Amnesty International Report declares Israel as an “Apartheid State”

IRIA Staff - February 02, 2022




Amnesty joins other human rights groups in declaring that Israel is ‘committing the crime of apartheid’

Amnesty International has labeled Israel as an “apartheid regime” on accounts of its “oppression and domination” against the Palestinian Arab population.

The 280-page report was compiled by London-based Amnesty International over the span of four years. The report highlights Israel’s crimes against humanity that are being carried out through a “cruel system of domination”. According to the report, Israel has embraced laws and practices that are intended to maintain control over Palestinians, “leaving them fragmented geographically and politically in a constant state of fear and insecurity, often impoverished."

Amnesty called on all states particularly those that enjoy close diplomatic ties with Israel such as the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and its member states, and also those states that are in the process of strengthening their ties – such as some Arab and African states to:

- First recognize that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid and other international crimes.

- Use all political and diplomatic tools to ensure Israeli authorities implement the recommendations outlined in the Amnesty report and review any cooperation and activities with Israel to ensure that these do not contribute to maintaining the system of apartheid.

- Immediately suspend the direct and indirect supply, sale, or transfer of all weapons, munitions, and other military and security equipment, including the provision of training and other military and security assistance.

- Institute and enforce a ban on products from Israeli settlements.


A journalist holds a copy of Amnesty International's report "Israel's Apartheid Against Palestinians," at a press conference on the release of the 278-page report compiled over a period of four years, in Jerusalem, on February 1, 2022. (Image Credit: Maya Alleruzzo/AP)


Revealing the “true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime,” Amnesty’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard said: “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. We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession, and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid.”

Amnesty International also called upon the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

Israel has repeatedly rejected the claims of apartheid and insists that Arab citizens enjoy equal rights in Israeli. Soon after the release of the report, Israeli politicians came up with a furious response and called on Amnesty international to withdraw the report by claiming it to be an act of anti-Semitism. Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid rejected the report by referring to it as a “divorced from reality”. He also stated that “Amnesty quotes lies spread by terrorist organizations.” Israeli embassy in the U.S. took Twitter to criticize the findings of the report by stating that “the report all but ignores that Israel is a democracy that accords more rights to Arabs and Palestinians than does any other state in the region.”

Palestinian authorities welcomed the report and said that it would open the way for accountability of Israel at the international criminal court on accounts of atrocities and oppression that it has been carrying out against Palestinians for seven decades now.

“Amnesty International joins a long list of distinguished Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations and experts in exposing Israel’s colonial occupation for what it is: an institutionalized system of oppression and domination over the Palestinian people, designed to legitimize its colonial settlement expansion, deny the Palestinian people their inalienable right to self-determination, and erase Palestinian history, present, and future in their homeland,” the Palestinian Authorities Foreign Affairs Ministry said. “The report is a detailed affirmation of the cruel reality of entrenched racism, exclusion, oppression, colonialism, apartheid. It is a reality in which the State is structured to maintain Jewish Israeli domination by ensuring the perpetual denial of the fundamental and national rights of the Palestinian people.”

The report opens by citing comments from the former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from March 2019 when he stated, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens, [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.”


Israeli soldiers clash with Palestinian stone throwers at a checkpoint outside Jerusalem. (Image Credit: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP)


Palestinian Arabs make up about one-fifth of Israel’s total population. Although the Palestinian Arab population residing in Israel has a right to hold Israeli passports and the right to vote, there is evident segregation when it comes to basic rights such as access to healthcare, employment, and education opportunities. While a large proportion of the Palestinian Arab population that resides in the Gaza Strip and West Bank area have no access to even basic human necessities.

The report refers to the international criminal courts’ definition of apartheid which states, “The crime of apartheid means inhumane acts, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

This is not the first time that a human rights activist organization has raised its voice against Israel and its crimes against humanity. Previously, New York-based organization, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli human rights group B'Tselem have also termed Israel as an ‘Apartheid Regime”. Similarly, Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter termed Israel as an apartheid state in his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. The book at the time of its publication in 2007 received a lot of criticism and was branded anti-Semite. As a reaction to the book, 14 members from the Carter Center community board resigned to record a protest. This lead the former U.S. president to take a step back from his position and say that some passages from his book were “Terribly worded”.

While in the past, most of such reports and studies have focused on the deterioration and impoverished condition of the Palestinians specifically living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, this is the first time that a report directly addresses the issues of Palestinian Arabs residing under the direct control of Israeli state. B’Tselem’s report from one year ago stressed on the motivations behind Israeli apartheid by stating that the Israeli policies are designed to enforce, “Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”.


Israeli forces arrest Al Jazeera journalist Givara Budeiri during a protest in the illegally occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah on June 5, 2021 (Image Credit: Oren Ziv/AP)


Amnesty urged Israeli authorities to:

• End the system of apartheid by dismantling measures of discrimination, segregation, and oppression currently in place against the Palestinian population and review all discriminatory laws.

• Grant equal and full human rights to all Palestinians in Israel and the OPT in line with principles of international human rights law and without discrimination.

• Immediately order members of all state authorities to end and refrain from all future conduct that violates international law, including forcible transfer of population, arbitrary arrest, administrative detention, torture, and other ill-treatment, unlawful killings, and infliction of injuries, as well as restrictions on other fundamental rights.

• Suspend from active duty any military or official personnel suspected of ordering or committing grave violations of international law pending the completion of investigations.

• Order prompt, impartial, independent, and effective investigations into all allegations of crimes against humanity and other serious human rights violations by state officials and actors.

• Provide victims of human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and serious violations of international humanitarian law – and their families – with full reparations.

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