Israel commits acts of apartheid against Palestinians that constitute a crime against humanity, says a bomb report by Amnesty International will be released on Tuesday.
The 280-page report by the human rights group calls on the international community to “urgently and drastically” change its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to investigate apartheid under international law. It called on the UN Security Council to impose a “comprehensive arms embargo” on Israel and to impose targeted sanctions on implicated Israeli officials.
It further appeals to businesses to ensure that they do not contribute to or benefit from the system of apartheid.
According to government data, Canada exported $ 13.7 million worth of military goods and technology to Israel in 2019, and $ 19 million in 2020.
A day before Amnesty International published the report, Israel rejected it call it “false, prejudiced and anti-Semitic.” It said the London-based group was “just another radical organization” that “echoes the same lies shared by terrorist organizations.”
Amnesty International’s findings on apartheid reflect those of organizations, including human rights commission and B’Tselem last year.
But his report entitled “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity” goes on to declare that Israel is not enforcing its draconian discrimination on occupied Palestinian territories such as the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which has been reduced to a state of “eternal humanitarian crisis”, but also on Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens living in Israel, where they are seen as “the enemy from within”.
While Palestinian citizens make up about 19 percent of the population, the government has given only 1.7 percent of its COVID-19 recovery package to Palestinian local authorities, the report said.
Israeli policies fragment Palestinians into different geographical areas of control and treat them differently from each other to weaken ties between Palestinian communities, the report said.
The report cites travel as one example of this divide-and-rule approach. Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of the annexed East Jerusalem (they are not granted citizenship) can travel abroad, but they are subject to discriminatory security checks at airports. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (who are considered stateless) cannot travel abroad via Israeli airports without special permits that are difficult to obtain, the report said. Israel can ban West Bank Palestinians from traveling abroad on the basis of “secret information” that they cannot see or challenge. For Gaza Palestinians, travel abroad is “almost impossible”.
To travel between the occupied territories, Palestinians must obtain Israeli military permits with no clear procedure for making an application or obtaining an outcome, the report said. This rule does not apply to Jewish settlers, Israeli citizens or foreign visitors who can travel freely.
Israel further restricts movements within the West Bank with a web of hundreds of military checkpoints, landfills and road gates in addition to blocked roads, the report said. A 700 km fence / wall isolated Palestinian areas and forced residents to obtain special permits to enter and leave their own homes and separate permits for those with agricultural land that had to be renewed repeatedly. Access is only on foot and through specific gates.
This difficulty in traveling “is a constant reminder of their powerlessness,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said in a statement. “Their every move is subject to the approval of the Israeli army, and the simplest daily task is to navigate a web of violent control.”
Since the discovery of oil and gas off the coast of Gaza, Israel has repeatedly changed the demarcation of Gaza’s maritime coast, sometimes reducing it to just three nautical miles, the report said. The lack of access to adequate fishing waters affects an estimated 65,000 Gazans, impoverishing nearly 90 percent of fishermen.
Amnesty International conducted its research and analysis from July 2017 to November 2021 and found that Israeli authorities treat Palestinians as an inferior racial group defined by their non-Jewish, Arab status. This racial discrimination is enshrined in policies and laws that have made segregation, large-scale seizures of Palestinian land and property and denial of basic rights and freedoms possible with increasingly stringent restrictions on Palestinian movement, illegal killings, torture and unfair trials, Amnesty said. This institutionalized regime, coupled with Israel’s intention to oppress and dominate, amounts to apartheid as defined in international law and a serious violation of internationally protected human rights, it said.
“Amnesty International recognizes that Jews, like Palestinians, claim a right to self-determination, and does not challenge Israel’s desire to be a home for Jews,” the organization’s statement told the media.
Israel often justifies controversial policies as essential to maintaining its security in the region.
The group says they have examined each of the security justifications cited by Israel as the basis for its treatment of Palestinians and found that many policies have no reasonable basis in security or defense, and many human rights restrictions have not been carried out in good faith. Those designed to achieve legitimate security objectives are implemented in an extremely disproportionate and discriminatory manner, the report said.
For example, the report said, Israeli army sprays herbicides from the air over Palestinian crops along the fence between Gaza and Israel, leading to the loss of livelihood for Gaza farmers. “Although Israel claims that the spraying was intended to ‘enable optimal and continuous safety operations’, it has not provided any evidence to support this claim.”
Another example of prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment quoted in the report is who is allowed to enter Israel. While Israel was established as a Jewish state in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the state appealed to Jewish people around the world to immigrate to Israel, giving every Jew the right to immigrate and then the right to offered automatic Israeli citizenship. In contrast, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced during the 1947-49 and 1967 conflicts were prevented from returning to their homes. Today, they and their descendants remain displaced in neighboring countries, often within 100 km of their original homes.
In 1948, before Israel was founded, Palestinians (who then made up 70 percent of the population) owned about 90 percent of privately owned land, and Jewish individuals and institutions owned about 6.5 percent, the report said. Today, that number has reversed. .
Israeli forces have killed and injured thousands of Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories since 1967, according to the report, but prosecutions for illegal killings are extremely rare.
While Israel’s Western allies were reluctant to heed calls on Palestinians and human rights organizations to understand Israel’s rule as apartheid, human rights defenders faced increasing Israeli repression as punishment, the report said.
Calling for change, Callamard said: “The international response to apartheid should no longer be limited to faint condemnation and ambiguity.”
Reference-www.thestar.com