Grassroots International Commends Amnesty International Report on Israeli Apartheid Against Palestinians

Grassroots International commends Amnesty International on the launch of its report Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity. The report details how Israeli authorities impose a system of domination and oppression against the Palestinian people through practices including territorial fragmentation; dispossession of land and property; restrictions on access to water; denial of equal nationality and status; restrictions on movement; discriminatory family reunification laws; use of military rule; restrictions on the right to political participation and popular resistance; and the suppression of Palestinians’ human development and denial of their economic and social rights. It also documents specific inhuman/inhumane acts constituting serious human rights violations. It concludes that this treatment amounts to an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination defined as apartheid under international law.

The report’s contents very much resonate with what Grassroots International hears directly from our Palestinian partners on ongoing injustices of life under an apartheid system.

We appreciate this report for its unequivocal designation of apartheid to describe the system imposed upon Palestinians, as recognized by ever more human rights organizations across the globe. This report follows a growing number of reports on the Israeli apartheid system, including one published by B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories in January 2021 and one by Human Rights Watch in April 2021, among others. These reports represent critically important tools in our collective efforts toward Palestinian liberation, led by efforts of grassroots organizations on the ground in Palestine.

According to Raji Sourani of our partner Palestinian Center for Human Rights:

Israel has failed to silence our voices and delegitimize us. What we said more than 20 years ago is now repeated by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem. We do not stand alone anymore, and these international voices echo ours. The Israeli Apartheid’s mask fell off, and a new stage of struggle has started at the international level to take down the apartheid and end all its crimes against the Palestinian civilians.

Jamal Juma of our partner Stop The Wall adds:

Recognizing Israel as an apartheid state by Amnesty International is a historic moment in support of Palestinians’ long-standing calls to call Israel for what it actually is — an apartheid regime. We believe that Amnesty’s support to our calls will be a step forward to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing crimes against our people by the UN and the ICC. We also hope that this will increase solidarity with Palestine across the world and isolate Israel even more until it stops committing this crime against humanity. At the same time, we are cautious that any talk about Israeli oppression within the framework of apartheid should never distract us from the fact that apartheid Israel is implemented in order to advance settler colonial structures.

Standing in solidarity with our Palestinian partners, we echo the words of Raji and Jamal and second Amnesty International’s call to end all measures of discrimination, segregation, and oppression currently in place against the Palestinian people.

Check out this video from Amnesty International summarizing the report.