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J onathan C ook
Walls protecting Israel are finally crumbling With the publication of Amnesty International’s apartheid report, Israel’s supporters have just one tactic left: to accuse critics of antisemitism
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he walls protecting Israel are quickly crumbling. A year ago, it was Israel’s most celebrated human rights group, B’Tselem. Months later, it was the New Yorkbased Human Rights Watch, whose senior staff have often enjoyed a revolving door with the US State Department. Now, the one speaking up is Amnesty International – an organisation widely viewed as the most authoritative arbiter of what constitutes human rights violations. Over the past year, all have reached the same conclusion: Israel is an apartheid state. According to Amnesty’s new report published on February 1: “Israel’s system of institutionalised segregation and discrimination against Palestinians, as a racial group, in all areas under its control amounts to a system of apartheid.” This is not just a criticism of Israel’s occupation. All three groups have been pointing out for decades Israel’s flagrant disregard of international law, and its likely commission of war crimes, in the occupied territories. But Israel was little concerned, so long as public debate was confined to the occupation. Its advocates quickly learned that they could always deflect to matters of Israel’s security,
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by presenting any Palestinian resistance as terrorism. Now, the consensus is shifting to entirely new terrain – a discursive battlefield where Israel has less effective weapons with which to defend itself. The biggest human rights watchdogs are agreed that everything about Israel’s rule over Palestinians is connected, from its military oppression of those under occupation, to the civil legal system inside Israel that systematically confers inferior rights on the country’s large minority of nominal Palestinian “citizens”. In other words, Israel’s apartheid structures cannot be disentangled, separating out the occupied territories from “Israel proper”. It is all part of the same, single system of rule by one ethnic-national group, Jews, designed to oppress and marginalise another ethnic-national group, Palestinians. u
The divisions between Israel and the occupied territories have served a public relations purpose, hiding Israel’s true intent: to dispossess Palestinians
Late in the day, the champions of human rights have fully understood that the divisions between Israel and the occupied territories are simply cosmetic. They have served a public relations purpose, hiding Israel’s true intent: to dispossess Palestinians wherever they find themselves under Israeli rule. Crucially, all the major human rights groups have now jettisoned the key artificial distinction insisted upon by Israel. Israel’s premise was that its 1.8-million Palestinian “citizens” – a fifth of the population inside Israel – faced informal and unconscious discrimination, similar to that suffered by minorities in western democracies, such as the US and UK. The message was intended to reassure: Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian citizens was not perfect, but it was no worse than other liberal democratic states. That allowed it to rationalise its brutal, repressive treatment of Palestinians under occupation. The military occupation was supposedly an anomaly, forced on Israel by the need to protect its citizens and democratic structures from constant, unprovoked Palestinian violence and terrorism. Israel’s foreign minister, Yair Lapid, rehearsed exactly that line in a pre-emptive strike against Am-
