The absence of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement contributed to Human Rights Watch’s decision to accuse Israel of the crime of apartheid, the NGO’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, told reporters at a virtual conference on Tuesday.
“We all hope that the peace process works, but 30 years into it, with no end in sight, we can’t accept that remote prospect as justifying a contemporary abusive reality,” he said.
Roth spoke hours after his organization published a 213-page report in which it alleged that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians both within and outside of sovereign Israel met the international legal definition of apartheid as set out under the Rome Statute. It was the first time that HRW had accused Israel of apartheid.
For many years HRW accepted the inequitable treatment of Palestinians as a temporary phenomenon that would end once a peace deal was reached, Roth said.
“That is not credible anymore,” he said.
“We said we are not going to accept this supposed temporariness because of the peace process,” he added. “We are going to look at what it is… We are going to say that it is not acceptable to tolerate these abuses today in the name of some future development, and when you look at what is there today, it is apartheid and persecution.”
In the past, HRW had always focused on one specific form of discrimination against the Palestinians, but it had not looked at it from a more holistic prism in which all the activity was linked by the overall theme of racial suppression, Roth said.
“What we did with this report was to put it all together, and that pattern spoke starkly to the existence of apartheid and persecution,” he said.
Currently, there is no existing peace initiative to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The last Israeli-Palestinian negotiation process ended without any conclusions in April 2014.
It is rare for HRW to issue a charge of apartheid. It has done so with respect to Myanmar’s actions against the Rohingya and India’s oppression of the Dalit.
HRW’s Israel and Palestine director Omar Shakir focused his comments mostly on Israeli policies in east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which he said were designed to maintain domination and control of the territory. But he also took issue with Israeli policies in the Negev and the Galilee.
The report also spoke of Israel’s Law of Return, which grants preferential treatment to Jews seeking citizenship, as an example of discriminatory practice.
The Foreign Ministry attacked the report, saying that HRW “is known to have a long-standing anti-Israeli agenda, actively seeking for years to promote boycotts against Israel.”
HRW’s failure to share the report with the Israeli government in advance of its publication “is clear indication that it is a propaganda pamphlet, which lacks all credibility,” the Foreign Ministry said.
“HRW’s founder, Mr. Robert Bernstein, has criticized his organization in 2009 for issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state,” it said.
This report has “no connection to facts or reality on the ground,” the Foreign Ministry said. “The fictional claims that HRW concocted are both preposterous and false.”
The Palestinian Authority, which has long accused Israel of apartheid practices, welcomed the report. PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh called on the international community to hold Israel accountable for such acts.
According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said the report “comes at a moment when Israel’s violations have cruelly increased against the Palestinian people, particularly in occupied Jerusalem, the capital of the State of Palestine, as well as against the Palestinian citizens of Israel.”