The Mission of the State of Palestine would like to share this report with you on apartheid in Palestine and the reality of Israel’s colonial occupation.

This briefing covers:

•    Apartheid as aggravated racial discrimination – Apartheid is considered an aggravated form of racial discrimination under general international law and international human rights law.  Israel is a party to seven of the core international human rights treaties, including ICERD.  Israel, as Occupying Power, has human rights obligations towards Palestinian citizens of the State, but also extraterritorially with respect to Palestinians under its effective military control in the occupied Palestinian territory. Israel must respect, safeguard, and fulfil the human rights treaties in their entirety for the benefit of the Palestinian people on both sides of the Green Line.
•      The crime of apartheid – The practice of apartheid is criminalized in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, 1973 (Apartheid Convention), under the Rome Statute, under Article 85(4)(c) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and under the Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind, 1996, recognizes as a crime against humanity, “institutionalized discrimination on racial, ethnic or religious grounds involving the violation of fundamental human rights and freedoms and resulting in seriously disadvantaging a part of the population”. These instances are recognised as binding “customary international law”.
•     The crime of apartheid in the context of Palestine – The report examines the separate ethnicity of Jews and Palestinians per the laws, charters, customs and beliefs.  A number of key discriminatory laws adopted by the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) in addition to military orders issued in the occupied Palestinian territory provide for a single regime of systematic oppression and domination over all Palestinians, a system upheld by Israeli courts ensuring Israeli-Jewish national hegemony and the denial of Palestinian self-determination. These include laws governing return, citizenship, family unification, land acquisition, and settlement. Israel separates the Palestinian people as a whole, into different “domains”, with a different range of rights and freedoms depending on the density of the Palestinian population and the supposed demographic threat it poses in relation to the land controlled by Israel. In doing so, Israel maintains different spheres of rights, with Israeli-Jewish rights at the apex, having full rights of citizenship and nationality, as Jewish nationals of the State, which the Israeli Supreme Court has determined is a “Jewish Nation”.

This report highlights how Israel maintains its apartheid regime:

•   Fragmentation of the Palestinian people into separate bantustans with restrictions on freedom of movement throughout the areas designated “Palestinian”, including an illegal annexation wall and settler-only roads and infrastructure.
• Undermining of Palestinian culture and heritage – Palestinians are forbidden from holding or displaying their own flag under Israeli military order 101, Judaization and/or transliteration of Palestinian place names from Hebrew, the erasure of Palestinian place names from maps, industrial-scale appropriation of Palestinian archaeological lands for Israeli-Jewish settler commercial touristic use, raids and arrests on Palestinian cultural centres, the pillage of Palestinian archaeological artefacts and impunity for violent and recurrent settler attacks on olive harvesting, including the burning of trees.
•  Maintaining Economic Domination Through Exploitation of Natural Resources – Israel further maintains Israeli-Jewish national domination over Palestinians by crippling the Palestinian national economy and ensuring a captive market and the denial of economic self-determination.
•  Obstructing Palestinian Political Life Under Apartheid – Israel implements legislative and military measures to hamper and obstruct participation in Palestinian political life.  A blanket military order prohibition on assemblies, processions, vigils and publications, relating to “political matter(s) or one liable to be interpreted as political”129 breaches en masse Palestinian rights to freedom of expression and assembly in the occupied territory.

Israel’s Inhumane Acts of Apartheid in Occupied Palestine:

•  Inhumane Act of Forcible Transfer in East Jerusalem – East Jerusalem, capital of the State of Palestine, is an extreme example of a two-tier city in which Palestinians live under Israeli apartheid. In 1967, Israel illegally annexed occupied East Jerusalem, expanding the city’s municipal boundaries and illegally extending Israeli laws, jurisdiction, and administration over the city.  In a deliberate attempt to radically engineer the demography in occupied East Jerusalem, Israel works towards a stated ethnic cleansing goal of achieving a 70:30 demographic ratio of Israel-Jews to Palestinians living in the city. Undertaking a population census in 1967, Israel assigned to approximately 66,000 Palestinians present in Jerusalem a temporary and revocable “permanent residency” status, a colonial policy imposing a continual burden on Palestinians to prove that their “centre of life” is Jerusalem. By 2019 Israel had revoked 14,683 of these residencies in what has been termed a “quiet deportation” policy.  Continuing this policy, the Jerusalem Municipality’s Jerusalem 2050 Plan refers to “the desire to have a solid and distinct Jewish majority in Jerusalem”.  Israel applies a discriminatory planning and zoning regime across occupied East Jerusalem to prevent Palestinian population growth and development, as a coercive environment to force transfer.

•   Persecution of the Palestinian People in the Besieged Gaza Strip – The containment of the Palestinian people in the besieged and densely-populated Gaza Strip as a separate and distinct entity is particularly evident from the now permanently entrenched illegal closure and blockade of the Gaza Strip. 
•  Imprisonment or Other Severe Deprivation of Physical Liberty of Palestinians – Israel has instituted administrative detention as a tool to suppress any kind of Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression, colonization, and apartheid.  Today, in the occupied West Bank, Israel continues to operate two separate legal regimes, one for Israeli settlers policed under Israeli domestic law, and another for protected Palestinians administered under the military laws of occupation.
•   Murder and Wilful Killing – Israel ensures the continuation of its apartheid regime over Palestinians through oppressive use of lethal and excessive force by the IOF. Since 2010, OCHA has documented the killing of 3,601 Palestinians and the injury of over 101,897 Palestinians by the IOF.  Israel has waged a number of military offensives on the besieged Gaza Strip, including in 2014 killing 2,251 Palestinian civilians indicating its employment of military policies in breach of international humanitarian law.

The report concludes with final steps on recognition of this apartheid regime by the international community, and obligations under international law.