Apartheid

Amnesty International, an international human-rights non-profit organization, has consistently alleged that Israel is an “Apartheid State.” including Efforts to promote the claim include the creation of a free online course called “Deconstructing Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians,” as well as a report published in 2022, “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity.” The report “concluded that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public international law.” AIn response to Amnesty's claims, NGO Monitor provides direct evidence to contrast Amnesty International's claim that Israel is an apartheid state by debunking pervasive myths that Amnesty International has asserted, including:

1. Attributing Palestinian separatism to Israel: Amnesty International has maintained that Israel is founded on “legal segregation” by arguing that, “[i]n the course of establishing Israel as a Jewish state in 1948, its leaders were responsible for the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.” However, NGO Monitor analysis of these claims in the report, “Neo-Orientalism: Deconstructing Claims of Apartheid in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” argues that, “Palestinian fragmentation was not inherent to the establishment of the State of Israel as the Jewish state. Palestinian territorial and political division is more the result of Arab policies of rejection directed towards the Jewish State prior to and after the establishment of Israel.” NGO Monitor provides that throughout 1922 to the creation of Israel in 1948, neighbouring Arab states and the local Palestinian leadership rejected the proposal to create an Arab State in Palestine.
2. Erasure of Arab-Israeli Identity: Amnesty relies on erasing the Arab-Israeli identity and the rights that Arab-Israelis have under Israeli law to make its apartheid claim. For example, Amnesty International states, “Regardless of whether individual Palestinians are citizens of Israel living in Israel, or Palestinians living under Israeli military rule in the OPT, or Palestinian refugees, they overwhelmingly regard themselves as Palestinian.” However, NGO Monitor reports in “Amnesty International’s Cruel Assault on Israel: Systematic Lies, Errors, Omissions & Double Standards” that, “Polls show the vast majority of Arabs in Israel refer to themselves as anything but, either Arab-Israeli (51%), Israeli (23%) or just Arab (15%) and only 7% as Palestinians according to one study. Even a source known to be hostile to Israel (+972 Magazine) shows that only 14% of Arabs in Israel consider themselves ‘Palestinian.’ Arab-Israelis are active in every aspect of Israeli society including the legislature, leading schools, every major profession, top judges, sports, and media, and are not subject to ‘segregation’ policies,” rendering Amnesty’s apartheid argument false.
3. The ‘Perfect Standard’: NGO Monitor argues that, “Amnesty consistently holds Israel to what we call a ‘perfection standard,’ where any disparity between Arabs and Jews is seen by Amnesty as a result of and evidence of apartheid. For example, higher poverty rates for Arabs versus Jews is seen as part of deliberate apartheid, even if these poverty rate differences are far better than those of minorities in many Western nations.” NGO Monitor claims that the facts used by Amnesty International to claim Israel is an apartheid state, such as poverty, are seen in most democratic countries across the globe and demonstrate that Israel is held to a higher standard than any other democracy.
4. Methodically Flawed: Furthermore, NGO Monitor argues that Amnesty International’s reports are methodically flawed, citing that, “Amnesty lists various laws Israel allegedly abused or created from 1948 to the mid-1950s to confiscate land through what it describes as ‘massive and cruel land seizures’ intended to enable ‘Jewish domination.’ However, Amnesty reportedly failed to conduct primary research and instead relied heavily on secondary sources, resulting in calculations that exceed the total land area of pre-1967 Israel. Amnesty’s report claims that Israel expropriated at least 32.2 million dunams of land, despite pre-1967 Israel encompassing only approximately 20.7 million dunams.”
5. Imbalance: The imbalance demonstrated throughout Amnesty International’s reporting provides a biased narrative that holds Israel accountable and ignores the harmful actions of Palestinians, particularly Hamas. NGO Monitor argues that, “Amnesty recommends that Israel open all borders to Gaza and allow the free entry of all goods into Gaza, yet it does not recommend that Hamas stop building rockets or tunnels. While Amnesty recommends that Israel remove the security barrier, it does not recommend that Palestinians halt activities that promote terrorism, such as so-called ‘martyrs payments’ or naming schools after terrorists. Finally, while Amnesty recommends that Israel repeal its Nation-State Law, it does not recommend that the Palestinian Authority amend provisions declaring itself part of the ‘Arab nation,’ establishing ‘Islam as the official religion of Palestine,’ or identifying ‘Islamic Shari’a’ as the principal source of legislation.”

On March 25, 2022, UN Representative for the ICJ Massimo Frigo stated, “The ICJ calls on this Council to urge Israel to end its system of apartheid against Palestinians.” Consequently, the statement that Israel was engaging in apartheid was widely adopted as a statement of fact across international organizations. NGO Monitor demonstrates that a legal claim of apartheid is inapplicable to Israel because:

1. Policies are Based on Citizenship and Not Ethnicity: NGO Monitor explains that the ICJ bases a finding of apartheid on laws in Israel that are based on citizenship, not ethnicity. NGO Monitor asserts that citizen-based distinction is legal in international law, stating, “International human rights law does, however, permit differential treatment based on citizenship or where there is a reasonable basis to support it.” NGO Monitor also provides that, “international law ‘itself demands the application of different legal regimes to (groups of) individuals under a state’s jurisdiction,’ whilst noting that in certain circumstances international law recognizes ‘the permissibility of a state treating nationals and non-nationals differently.’ Put simply, ‘a requirement that two groups are subject to different laws does not necessarily entail a regime of domination’.”
2. Legitimate Security Context: The IJC claims that several Israeli security policies constitute apartheid. However, given that Israel's neighboring countries have demonstrated a desire to destroy Israel, Israel is responding to these threats with legislation to protect state sovereignty, not with the intent of establishing apartheid. As NGO Monitor argues, “From the north, south, east, and west, Israel is confronted by adversaries (namely, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran) that are acting in concert with what is, arguably, a genocidal intent to destroy it and its population. This specific intent is reflected in official statements, policies, and actions of these organisations. Iranian government officials have – repeatedly and publicly – stated an intention to destroy Israel. In May 2021, Ali Shirazi, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative in the Quds Force, was quoted as promising young Iranians that one day they would ‘witness a world without Israel’.”
3. Failure to Balance the Rights of Israeli’s: NGO Monitor asserts that the ICJ fails to balance the rights of Israelis' right to safety and security, providing that ‘human rights law must weigh not only the special interests of individuals and groups as against the heterogeneous societal interests of the State, but also conflicting interests (offsetting each other) of sundry individuals and groups.' The reason is that exercise of a certain human right by a given person or group may be irreconcilable with the invocation of the same – or a separate – human right by another individual or group.” The ICJ fails to recognize the careful balancing of human rights that democratic states are often tasked with. Every government must balance the rights of its citizens with those of the collective international community, but not at the expense of state security.

In 1993, academics Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton published a book titled “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.” The book asserts that USA is an apartheid, particularly one created through policies of racial segregation and economic disparities among racialized communities. Despite no legal finding to support the claim that USA is an apartheid, American academics continue to reference the work to support their analysis of racial segregation in USA. In a publication titled “Segregation and Poverty Concentration: The Role of Three Segregations,” the academic cites “American Apartheid” as the foundational work for their research more than 19 years after its publication. Despite the real issues of racism against Black Americans, the claim that USA is an apartheid is not the same as the lived experience ofBlack South Africans, who faced entirely different experiences. The claim that USA is an apartheid is based on:

1. No Legal Findings of Apartheid: Findings of apartheid are substantiated through international law. The United States has never been found by an international court to constitute an apartheid. This is attributable to the fact that apartheid has a very specific legal threshold and is not a proxy for discrimination, racial inequality, and segregation. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, established in 1973, defines apartheid as a specific systemic racial domination. Providing that the crime of apartheid is “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.”
2. Black Americans Participate in “political, social, economic and cultural life of the country”: Article II (c) of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid provides that a key aspect of apartheid is implementing “legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation political, social, economic and cultural life of the country.” However, when the book, “America Apartheid” was published, Black representation in Congress had surged. The US House of Representatives History, Art & Archives provides that in 1993, “as the 103rd Congress (1993-1995) opened, 40 Black Members took the oath of office—the highest number in history and up from 27 in the previous term.” These figures represented the Black Americans in Congress, and provided further inclusion of Black Americans into “political, social, economic and cultural life of” USA. Throughout apartheid South Africa, a white majority government was an essential aspect of maintaining apartheid. Far before 1993, Black Americans could vote, be elected to government, own businesses, and participate in cultural institutions. In contrast, when the novel “American Apartheid” was published, Black South Africans could not fully participate in the “political, social, economic and cultural life of the country.”
3. Segregation is Different Than Apartheid: Apartheid is a more aggressive form of a state system that sponsors segregation. The Nelson Mandela Foundation provides that, “Among the world’s racial orders, South Africa’s was unique in its rigidity and in its pervasiveness.” South Africa’s apartheid had distinct features not recognized in USA, for example, by the time the book was published in 1993, legislative equality for Black Americans had been guaranteed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In apartheid South Africa, these statements would not stand true, as Black South Africans were stripped of their citizenship. In the opening line of his paper, “Is South Africa Different?: Sociological Comparisons and Theoretical Contributions from the Land of Apartheid,” Gay Seidman writes for the University of Wisconsin that, “For most of the past 50 years, South Africa served as the outlier in sociological discussions of racial inequality: From the late 1940s, when most of the world was moving away from strict racial classification and segregation, apartheid provided social scientists with their most extreme example of the dynamics of racial segregation and exclusion” asserting that apartheid was not mere racial segregation, but the most extreme form.