New published research this month

The comparison emerged with a vengeance in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, notably when the 2002 Rome Statute defined apartheid as a crime in 2002, and thereby shifted attention to the question of international law. In December 2019, the UN Committee on the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination announced the opening of a review of Palestinian complaints that Israeli policies in the West Bank amount to apartheid (Staff, 2019).

In April 2021, Human Rights Watch became the first major international human rights organisation to accuse Israel of apartheid, calling for Israeli officials to be prosecuted under international law and for an investigation by the International Criminal Court. Amnesty International followed suit on 1 February 2022 (Holmes, 2021). There are worldwide some of the most renowned Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers from Israel, the United States and the European Union who share this conviction.

Israeli-born historian Omer Bartov, one of the most respected Holocaust and genocide researchers, states that ‘there can be for Jews in Israel no democracy as long as Palestinians live under what Israeli lawyers have characterized as an apartheid regime.’ (Goldberg, 2023).

Yet, there were enough similarities or approximations between ‘apartheid’ in South Africa and Israel to belong to the same family of settler colonialism, built on various forms of exclusion, exploitation, displacement and confinement. While apartheid as an ideological and governmental system was eventually dismantled in South Africa, in Palestine settler colonialism continues apace within a state that has adapted well to neoliberal economic imperatives and continues to receive almost unqualified support from the U.S. (Peteet, 2016).

Apartheid (meaning “apartness” in Afrikaans) was the legal system for racial separation in South Africa from 1948 until 1994 https://perma.cc/7SL8-W66X

The Struggle against Apartheid https://perma.cc/Y67R-LXZK

🇮🇱: We are innocent.

Still interesting that prisoners are increasing ...

Human rights organizations claim that Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, who are in prisons and detention centres in Israel itself, are being held in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Israel consistently maintains that this constitutes a legitimate exercise of its legal rights as the Occupying Power under the Convention.

For example, in 1977 a few hundred Palestinian prisoners were released on the occasion of religious festivals, and in 1985 some 1500 Palestinian political prisoners were released in exchange for three Israeli soldiers held by the PFLP (Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command) of Ahmad Jibril.

Indeed, during certain periods, the numbers of Palestinians held in custody by the Israeli Army were much higher than those held in civil custody. For example, in 1989, during the peak year of the Intifada, some 4000 Palestinian prisoners were held in the IPS prisons and nearly 9000 were imprisoned in various army prisons and detention centres (Cohen, 1989: 194).

An examination of the breakdown of Palestinian security prisoners accord- ing to a more detailed classification of offences shows that in 1993, 56.7 per cent were convicted for terrorist/hostile activity, 27.5 per cent were convicted for violations involving membership in an illegal organization, 5.2 per cent were convicted for production, possession or throwing an explosive, a grenade or a Molotov cocktail and 3.8 per cent were convicted for causing death. No corresponding data have been published for later years.

Palestinian sources provide much higher numbers. For exam- ple, The Palestinian Prisoner Society reported that upwards of 10,000 Palestinians were arrested throughout the course of the military reoccupation of Palestinian cities in April 2002, 5000 of whom remained in detention centres.

Done by 🇮🇱 Bar-Ilan University