 2021  +972 MAGAZINE

The word “apartheid” has undoubtedly become a centerpiece of the mainstream public debate around Israel-Palestine this past year — and today, the once-taboo term may have received one of its biggest endorsements yet.

Human Rights Watch, a leading organization monitoring rights abuses worldwide, released a major report on Tuesday arguing that Israel is committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution — both defined by the Rome Statute as crimes against humanity — on both sides of the Green Line. The 213-page report, which is accompanied by graphics co-produced with Visualizing Palestine, details the ways in which Israel is intentionally pursuing the domination of Jews over Palestinians in all parts of the land, as well as in the diaspora, regardless of their legal status.

“Every day,” the report reads, “a person is born in Gaza into an open-air prison, in the West Bank without civil rights, in Israel with an inferior status by law, and in neighboring countries effectively condemned to lifelong refugee status, like their parents and grandparents before them, solely because they are Palestinian and not Jewish.” Among other recommendations, the report calls on states to condition military aid to Israel and impose targeted sanctions against Israeli officials deemed responsible for the crimes.

What makes this report significant for HRW is that it “connects the dots” between Israel’s varying policies to show that they are driven by “one system, one policy, and one intent” to secure the permanent rule of one group over another, explained Omar Shakir, the organization’s Israel-Palestine director, in an interview with +972. Shakir, the chief author of the report, is currently based in Amman after the Israeli government, with the High Court’s approval, deported him in November 2019, claiming he supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The group’s damning conclusions after a two-year process were not made lightly, said Shakir, but the evidence was “so overwhelming” that any claim that the reality on the ground was somehow “temporary” could no longer stand. Recognizing that Palestinian groups and others have been making the same case for years, he hopes that HRW’s contribution will help push the international community to recognize the gravity of the crimes at hand and to “have the courage to fight apartheid.”

Human Rights Watch Israel and Palestine Director Omar Shakir speaks to press ahead of his deportation from Israel, flanked by HRW head Kenneth Roth, right, and attorney Michael Sfard, left, November 25, 2019 (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org).

HRW is the latest in a lineup of top human rights groups — including Israeli NGOs Yesh Din and B’Tselem — that have publicly stated in recent months that Israel is perpetrating apartheid and maintaining a regime of Jewish supremacy. They join a growing movement, led for years by Palestinians and allies, that has been working to debunk mainstream myths about Israel’s military occupation and redefine the nature of the oppression Palestinians face on the ground.

+972’s interview with Shakir was edited and shortened for clarity.

The HRW report is arriving on the heels of several high-profile publications that have called out Israel for committing the crime of apartheid. What has compelled so many in the human rights community, including HRW, to publicly take this stance over the past year? Why has the “threshold” been passed now, but not before?

Human Rights Watch and other groups have been documenting serious abuses by Israeli and Palestinian authorities going back decades. But there was an increasingly shared sense that our reports, while capturing aspects of it on the ground, failed to speak to the core underlying reality. A reality in which one government, the Israeli government, rules over the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River; where two groups of roughly equal size live, yet where one group, Jewish Israelis, are methodically privileged, and the other group, Palestinians, are oppressed at varying degrees of intensity.

Many of the assumptions that underlie the international community’s conversation [on Israel-Palestine] seem divorced from the reality that we witness every day — like the idea that a 54-year occupation is temporary, or that a 30-year peace process will soon end abuses on the ground. Groups like ours haven’t done enough work connecting the dots, to understand what’s behind these policies. And when we started to connect the dots over the past two years, the complete picture needed to be told.

Jewish men at a home newly inhabited by Jewish families in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem, April 8, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Our mandate as a human rights organization is international law, and the prohibition against severe discriminatory oppression, or apartheid, is a core element of the law. While the term was of course coined in relation to South Africa, it is a universal legal term and a crime against humanity set out in its own 1973 convention, and under the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Once we started connecting those dots, and looked in depth at the treatment of Palestinians, it became overwhelmingly clear that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

This threshold may well have been crossed long ago. HRW, though, does not make determinations of crimes against humanity lightly. For us, the one element that could have been questioned was the intent to maintain domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians. And for a long time, there was a sense that a solution could be around the corner. There were even Israeli authorities — in court and in public statements — claiming that the occupation was temporary, and that the current reality was the result of a failure to reach a peace agreement for which both sides held responsibility.

But recent years have shown these arguments to be fig leaves. For one, we’ve seen a massive expansion in Israeli land grabs and settlements, and the building of infrastructure to connect these settlements to Israel proper, making clear the intent of permanence. Israeli authorities have directly declared their intent to rule over the West Bank in perpetuity, irrespective of whether formal annexation moves forward.

In addition, the Israeli government passed the Jewish Nation-State Law, a law with constitutional status that enshrines rights for one group that are denied to the other, while codifying a reality that has long existed on the ground. Putting it as a constitutional value made even more clear the intent for domination by one group over another.

Palestinian citizens of Israel and activists protest against the Jewish Nation-State Law in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv, Aug. 11, 2018. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)

Putting these factors together, there was no argument against there being an intent for permanent domination. The evidence was so overwhelming — and as an organization that applies the law to the facts, this determination had to be made.

A significant element of this report is that it includes practices inside Israel — that is, against Palestinian citizens of the state — as constituting apartheid. I imagine this position will receive its fair share of criticism and outrage. Why did HRW feel it was necessary to go beyond the occupied territories in its scope?

Apartheid is fundamentally a crime about the domination of one group over another. And when you look at the situation from an aerial perspective, it’s clear that we’re talking about one government ruling over two people — Palestinians and Jewish Israelis — and that on the ground, there is one system, one policy, and one intent. To divorce Palestinian citizens of Israel from the picture would be to say that the severe discrimination they face is not linked to the underlying predicament facing Palestinians at large.

At the same time, the report is clear that there is different intensity of abuses in different areas, and does not paint with a single brush the situation that Palestinians face. There is no question that Palestinian citizens of Israel face discrimination and oppression less intense than those faced by Palestinians in the occupied territory.

Still, our finding of apartheid is based on that overriding intent to maintain domination, and the particularly severe abuses carried out pursuant to that intent. Depriving millions of Palestinians of their fundamental rights, solely because they’re Palestinian and not Jewish, cannot be solely linked to abusive occupation. The reality is that Jewish Israelis — wherever they live across Israel and the OPT — are governed under the same system with the same rights and privileges, while Palestinians are discriminated against wherever they live.