Exposing The Lie Of Israel Apartheid / Moscow's role

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Part 5

As noted, entirely absent from Amnesty’s discussion of occupation is reference to the ancient historical connection of those who experienced the first dispossession of the Land of Israel: the Jews. The archeological evidence alone makes clear that present-day Arab settlement rests on the foundation of the Jews’ biblical birthright. There is no starker reminder of this than the Mosque of Omar’s construction on the ruins of the ancient Jewish Beit Hamikdash, the Second Temple.


In Amnesty’s telling, the Palestinians’ territorial claims are untethered from the circumstances that have produced their serial losses, retreats, and defeats: their persistent rejectionism at every opportunity to reach a compromise. Abba Eban’s old saw remains as true today as it was at the time of the Partition Plan: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

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It’s tempting to dismiss entirely the work of Amnesty and similar organizations, but neither Israel nor other states can afford to do so. Non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty occupy a prominent role in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), as they can refer a matter for the prosecutor’s investigation. That statute empowers the ICC prosecutor to initiate an investigation on the basis of “information from…intergovernmental or non-governmental organizations,” even though neither Israel nor the United States is a party to it.

In the absence of a cadre of investigators akin to a domestic law-enforcement agency, an “independent” human-rights organization’s assessment is potentially significant for the ICC prosecutor and judges. The organization’s views may influence the course of a prosecutor’s investigation, be relied upon as evidence, and ultimately influence the opinions of the judges. As the Rome Statute states: “The Court may ask any intergovernmental organization to provide information or documents. The Court may also ask for other forms of cooperation and assistance which may be agreed upon with such an organization and which are in accordance with its competence or mandate.”

Amnesty International’s Campaign to Destroy Israel

In March, the human-rights organization Amnesty International engineered a publicity stunt. It wasn’t aimed at condemning Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which had just sent roughly 150,000 troops into Ukraine to slaughter civilians

www.commentary.org

 

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Part 6

Thus, Amnesty’s report and others like it add to the impression of a body of evidence and legal analysis supporting a warped view among the international legal elite that the Jewish State of Israel, like apartheid South Africa, is illegitimate and unwelcome in the brotherhood of nations. From this presumption of illegitimacy, a cascade of conclusions follows. Amnesty suggests “dismantling this cruel system of apartheid” by:

1. extending to all Palestinians “in Israel and the OPT” “equal and full human rights … without discrimination”;
2. extending the “right of return” to all “Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived in Israel or the OPT”;
3. providing “full reparations” to the alleged “victims of human rights violations, crimes against humanity and serious violations of international humanitarian law—and their families”;
4. encouraging countries to “pressure Israel into dismantling its apartheid system” through investigation of individual criminal liability of those who have committed the crime of apartheid;
5. inviting the ICC prosecutor “to consider the applicability of the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current formal investigation” of Israel’s activity in the OPT;
6. inviting the UN Security Council to either “refer the entire situation to the ICC” or to establish “an international tribunal to try alleged perpetrators”;
7. inviting the UN Security Council to “impose targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes, against Israeli officials implicated in the crime of apartheid, and a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel”; and
8. “calling on states to institute and enforce a ban on products from Israeli settlements.”

Any differences between this platform and those of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine are purely cosmetic, not substantive. Amnesty’s recommendations come packaged in a glossy and colorful report, but this is legal warfare (“lawfare,” as some have aptly called it) against the Jewish state. The goal, unmistakably, is the destruction of Israel.


Finally, the human-rights organizations that have internalized the Palestinian narrative, and now aid and abet international lawfare, do the Palestinians more harm than good. If Amnesty lived up to its own mantra (“deeply held core principles of impartiality, independence and accuracy”), it might facilitate a more honest reckoning that could pave a pathway for peace. Instead, it furnishes maximalist Palestinian leaders with sham legitimacy and institutional cover to wage war and keep their people
in misery.

If and when the peace we pray for finally blooms, it will be no thanks to Amnesty and its fellow travelers who have played the roles of obstructionists rather than facilitators, a crime greater than any charge they level against Israel.

Amnesty International’s Campaign to Destroy Israel

In March, the human-rights organization Amnesty International engineered a publicity stunt. It wasn’t aimed at condemning Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which had just sent roughly 150,000 troops into Ukraine to slaughter civilians

www.commentary.org

 

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Last month, before ending his six-year term as UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Canadian lawyer Michael Lynk issued a report to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza.

As The New York Times reported, “the claim is the first time that a UN-appointed investigator has accused Israel of apartheid in such an unequivocal way.”
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Lynk is true to form in his report to the UNHRC, where his inflammatory rhetoric again shows his bias. For example, he characterizes Israel as “a covetous alien power” caught in “the fever-dream of settler-colonialism.” In Gaza, he says, Israel subjects the population to a “medieval military blockade” aimed at the “indefinite warehousing of an unwanted population.” Overall, Israel’s “intent is for the Palestinians to be encased in a political ossuary, a museum relic of 21st century colonialism.” Sounds like a calm, objective analysis, doesn’t it?

Lynk rests his argument on what can charitably be called a creative reading of the law. He notes that the Convention Against Apartheid and the 1998 Rome Statute both speak in terms of race. Thus, the essence of the crime of apartheid, he says, is one race oppressing another. This raises some inconvenient questions. For example, are Israeli Jews a race? Or are they a nation with a diverse population? Are Palestinians a separate race? And didn’t the UN resolve this whole matter when it repealed the “Zionism is racism” resolution?

Clearly, Lynk is uncomfortable with these questions, and would rather not deal with them. Instead, he tries to rely on a novel theory proposed by Norwegian professor Carola Lingaas, who “argues that race in international criminal law should be constructed according to the perpetrator’s perception of the victims’ ostensible otherness. The perpetrator’s imagination as manifested through his behavior defines the victims’ racial group membership.”

Strict definitions of race should be avoided, she says. Imagination is what matters. Is that what the drafters of the Convention Against Apartheid and the Rome Statute had in mind? Not likely.

In any event, as historian Benny Morris recently said when he addressed the apartheid issue in The Wall Street Journal, the conflict is not about race: “Instead, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is essentially national, a struggle between two nations over the same tract of land.” And that goes straight to heart of Lynk’s argument: the issue of Palestinian self-determination. As Lynk would have it, Israel’s apartheid regime has denied Palestinians a state of their own. Of course, the world community offered Palestinians a state in 1947. They rejected it, and tried to murder every Jew in Israel.


(full article online)

UN Official Takes a Final, Parting Shot at Israel - Algemeiner.com

Last month, before ending his six-year term as UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Canadian lawyer Michael Lynk issued a report to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza. As The...

www.algemeiner.com

 

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Importantly, the rights of Israeli Arabs are so comprehensive and protected, that to accuse Israel of apartheid is simply misinformation and libel. Keep in mind, Israel is a country where an Arab Supreme Court judge sent a Jewish president of Israel to jail. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East where its 20% Arab minority enjoys full equal rights before and under the law. Israeli Arabs consistently affirm they would rather live in Israel as a minority than anywhere else in the Middle East as part of the majority. Israel’s vibrancy, its openness, and tolerance have solidified its credentials as a progressive liberal democracy whose Arab minority not only enjoys the same rights as all other Israeli citizens, they occupy positions at the pinnacle of Israeli society. Arabs have been elected to Israel’s parliament, they fight in the Israel Defense Forces and partake in every facet of Israeli society. Furthermore, Israel has over 400 mosques throughout the country and there are zero synagogues (and Jews) in Gaza and Palestinian Authority controlled-areas.

Just ask Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Arab-Islamist party Ra’am who repudiated AI and HRW’s “apartheid” slur.

(full article online)

Queen’s Journal Editorial Accuses University’s Student Union of Being Insufficiently Anti-Israel, Promotes BDS

An April 8 editorial in the Queen’s Journal by one of the newspaper’s Editors in Chief, Shelby Talbot, “The AMS

honestreporting.ca

 

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If you’re after evidence of apartheid in Israel, you don’t have to look very far. Amid rioting by Palestinians and Arabs, the Israel Police has declared the Temple Mount in Jerusalem off-limits. For ten days, only practitioners of one religion will be allowed to visit.

For context, Temple Mount is home to the Holy of Holies, the most sacred site in Judaism, and is where the First and Second Temples stood until their destruction by the Babylonians and Romans, respectively. Following Jerusalem’s conquest by Islamic imperialists in the 7th century, a succession of caliphs worked to Islamise the Temple Mount by erecting Muslim worship sites including the Dome of the Rock, built on top of the old Jewish temple, and Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

In recent days, Arab and Muslim rioters have run amok on the Temple Mount and throughout the Old City. They have fired off Molotov cocktails and rocks at law enforcement from inside Al-Aqsa. They have beaten religious Jews on their way to pray at the Western Wall. They have stoned at least ten buses, injuring passengers including a 13-year-old girl. Hence why the Israel Police has said adherents of one religion and one religion alone will be permitted on the Temple Mount for the next ten days. That one religion is, naturally, Islam.

For centuries, Jews were forbidden from ascending Temple Mount by the occupying empire of the day
Welcome to Israel, apartheid state. This interdict is not unusual and nor is the tumult that has occasioned it; both have played out semi-regularly in recent years. Religious discrimination against non-Muslims is in fact routine on Temple Mount, which is governed by the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, a Jordanian religious trust, in cooperation with the Israel Police.
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Rather than acknowledge Israel’s self-denying efforts to keep the peace on Temple Mount, the international community simply breezes past them and onto their condemnations. It is taken as given that Israel ought to cede sovereignty in its capital city and task its police with arresting Jewish citizens for praying on a hill. This goes to the hypocrisy that runs through elite western (and, it must be said, Israeli) discourses on Israel and the Palestinians. Western legal norms and the assumptions of rights-based liberalism are applied – often, though not always, dishonestly – to characterise Israeli laws, military decisions and security measures as arbitrary and discriminatory, motivated by racial and religious malice and a nationalist desire to dominate the Palestinians. Because Israel is not Sweden, it is damned as South Africa.

Yet this commitment to universalising western values only goes one way. It is not applied to Palestinian demands for a Jew-free state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, nor to Palestinian prohibitions – backed up by the death penalty – against selling property to Jews. Most noticeably, it does not apply when Israel discriminates against its Jewish citizens and restricts their liberty of movement and freedom to manifest their religious faith. Israelis often complain about double standards but there is only one standard and it is always against Israel.

The Temple Mount compromise is messy, unjust, inequitable and probably doesn't bring a fraction of the benefits the Israeli security establishment tells itself, but it is an accommodation made in the interests of public order, stability, and coexistence. It is plainly discriminatory against Jews but Israel figures, rightly or wrongly, that this is the price of keeping an uneasy peace. There's your apartheid state.

(full article online)

Israel is an apartheid state

If you’re after evidence of apartheid in Israel, you don’t have to look very far. Amid rioting by Palestinians and Arabs, the Israel Police has declared the Temple Mount in Jerusalem off-limits. For ten days, only practitioners of one religion will be allowed to visit. For context, Temple Mount...

www.spectator.co.uk

 

[Sixties Fan]

To find more evidence of the emptiness of the “apartheid” slur against Israel, one can quickly look at this week’s “Israeli Apartheid Week” at Harvard University.

These activists are not opposed to some imaginary “Israeli apartheid,” but to the right of states like Israel and Ukraine, and their respective peoples, to exist.

So much for Mehdi Hasan’s laughable attempts to compare Israel to Russia.

Every day this week, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee (Harvard PSC) is hosting a number of speakers who unintentionally illuminate a fundamental truth about anti-Israel activists: they’re not interested in promoting human rights, but in denying human rights to disfavored groups.

While purportedly a week about the imagined evils of Israel, many of the speakers selected by Harvard PSC have recently been loudest about Putin’s attempt to wipe Ukraine off the map.

Margeret Kimberley, who spoke on Monday, has a penchant for comparing Ukrainians to Nazis, and has been regularly sharing obvious Russian propaganda on Twitter. For example, Kimberley thinks the “real Nazis are in Ukraine” and that they’re preparing “a chemical weapon false flag” attack.

Another speaker, Abbas Muntaqim, is a producer at the Iranian state news agency Press TV. Muntaqim likes to claimthat “neo-nazis, al qaeda, and anarchists are all linked up fighting the Russians,” and that is “all you need to know about this Ukrainian regime.”

Noam Chomsky, who has a habit of downplaying or denying atrocities committed in places like Srebrenica and Syria, is another featured speaker. Just a few days ago, he told Ukrainians to “pay attention to the world” and to surrender to Russia’s invasion.

Unsurprisingly for an “Israeli Apartheid Week,” many of these speakers not only run interference for Russian attempts to wipe Ukraine off the map, but also condone Palestinian terrorism and Arab wars meant to wipe the Jewish state off the map.

Muntaqim, for example, celebrates Iran for providing rockets and other weapons to “the Palestinian resistance,” and labels the former Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani as a “hero of humanity” for fighting “against the Zionist regime as well as the amerikan [sic] empire…”

(full article online)

The Pro-War Proclivities of Harvard’s ‘Anti-Apartheid’ Speakers - Algemeiner.com

To find more evidence of the emptiness of the “apartheid” slur against Israel, one can quickly look at this week’s “Israeli Apartheid Week” at Harvard University. These activists are not opposed to some imaginary “Israeli apartheid,” but to the right of states like Israel and Ukraine, and their...

www.algemeiner.com

 

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The government of the Netherlands has rejected Amnesty International’s report accusing Israel of apartheid against the Palestinians, Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra has said.


“The cabinet does not agree with Amnesty’s conclusion that there is apartheid in Israel or the territories occupied by Israel,” Hoekstra wrote on Friday to a group of legislators asking the government to respond to the report.


“Apartheid is a specific legal term and a serious international crime, and it is up to a judge to judge whether this is the case,” the Dutch foreign minister wrote. “In light of the above, the cabinet also rejects the recommendations made by Amnesty in the report.”

(full article online)

Netherlands rejects Amnesty report accusing Israel of apartheid

Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra: “The cabinet does not agree with Amnesty’s conclusion that there is apartheid in Israel."

www.jpost.com

 

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Newest "Apartheid?" poster: An Arab female Muslim major in the IDF

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

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The Emirati Alsharif and the Israeli Haddad, who are both Arabs, met at a Holocaust Memorial Ceremony in a Muslim country, and have been working for two years "to produce a new reality."​

(full article online)

https://www.israelhayom.com/2022/05/16/its-not-apartheid-gulf-influencers-are-shattering-stigmas-about-israel/

 

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Running Blind: Avi Solomon Knows a Thing or Two About Facing Challenge​

Avi Solomon is sitting on his couch at his home in Beit Shemesh playing with his two-month-old daughter, Malka. Nike, his service dog, is by his side. His six other children are at school, and it’s a rare moment of quiet for Solomon, a marathon runner, because he is resting on doctor’s orders.

Solomon, who is blind, took a tumble just a few weeks earlier at the 31st kilometer of the London Marathon in October, and injured his leg. It won’t stop him for long, though. The 40k Abu Dhabi marathon is coming up in November, and Solomon is not the type of man to let anything get in his way.

Aside from running marathons, Solomon also works various jobs to support his family; founded a nonprofit called Moreshet Avot, to bring Ethiopian youth and adults back into the fold of religious Judaism; and leads inclusivity activities for groups including Afikim, Afikim – Ending the cycle of poverty through education a nonprofit organization that helps children and families at risk.

(full article online)

Running Blind: Avi Solomon Knows a Thing or Two About Facing Challenge | United with Israel

Ethiopian-Israeli Avi Solomon isn’t about to let anything stop him, or the children at risk whom he helps, achieve what they desire.

unitedwithisrael.org

 

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Question: Hi, I am an Arab student who pays 400 NIS dues to the student union at the start of every year and I want to ask you something:

Why does the student union hold its biggest event, Student Day, on Jerusalem Liberation Day when it is really Jerusalem Occupation Day?

How come the union ignores the Arabs who make up a significant percentage of the student body at the Hebrew University campus, and prevents them from enjoying the event, knowing that they cannot take part in the most lavish and grandiose celebration held all year, one that should be open to all students, one that every student should be able to attend without hesitation?

Response:

Ya sahabi – My friend -

Student Day is celebrated intentionally and purposefully on the day of Jerusalem's liberation from Muslim occupation – and if there is anyone who should be celebrating on that day, it is you and your fellow Arab students at the university. Let me explain why, briefly:

Had you not been liberated from the Jordanian Occupation, it is more than probable that you would have found yourself persecuted, downtrodden, poverty stricken, uneducated and perhaps even decapitated ISIS-al Qaeda-style. You may not like hearing this, but dear fellow student, your life under Israeli "occupation" is much better than it would be under any other Middle Eastern regime.

In Syria – you would be slaughtered on the battlefield, killed during a bombing or murdered by gassing

In Lebanon – you would be drafted to Hezbollah's ranks, killed in service or murdered in a civil war

In Iraq – your head would be sundered from your neck forthwith

In Yemen – you would risk being shot in the street

In Egypt – You would be eliminated in a violent police action or one carried out by Salafist organizations and the Muslim Brotherhood.


It seems that even if you lived in Jordan (because, of course, you would never live in the other countries mentioned above) you would be poor, ignorant, lacking academic education, perhaps dwelling in an Egyptian cemetery or a clay house in northern Jordan, perhaps in a delapidated refugee camp outside Damascus.


Your honor would be stepped on and your rights trampled underfoot, but there is no question that you would be "independent" and not "occupied". How lucky you are! After all, in any of those countries, who would care if someone beheads you, humiliates your wife, steals your money, forces you to live in a certain way- the main thing would be that you live under an independent Arab regime and, heaven forfend, not under the authority of those yahuds.


And that is why Jerusalem Liberation Day is first and foremost your holiday, ya habibi. It is the Nakba and the Taksa that enable you to read and write, use the internet, and be a consumer like those in Western countries, expressing your opinions in public without fear of being arrested or killed, choosing to be religious or not without repercussions.

You can study whatever your heart desires at the university – at the state's expense, enjoy the services on the National Insurance administration, have the use of running water and reliable electricity – and a feeling of real personal security. You do not have to worry that some government bureaucrat will burst into your house and demand a bribe. And even if you commit a crime – no one will cut off your hands, stone you or hang you.



This is really your holiday, ya habibi, and the university celebrates Student Day on this day especially for you.



As for us, we celebrate the return to our historic homeland on this day – a national holiday, true, but for you? You celebrate a personal hoiday along with the general one.



You have achieved a better life in the Jewish State, instead of drowning in the thick, bubbling bloodbath in which the rest of the Middle East is up to its neck.



Ya Salame – hey, man - Mazel tov!

Response to a question from an Arab fellow student at Hebrew U.

Isn't it unfair to the Arab students to have Student Day take place on Jerusalem Liberation Day? A Jewish student responds.

www.israelnationalnews.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

This article was prepared jointly by CAMERA and UK Lawyers for Israel. Their joint press release can be found here. Their extended reply to the Harvard clinic’s submission can be found here.

On 28 February 2022, the Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic jointly submitted a report, alongside the organization Addameer, to a United Nations commission of inquiry against Israel, accusing the Jewish state of committing “apartheid.”

Unfortunately for Harvard’s reputation, that is not what the submission ends up showing. Instead, the submission shows that the students involved have failed to comprehend basic concepts of the rule of law. From committing basic legal analytical errors that would get them laughed out of court to getting basic facts wrong, here are just seven of the errors made in the submission.

7) The Authors Confuse Concepts and Apply the Wrong Standards.
While trying to attack Israel over the topic of administrative detention, the Harvard Law students only succeed in demonstrating a disturbing failure to understand the fundamental importance of applying the correct legal standards.

Administrative detention is a lawful security mechanism under the Geneva Conventions for the inevitably complex security environments of “occupied” territories. It is very different from criminal law procedures. Under international law, as explained by Dinstein, administrative detention is a “measure of preventive rather than punitive nature.” While criminal procedures govern trials for those accused of having committed crimes, administrative detention deals with prospective threats. Such detention is permitted for “imperative reasons of security,” according to the Geneva Conventions, including “the overall security of the civilian population in the occupied territories,” as the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom explained.

The rules surrounding the use of administrative detention are thus very different from those governing criminal trials, including those conducted by military courts. Yet, the authors of the submission appear not to understand these basic differences, attacking Israel’s application of administrative detention by comparing it to Israeli civilian courts.

For example, criminal procedure rules such as the period of time a suspect may be held without indictment are entirely irrelevant to an analysis on the lawfulness of an administrative detention. When the authors tried to apply the former to the latter in their report, they either didn’t actually understand what administrative detention is, or they were deliberately trying to mislead readers.

Neither scenario reflects well upon Harvard Law.

(full article online)

An Embarrassment to the Institution: Seven Basic Errors and Deceptions from the Harvard Law Clinic’s “Israel Apartheid” Submission

The submission shows that the students involved have failed to comprehend basic concepts of the rule of law. From committing basic legal analytical errors

www.camera.org

 

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