OCCUPIED JERUSALEM —
Amnesty International on Tuesday labeled Israel an apartheid state that
treats Palestinians as “an inferior racial group,” joining the assessment of
other rights groups.
اضافة اعلان
“Israel’s cruel
policies of segregation, dispossession, and exclusion across all territories
under its control clearly amount to apartheid,” said Amnesty’s
Secretary-General Agnes Callamard.
“Whether they live
in
Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself,
Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically
deprived of their rights.”
Israel’s Foreign
Minister Yair Lapid strongly rejected the claims as “divorced from reality” and
charged that “Amnesty quotes lies spread by terrorist organizations”.
A year ago,
Israeli-based rights group B’Tselem drew fire when it asserted that Israeli
policies had been designed to enforce “Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River
to the Mediterranean Sea” and met the definition of apartheid.
New York-based
Human Rights Watch in April last year became the first major international
rights group to publicly level the controversial allegation.
The report by
London-based Amnesty builds on those previous calls in asserting that Israeli-enforced
apartheid exists in occupied Palestinian territories and within Israel itself,
where Arab citizens make up more than 20 percent of the population.
Amnesty stressed
it was not comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with conditions in apartheid-era
South Africa but said Israeli conduct and policies met the criteria for the
crime of apartheid under international law.
Israel’s foreign
ministry has called on Amnesty to “withdraw” the report.
“Amnesty was once
an esteemed organization that we all respected,” said Lapid. “Today, it is the
exact opposite.”
Lapid, who is
also Israel’s alternate prime minister, also charged that Amnesty had an
anti-Semitic agenda.
The president of
the
World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, said Amnesty’s report “does
absolutely nothing to offer a constructive way forward and has no real interest
in promoting the human rights of Palestinians”.
“It will only
serve, like previous similar prejudiced reports, to fuel the fires of
anti-Semites under the guise of political correctness.”
Callamard
countered that “a critique of the practice of the state of Israel is absolutely
not a form of anti-Semitism.”
“Amnesty
International stands very strongly against anti-Semitism, against any form of
racism,” she said.
Briefing reporters
on Tuesday, Callamard also dismissed charges that Amnesty “was singling out”
Israel, highlighting the group’s work on Israel’s arch foe Iran and on China,
among other places.
‘Avenues to
justice’
Israel has
occupied the West Bank and
East Jerusalem since 1967. Some 700,000 Jewish
settlers now live alongside Palestinians in both areas, in settlements regarded
as illegal under international law.
The Palestinian
Authority, which has civilian control over parts of the West Bank, praised
Amnesty for its “courageous and fair” work on behalf of the Palestinian people.
Hamas, which has
controlled Gaza since 2007 and is considered a terrorist organization by much
of the West, also welcomed the report and applauded Amnesty’s
“professionalism”.
Israel withdrew
from Gaza in 2005 but has maintained a blockade of the coastal territory since
the Hamas takeover.
The International
Criminal Court (ICC) has opened an investigation into the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict expected to focus in part on possible war crimes committed during
Israel’s aggression on Gaza in 2014.
Amnesty called on
the ICC “to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation”.
It also urged the
UN Security Council to “impose targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes,
against Israeli officials most implicated in the crime of apartheid”.
It said the
international community needed to “face up to the reality of Israeli apartheid
and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored”.
Callamard also
told AFP that international “fatigue” to address the plight of Palestinians was
“not an option”.
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