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
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