Israeli apartheid
[40] The concept emerged with some frequency in both academic and activist writings in the 1980s–90s,[41] when Uri Davis, Meron Benvenisti, Richard Locke, and Anthony Stewart used the term apartheid to describe Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
[66] Leila Farsakh, associate professor of political science at University of Massachusetts Boston, has said that after 1977, "the military government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) expropriated and enclosed Palestinian land and allowed the transfer of Israeli settlers to the occupied territories."
[citation needed] In 2007, in advance of a report from the United Nations Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteur John Dugard said that "Israel's laws and practices in the OPT [occupied Palestinian territories] certainly resemble aspects of apartheid."
"[68][69] In October 2010, Richard A. Falk reported to the General Assembly Third Committee that "the nature of the occupation as of 2010 substantiates earlier allegations of colonialism and apartheid in evidence and law to a greater extent than was the case even three years ago."
According to Benvenisti, Ariel Sharon's intention to disengage from Gaza only after construction of the fence was completed, "along a route that will include all settlement blocs (in keeping with Binyamin Netanyahu's demand), underscores the continuity of the bantustan concept.
[85] Henry Siegman, a former national director of the American Jewish Congress, has said that the network of settlements in the West Bank has created an "irreversible colonial project" aimed to foreclose the possibility of a viable Palestinian state.
[95][96] In 2008, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel concluded that a segregated road network in the West Bank, expansion of Jewish settlements, restriction of the growth of Palestinian towns, and discriminatory granting of services, budgets, and access to natural resources are "a blatant violation of the principle of equality and in many ways reminiscent of the Apartheid regime in South Africa".
[107] B'Tselem wrote in 2004, "Palestinians are barred from or have restricted access to 450 miles [720 km] of West Bank roads", and has said this system has "clear similarities" to South Africa's apartheid regime.
The IDF order was reportedly overturned by Moshe Ya'alon who, responding to pressure from settler groups, issued a directive that would deny Palestinians passage on buses running from Israel to the West Bank.
[155][156] On 30 April 2021, the Committee rejected the exceptions raised about the admissibility of inter-state communication and requested the creation of an ad hoc Conciliation Commission with a view "to an amicable solution of the matter on the basis of States parties' compliance with the convention.
[158][159] On 17 February 2022, CERD set up the commission, composed of five human rights experts from the Committee: Verene Shepherd, Gün Kut (chair), Pansy Tlakula, Chinsung Chung and Michał Balcerzak.
[180] At the time of publication, Rima Khalaf, then UN Under-Secretary General and ESCWA Executive Secretary, said the report "clearly and frankly concludes that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people".
"[187] Following Dugard's report, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) of South Africa commissioned a legal study, completed in 2009, of Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territories.
"[9] B'Tselem Executive Director Hagai El-Ad said, "Israel is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it: it is one regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and we must look at the full picture and see it for what it is: apartheid.
[199] The report states that, taken together, Israeli practices, including land expropriation, unlawful killings, forced displacement, restrictions on movement, and denial of citizenship rights amount to the crime of apartheid.
Even before its release, Israeli officials condemned the report as "false and biased" and antisemitic,[201][202] accusations that Amnesty secretary general Agnes Callamard dismissed as "baseless attacks, barefaced lies, fabrications on the messenger".
[226][227][228][229] Human rights lawyer and B'tselem director Smadar Ben-Natan analyzed the different reports in terms of temporal and spatial framing, whether they look at the situation from 1948 or from 1967, and whether they include Israel.
[234][c] In 2007, Gideon Shimoni, professor emeritus of Hebrew University, said the analogy is defamatory and reflects a double standard when applied to Israel and not to neighboring Arab countries, whose policies towards Palestinian minorities have also been described as discriminatory.
[239] On 14 April 2023, Foreign Policy released a feature-length article, Israel's One-State Reality, co-authored by Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami.
[269] Vernon Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League, said the resolution smeared the 'racist' label on Zionism, adding that Black people could “easily smell out the fact that ‘anti-Zionism’ in this context is a code word for anti-Semitism”.
"[280] In May 2021, then French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned of "the risk of 'long-lasting apartheid' in Israel in the event that the Palestinians fail to obtain their own state" and that "Even the status quo produces that".
"[31] In June 2022 the Catalan Parliament passed a resolution that "Israel commits the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people" and calling upon the Generalitat de Catalunya to avoid any support for the Israeli regime and to aid in implementing the recommendations of the Amnesty and Human Rights Watch reports.
[302][303] In her remarks to the 2022 UNGA on 22 September 2022, she said, "We cannot ignore the words of the former Israeli negotiator at the Oslo talks, Daniel Levy, who addressed the UN Security Council recently and referred to 'the increasingly weighty body of scholarly, legal and public opinion that has designated Israel to be perpetrating apartheid in the territories under its control'.
"[304][305] Foreign governments who have used the word apartheid to describe the situation in Israel or in the Israeli-occupied territories include those of Bahrain,[306] Bangladesh,[307] Bolivia,[308] Cuba,[309] Iran,[310] Iraq,[310] Lebanon,[310] Nicaragua,[311] North Korea,[310] Pakistan,[311] Qatar,[311] Saudi Arabia,[312] and Venezuela.
[313] On 18 July 2021, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ adopted a resolution, denounced by the American Jewish Committee's director of media relations, that, among other criticism, refers to Israel's "apartheid system of laws and legal procedures".
[316][317][318] On 8 September 2022, the World Council of Churches adopted a statement that included a call for "The WCC to study, discuss and discern the implications of the recent reports by B'tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and for its governing bodies to respond appropriately."
[323][324] In 2017, Jacques De Maio, then Head of Delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Israel and the Occupied Territories, denied there is apartheid, saying there is "no regime of superiority of race, of denial of basic human rights to a group of people because of their alleged racial inferiority.
[326][327][328] Former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Mary Robinson, chair of The Elders and former president of Ireland and UN human rights commissioner, visited Israel and the Palestinian territories on 22 June 2023.
"[342] Both Friel and Israeli author Uri Davis have quoted the following comment from Tutu, published in the Guardian in 2002, in their own work: "I was deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what has happened to us black people in South Africa.
[353] Human rights lawyer Fatima Hassan, a member of the 2008 ANC delegation, cited the separate roads, different registration of cars, the indignity of having to produce a permit, and long queues at checkpoints as worse than what black South Africans had experienced during apartheid.
