Under Int'l Law, Israel Policies Constitute Apartheid: Richard Falk

A furor has enveloped Washington, D.C. as Democrats and Republicans alike scramble to denounce Amnesty International for the report it released this month, which describes Israel as an “apartheid state” and alleges that the human rights abuses committed against Palestinians by Israel constitute crimes against humanity under international law, C. J. Polychroniou reported for Truthout.

Photo Insert: “Israel’s policies and practices do satisfy the definition of apartheid as accepted in international law circles, which rests on systematic and specific intent to impose a racially coded system of domination on a subjugated ethnicity," Falk said.

Many Israelis themselves agree with the assessment of Israel as an apartheid state. Even the late Israeli politician Yossi Sarid, who served as minister of education and the environment in the late 1990s and through the early 2000s, said the following in 2008 for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

“What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck — it is apartheid.”

Even so, the report provoked an explosion of rage in the US. The same rage also surfaced in the US in 2017, when Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian occupied territories, produced a UN report charging Israel with crimes against humanity and tagging it an apartheid state.

Falk said the Amnesty International report echoes the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia’s (ESCWA) “Report on Israeli Practices Towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid” in 2017.

In 2021, two reports by widely respected human rights organizations Human Rights Watch (HRW) and B. T’selem of Israel added weight to the apartheid allegations.

“Israel’s policies and practices do satisfy the definition of apartheid as accepted in international law circles, which rests on systematic and specific intent to impose a racially coded system of domination on a subjugated ethnicity. To dismiss and denigrate these reports adhering to the highest human rights research standards — as Israeli and American leaders and spokespersons have attempted to do, calling the Amnesty International report full of ‘lies’ and the work of ‘anti-Semites’ — is a shameless slander. Such inflammatory language is designed to shift the conversation from the message to the messenger,” Falk said.

WEEKLY FEATURE : MVP Group Keeps Lights On During Pandemic