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April 29, 2021

Dear Readers,

I got my second Moderna shot on Tuesday, which took me out of commission for the middle part of the week. So I’m turning over this week’s newsletter to Assistant Editor Josh Leifer, who has written a helpful overview of Human Rights Watch’s new report recognizing Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories as a form of apartheid—and the backlash it has predictably provoked from Israel and its defenders in the American Jewish establishment. Back soon, fully vaxxed!

Best,

David Klion


On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report, titled “A Threshold Crossed,” which argues that Israel is committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution as defined by international law.

The report is expansive, covering nearly every aspect of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians in Israel proper, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. It is impressively detailed—marshalling Israeli laws, government plans, statements by politicians, and evidence accumulated over years of monitoring Israeli abuses in the occupied territories—and amounts to a comprehensive picture of the multi-tiered system of ethnoreligious hierarchy that defines Israeli sovereign rule between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

“A Threshold Crossed” is also ambitious in its recommendations. For instance, it calls on the Israeli government to “[d]ismantle all forms of systematic oppression and discrimination that privilege Israeli Jews at the expense of Palestinians”; on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to cease security coordination with the Israeli army; and on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to “[a]dopt an advocacy strategy centered on the immediate attainment of the full human rights of Palestinians, rather than one that puts off attainment of human rights in favor of a particular political outcome.” It also calls on international businesses to “cease activities that directly contribute to the commission of crimes of apartheid and persecution.”

With this report, HRW joins a growing cohort of human rights groups and civil society organizations that have embraced the term “apartheid” as a conceptual and legal paradigm to describe the current one-state reality in Israel/Palestine. In January 2021, the Jerusalem-based human rights group B’Tselem issued its own report on Israel’s “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” which, it argued, amounts to apartheid. In July 2020, the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din released a detailed legal opinion, written primarily by attorney Michael Sfard, that concluded that Israeli authorities were committing “the crime against humanity of apartheid” in the West Bank.

Detractors of these reports have contested the idea that the politcal regime in contemporary Israel can be compared to the apartheid regime in South Africa, the system of racial segregation and oppression that lasted from 1948 until 1991. But “apartheid,” as human rights groups understand and use the term today, does not necessarily imply a system of rule that’s identical to South Africa’s. In the years since the end of apartheid in South Africa, international law has developed a definition of the “crime of apartheid” as a particular “crime against humanity.” According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), adopted in 1998, the crime of apartheid refers to “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” In light of ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s recent decision to open an investigation into potential Rome Statute crimes committed in the occupied territories, the stakes of the question of whether or not Israel is carrying out apartheid are not merely rhetorical.

HRW and other groups’ adoption of the apartheid paradigm signals their growing recognition that Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza is not temporary. In this sense, the emerging consensus in international civil society around apartheid reflects the demise of the two-state paradigm of the Oslo era, the brief period in the 1990s when a negotiated peace seemed like a viable path forward. As long as the Israeli government paid the barest lip service to an eventual two-state solution, human rights groups treated Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control over Gaza as temporary. Indeed, in the past HRW has rejected foundational critiques of the Israeli state, such as accusations that Zionism amounts to racism. The same is true for representatives of B’Tselem and Yesh Din, who took pains to distinguish the occupied territories from Israel proper. But after years of unabated settlement expansion and the long absence of any negotiations, it is now undeniable that Israel is not moving toward any territorial compromise with the Palestinians and is instead laying the foundation for perpetual control over the entire territory of Israeli/Palestine. It is the permanence of the occupation and Israeli leaders’ explicit “intent to maintain a system of domination'' through a regime of Jewish supremacy—not only in the occupied territories but also in the Negev and the Galilee, where the Israeli government has planned “Judaization” measures—that has prompted the human rights groups’ change in approach.

Predictably, the Israeli government and its defenders abroad have reacted to the HRW report with forceful denunciations and accusations of antisemitism. “The fictional claims that HRW concocted are both preposterous and false,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. The report, it claimed, has “no connection to facts or reality on the ground.” (In fact, the HRW report cites extensively from Israeli politicians and Israeli laws.) The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (CoP) issued a statement rejecting “the disgraceful report . . . [that] attempts to demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to the State of Israel.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) alleged that the report’s “arguments are baseless and sometimes border on antisemitism.” Israeli officials and Zionist activists have also seized on the fact that the report’s primary author, HRW’s Israel and Palestine Director Omar Shakir, was deported from Israel in 2019 under a 2017 law banning entry to those who advocate for boycotts of Israel or settlements in the West Bank—an odd point to emphasize, as the expulsion of a leading human rights watchdog is not exactly the marker of a robust democracy.

The refusal of establishment Jewish groups like the CoP and AJC to engage substantively with HRW’s findings demonstrates the extent to which the organized Jewish community has become hermetically sealed off from criticism of Israel; Jewish leaders, many of whom would likely be surprised by details in the reports, have collectively decided to ram their fingers in their ears when confronted with what they’d prefer to ignore. And because of the political power the major Jewish groups exercise, especially at the local level, this places a hard and very low ceiling on what reports like HRW’s can achieve in the realm of US politics. With exceptions such as Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Betty McCollum, there are few US politicians willing to amplify HRW’s findings, let alone translate them into policy, given the perceived political cost. Most US politicians, even those who stake out strong progressive stances on domestic issues, continue to mouth bromides about the two-state solution, often parroting Israel-advocacy talking points about “the path to peace.” The result is an American discourse about Israel/Palestine that is entirely out of sync with the political realities on the ground.

Of course, it is not only American Jewish leaders with their fingers in their ears. Even as Israel has unabashedly pursued a post-two-state agenda, shoring up its rule over the occupied territories, the Palestinian national leadership has remained committed to an independent Palestinian nation-state, as opposed to some kind of confederation or binational state. Yet the PA and the PLO, headed by the aging Mahmoud Abbas, have no clear strategy for achieving this goal. While many Palestinians have welcomed the HRW report as a belated recognition of their daily experience, there is no Palestinian political force that would implement HRW’s recommendations. Abbas has repeatedly threatened to cease the PA’s security coordination with the Israeli army, yet he has never fully followed through. And after receiving the nominal trappings of a state through the PA, Abbas—and whoever his successor may be—is unlikely to abandon the quest for the real thing in favor of a South-Africa-style demand for civic equality within a single binational state.

The recent human rights reports arrive as the politics of Israel/Palestine hang in an interregnum between the discredited Oslo paradigm and whatever may come next. Other than the territorial-maximalist Israelis, for whom the status quo of incremental de facto annexation is just fine, no significant political actors—not in the US, and not in Palestine—appear willing to recognize the present conditions for what they are.

How long could this go on? Probably for a long time. As Robert Kinloch Massie chronicles in Loosing the Bonds, a history of the anti-apartheid movement in the US, nearly three decades elapsed between the first wave of boycott protests and Congress’s passage of the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over Ronald Reagan’s veto. That struggle was also buoyed by the energies of the civil rights movement, while decolonization was in motion around the globe. Today, though some activists have drawn connections between American anti-Black racism and the oppression of Palestinians, the Black Lives Matter movement has not seen the emergence of an internationalism that compares to that of past decades, and the potency of global anti-colonial revolt lives on mainly in memory. Given the resurgence of right-wing nationalism in the West and the ongoing toll of the pandemic, Palestine currently takes up little space on foreign political agendas; the conditions for the revitalization of the international movement for Palestinian freedom are hardly favorable. The work of human rights organizations like HRW is no doubt important, but reports alone cannot fundamentally change a regime.


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