Published: 25 February 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Two NGO reports had already made the same claim in the past year, without a ferocious reaction. ELHANAN MILLER looks at what was different about Amnesty’s report
FOR A WHILE it seemed like the hype surrounding the new Amnesty International report, branding Israel a “cruel” Apartheid state, had died down. But just three weeks after its publication on February 1, the executive director of Amnesty’s Israel branch launched a scathing attack on the report, reviving the internal debate on the report’s accuracy and efficacy.
“Emotionally, as far as I’m concerned, referring to Apartheid inside Israel – as well as other matters in the report – is a punch in the gut,” Molly Malekar told Zman Israel, the Times of Israel’s Hebrew-language sister site. “I don’t see which goals this report advances, but I do see how it can harm our goals: the promotion of human rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories.”
The Amnesty report, titled “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity,” was not the first report in recent years to level the “Apartheid” accusation against Israel. In January 2021, Israeli human rights watchdog B’Tselem published a report titled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid.”
The report claimed that Israel’s 55-year occupation of the West Bank could no longer be considered a temporary measure. It rendered the distinction between a democratic Israel within the 1967 borders and a non-democratic military regime in the West Bank, a distinction commonly made by Zionist leftists, obsolete and artificial.
“Within the Green Line, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, there exists one regime which operates according to one organizing principle: the advancement and sustainment of the supremacy of one group of people, namely Jews, over another group of people, namely Palestinians. Such a regime is an Apartheid regime,” the B’Tselem report read.
