A human rights organisation has accused Israel of forcing Palestinians to live under apartheid. In response, Israel called the human rights group antisemitic. Bada boom bada bing. In other Earth-shattering news, today is Monday.
Amnesty International is about to publish a major new report which accuses Israel of “enforcing a system of apartheid against the Palestinian people” and of treating Palestinians as “an inferior racial group.”
The report was linked to an Israeli NGO. The Israeli’s are apoplectic, God love them. According to The Telegraph:
Lior Haiat, a spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry, branded the report a “collection of lies” which sought to “deny the right of existence of the state of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.”
“This is a double standard, demonising Israel in order to delegitimise the existence of the state of Israel. Those are the components of modern anti-semitism,” he said. “We have no other choice but to say that this whole report is anti-Semitic.”
The Amnesty report is due to be published this week, but extracts have already been published online by the Israeli pressure group NGO Monitor, which says it obtained a leaked copy.
Yawn, right? We’ve been here before. Last Spring, Human Rights Watch claimed that Israel was responsible for “the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians” including those with Israeli citizenship.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group agrees. In January 2021, B’Tselem declared its own country to be “an apartheid” regime. Is B’Tselem antisemitic too? Hardly.
Israel’s politicians claim that there’s an ulterior motive behind these human rights reports. They claim that the reports are motivated by hatred for the state and that those behind the investigations do not believe that Israel has any right to exist.
According to aforementioned Lior Haiat:
“This is a double standard, demonising Israel in order to delegitimise the existence of the state of Israel. Those are the components of modern anti-semitism.”
Delegitimise the existence of the state of Israel? Israel exists, whether I or anyone else likes it or not. It isn’t going anywhere. Does it have a right to exist? Writing in The Guardian in 2001, the Journalist and author Faisal Bodi said this:
Certainly there is no moral case for the existence of Israel. Israel stands as the realisation of a biblical statement. Its raison d’être was famously delineated by former prime minister Golda Meir. “This country exists as the accomplishment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be absurd to call its legitimacy into account.”
That biblical promise is Israel’s only claim to legitimacy. But whatever God meant when he promised Abraham that “unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the Euphrates,” it is doubtful that he intended it to be used as an excuse to take by force and chicanery a land lawfully inhabited and owned by others.
Israel’s other potential claim to legitimacy, international recognition, is just as dubious. The two pacts which sealed Palestine’s future were both concluded by Britain. First we signed the Sykes-Picot agreement with France, pledging to divvy up Ottoman spoils in the Levant. A year later, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration promised a national home for the Jewish people. Under international law the declaration was null and void since Palestine did not belong to Britain – under the pact of the League of Nations it belonged to Turkey.
By the time the UN accepted a resolution on the partition of Palestine in 1947, Jews constituted 32% of the population and owned 5.6% of the land. By 1949, largely as a result of paramilitary organisations such as the Haganah, Irgun and Stern gang, Israel controlled 80% of Palestine and 770,000 non-Jews had been expelled from their country.
In the 20 years since that article was published, nothing has changed. Israel is as Israel does. Israel continues to bulldoze homes in the occupied territories. The IDF routinely murders Palestinians. Palestinian children are routinely locked up, tortured and denied access to legal representation. Bada bing bada boom. In other Earth-shattering news, today is Monday.
