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A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution
The widely held assumption that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is a temporary situation and that the “peace process” will soon bring an end to Israeli abuses has obscured the reality on the ground today of Israel’s entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians. A single authority, the Israeli government, rules primarily over the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), made-up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza.
Drawing on years of human rights documentation, case studies and a review of government planning documents, statements by officials and other sources, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution examines Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and evaluates whether particular Israeli policies and practices in certain areas amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.
Drawing on years of human rights documentation, case studies and a review of government planning documents, statements by officials and other sources, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution examines Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and evaluates whether particular Israeli policies and practices in certain areas amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.
- GenresPolitics
217 pages, ebook
First published April 1, 2021
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Human Rights Watch
607 books40 followersHuman Rights Watch is one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights. By focusing international attention where human rights are violated, we give voice to the oppressed and hold oppressors accountable for their crimes. Our rigorous, objective investigations and strategic, targeted advocacy build intense pressure for action and raise the cost of human rights abuse. For more than 30 years, Human Rights Watch has worked tenaciously to lay the legal and moral groundwork for deep-rooted change and has fought to bring greater justice and security to people around the world.
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June 21, 2021This report makes specific, well-defined accusations (namely, that the Israeli government has continued and continues to commit the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution), backs them up with thorough evidence from a range of credible sources, and offers clear steps for what ought to be done. If this is what a 5/5 rating means, then I give the report a 5/5 rating.
It was quite repetitive, which was a bit tedious, but admittedly helpful to me as a lay person with a rather shallow understanding of the facts on the ground in Israel and the Occupied Territories. You will find a given sentence repeated *verbatim* three or four times in different sections of the report, so it could have been condensed from 217 pages to about, oh I don't know, 160.
Broadly, I went into the report expecting documentation of gross human rights abuses but little proof of an ethnically discriminatory intent. In general, intent is notoriously hard to prove. But in this case, I was mistaken: the report includes very substantial evidence of the intent to discriminate against Palestinians, including those who have Israeli citizenship, *solely* based on their ethnicity.
For example:
"In 2011, the Israeli Knesset passed a law permitting towns in the Negev and Galilee with up to 400 households to maintain admissions committees that can reject applicants from living there for being 'not suitable for the social life of the community' or for incompatibility with the 'social-cultural fabric.' The law’s sponsors openly spoke about how the law would facilitate the creation and maintenance of Jewish-only communities." (p. 59)
The obvious question: would it or would it not be anti-Semitic if some town in the US were legally allowed to ban Jews from living there due to being 'not suitable for the social life of the community' or incompatible with the community's 'social-cultural fabric'? Of course it would.
Another couple of examples of discriminatory intent:
"In March 2019, this time as prime minister, Netanyahu declared, 'Israel is not a state of all its citizens,' but rather 'the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.'" (p. 17-18)
"In June 2018, several Knesset members sought to introduce a bill to define Israel as a state of all its citizens, but the Knesset presidium disqualified it before it could be discussed since it 'seeks to deny Israel’s existence as the state of the Jewish people,' the Knesset legal advisor said." (p. 46)
In terms of other surprises in the report, I feel that the report actually went to great lengths to include nuance, even when that nuance might not be politically convenient to the Palestinian cause. Here are some examples of what I mean by that:
"There is nothing in international law to bar Israel from promoting Jewish immigration. Jewish Israelis, many of whom historically migrated to Mandatory Palestine or later to Israel to escape anti-Semitic persecution in different parts of the world, are entitled to protection of their safety and fundamental rights. However, that latitude does not give a state the prerogative to discriminate against people who already live in that country, including with respect to rights concerning family reunification, and against people who have a right to return to the country." (18)
"Not all policies designed to promote Judaization constitute rights abuses. Particular policies can, though, provide evidence of a discriminatory intent or purpose to maintain domination by Jewish Israelis." (44)
Page 133 of the report cites a UN Commission of Inquiry in criticizing Israel's response to "at times violent" Gaza protests from 2018-2019. Israeli forces fired live rounds at "unarmed protesters, children and disabled persons, and at health workers and journalists performing their duties, knowing who they are," which killed 214 Palestinians and injured over 8,000. The criticism is specifically that Israel's response to these protests was "neither necessary nor proportional," a stance which is actually pretty charitable towards Israel; the notions of "necessity" and "proportionality" are murky as they suggest that there's a "right" way for an occupying force to quell protests against said occupation. (Side note: the report also handily refutes Israel's claim that it's no longer occupying Gaza.)
Here is another excerpt that one could argue is actually pretty lenient towards Israeli:
"Israeli authorities do face legitimate security challenges in Israel and the OPT. However, restrictions that do not seek to balance human rights such as freedom of movement against legitimate security concerns by, for example, conducting individualized security assessments rather than barring the entire population of Gaza from leaving with only rare exceptions, go far beyond what international law permits. Even where security forms part of the motivation behind a particular policy, that does not give Israel a carte blanche to violate human rights en masse. Legitimate security concerns can be present among policies that amount to apartheid, just as they can be present in a policy that sanctions the use of excessive force or torture." (p. 18)
And here's some more nuance that I think is quite helpful:
"To analyze the motivations behind Israeli policies towards Palestinians today, which developed over many years with much of the architecture established in the early years of the state and the occupation, this chapter considers materials that in some cases date back decades. This does not implicate every official cited in seeking to dominate Palestinians. In fact, some Israeli officials and parties advocated positions that, if implemented, could have avoided such policies." (p. 44)
Similarly, the report highlights some cases in which Israeli Jews recognized sheer injustice and followed their conscience at pivotal moments:
"According to historian Benny Morris, Israeli officials gave the order to 'uproot all the residents of Nazareth,' but the commander of the nascent Israeli army’s brigade given the order, Ben Dunkelman, refused to carry it out, and authorities eventually allowed the city to surrender." (p. 160-161)
I recall Ilan Pappe highlighting some such cases in "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine."
What else is there to say? I'll just list below some more excerpts that caught my eye:
"Israeli forces in Hebron prohibit Palestinians from walking on large sections of what use to be the central thoroughfare of the city as part of making those areas 'sterile' of Palestinians, as per the parlance of the Israeli army." (p. 92)
Wtf... I mean, don't talk about the goal of making an area "sterile" of a particular ethnic group and then act so surprised when people notice the resemblance to the language of the Nazis.
"In March 2019, the Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu justified allowing funding from Qatar to enter Gaza to support Hamas authorities in order to maintain the divide between Fatah and Hamas and thereby the separation between the West Bank and Gaza." (p. 75)
"Israeli authorities in January 2008 calculated the minimum number of calories per person that Gaza residents needed to avoid malnutrition, although they insist they never implemented a policy based on the calculation. Israeli officials said at the time that they wanted to keep Gaza’s economy 'on the brink of collapse' while avoiding a humanitarian crisis." (p. 137)
"[...] the 1980 Drobles Plan, which guided the government's settlement policy in the West Bank at the time and built on prior plans, called for authorities to 'settle the land between the [Arab] minority population centers and their surroundings,' noting that doing so would make it 'hard for Palestinians to create territorial contiguity and political unity' and 'remove any trace of doubt about our intention to control Judea and Samaria forever'." (p. 12)
"Inside Israel, Israel’s Proclamation of Independence affirms the 'complete equality' of all residents, but a two-track citizenship structure contradicts that vow and effectively regards Jews and Palestinians separately and unequally. Israel’s 1952 Citizenship Law contains a separate track exclusively for Jews to obtain automatic citizenship. [...] This law creates a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country, cannot." (p. 17)
"Between 2005 and 2019, police closed 91 percent of the complaints tracked by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din of reported settler violence against Palestinian persons and property without indicting anyone." (p. 91)
"[...] Israeli authorities offer a range of incentives, including housing benefits, budgetary perks, and tax breaks to encourage Jewish Israelis to move to settlements. In doing so, they have steadily and unlawfully expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank for decades." (p. 92)
"The decades-long 'peace process' has neither significantly improved the human rights situation on the ground nor altered the reality of overall Israeli control across Israel and the OPT. Instead, the peace process is regularly cited to oppose efforts for rights-based international action or accountability, and as cover for Israel’s entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians in the OPT." (p. 26)
"Israeli authorities demolished more than 10,000 Bedouin homes in the Negev between 2013 and 2019, according to government data. They razed on unrecognized village that challenged the expropriation of its lands, al-Araqib, 185 times." (p. 13)
"Even within Israel where both Jews and Palestinians are citizens, authorities classify Jews and Palestinians as belonging to different 'nationalities'." (p. 38)
"Palestinian citizens of Israel [are] barred effectively from hundreds of small Jewish towns in Israel & largely concentrated on about 3% of the land." (p. 11)
"Human Rights Watch in 2014 and 2015 interviewed fourteen farmers from Salfit and the village of Marda, just north of Ariel, who own land that Israeli authorities either confiscated or restricted their access to in order to build settlements or fences or as a result of their construction. The farmers who maintained ownership of their land can access it only with prior permission of the Israeli army, which often only permits them to do so two or three times a year for a limited number of days. In each case, the farmers described how Israeli restrictions, including how often they could cultivate the land and what equipment they could use, drastically reduced the productivity of their harvest and even limited what crops they could grow. Two farmers stopped cultivating all or part of their land altogether, despite their fears that Israel may designate it as state land on the basis that Palestinians have not continuously cultivated it.” (p. 102)
In other words, Israel places absurd restrictions on when these farmers can access their land, what equipment they can use on it, and even what crops they can grow--and then holds them to a standard of "continuously" cultivating it. If they fall short of the standard, Israeli law permits the government to seize the land. How utterly infuriating.
It was quite repetitive, which was a bit tedious, but admittedly helpful to me as a lay person with a rather shallow understanding of the facts on the ground in Israel and the Occupied Territories. You will find a given sentence repeated *verbatim* three or four times in different sections of the report, so it could have been condensed from 217 pages to about, oh I don't know, 160.
Broadly, I went into the report expecting documentation of gross human rights abuses but little proof of an ethnically discriminatory intent. In general, intent is notoriously hard to prove. But in this case, I was mistaken: the report includes very substantial evidence of the intent to discriminate against Palestinians, including those who have Israeli citizenship, *solely* based on their ethnicity.
For example:
"In 2011, the Israeli Knesset passed a law permitting towns in the Negev and Galilee with up to 400 households to maintain admissions committees that can reject applicants from living there for being 'not suitable for the social life of the community' or for incompatibility with the 'social-cultural fabric.' The law’s sponsors openly spoke about how the law would facilitate the creation and maintenance of Jewish-only communities." (p. 59)
The obvious question: would it or would it not be anti-Semitic if some town in the US were legally allowed to ban Jews from living there due to being 'not suitable for the social life of the community' or incompatible with the community's 'social-cultural fabric'? Of course it would.
Another couple of examples of discriminatory intent:
"In March 2019, this time as prime minister, Netanyahu declared, 'Israel is not a state of all its citizens,' but rather 'the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.'" (p. 17-18)
"In June 2018, several Knesset members sought to introduce a bill to define Israel as a state of all its citizens, but the Knesset presidium disqualified it before it could be discussed since it 'seeks to deny Israel’s existence as the state of the Jewish people,' the Knesset legal advisor said." (p. 46)
In terms of other surprises in the report, I feel that the report actually went to great lengths to include nuance, even when that nuance might not be politically convenient to the Palestinian cause. Here are some examples of what I mean by that:
"There is nothing in international law to bar Israel from promoting Jewish immigration. Jewish Israelis, many of whom historically migrated to Mandatory Palestine or later to Israel to escape anti-Semitic persecution in different parts of the world, are entitled to protection of their safety and fundamental rights. However, that latitude does not give a state the prerogative to discriminate against people who already live in that country, including with respect to rights concerning family reunification, and against people who have a right to return to the country." (18)
"Not all policies designed to promote Judaization constitute rights abuses. Particular policies can, though, provide evidence of a discriminatory intent or purpose to maintain domination by Jewish Israelis." (44)
Page 133 of the report cites a UN Commission of Inquiry in criticizing Israel's response to "at times violent" Gaza protests from 2018-2019. Israeli forces fired live rounds at "unarmed protesters, children and disabled persons, and at health workers and journalists performing their duties, knowing who they are," which killed 214 Palestinians and injured over 8,000. The criticism is specifically that Israel's response to these protests was "neither necessary nor proportional," a stance which is actually pretty charitable towards Israel; the notions of "necessity" and "proportionality" are murky as they suggest that there's a "right" way for an occupying force to quell protests against said occupation. (Side note: the report also handily refutes Israel's claim that it's no longer occupying Gaza.)
Here is another excerpt that one could argue is actually pretty lenient towards Israeli:
"Israeli authorities do face legitimate security challenges in Israel and the OPT. However, restrictions that do not seek to balance human rights such as freedom of movement against legitimate security concerns by, for example, conducting individualized security assessments rather than barring the entire population of Gaza from leaving with only rare exceptions, go far beyond what international law permits. Even where security forms part of the motivation behind a particular policy, that does not give Israel a carte blanche to violate human rights en masse. Legitimate security concerns can be present among policies that amount to apartheid, just as they can be present in a policy that sanctions the use of excessive force or torture." (p. 18)
And here's some more nuance that I think is quite helpful:
"To analyze the motivations behind Israeli policies towards Palestinians today, which developed over many years with much of the architecture established in the early years of the state and the occupation, this chapter considers materials that in some cases date back decades. This does not implicate every official cited in seeking to dominate Palestinians. In fact, some Israeli officials and parties advocated positions that, if implemented, could have avoided such policies." (p. 44)
Similarly, the report highlights some cases in which Israeli Jews recognized sheer injustice and followed their conscience at pivotal moments:
"According to historian Benny Morris, Israeli officials gave the order to 'uproot all the residents of Nazareth,' but the commander of the nascent Israeli army’s brigade given the order, Ben Dunkelman, refused to carry it out, and authorities eventually allowed the city to surrender." (p. 160-161)
I recall Ilan Pappe highlighting some such cases in "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine."
What else is there to say? I'll just list below some more excerpts that caught my eye:
"Israeli forces in Hebron prohibit Palestinians from walking on large sections of what use to be the central thoroughfare of the city as part of making those areas 'sterile' of Palestinians, as per the parlance of the Israeli army." (p. 92)
Wtf... I mean, don't talk about the goal of making an area "sterile" of a particular ethnic group and then act so surprised when people notice the resemblance to the language of the Nazis.
"In March 2019, the Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu justified allowing funding from Qatar to enter Gaza to support Hamas authorities in order to maintain the divide between Fatah and Hamas and thereby the separation between the West Bank and Gaza." (p. 75)
"Israeli authorities in January 2008 calculated the minimum number of calories per person that Gaza residents needed to avoid malnutrition, although they insist they never implemented a policy based on the calculation. Israeli officials said at the time that they wanted to keep Gaza’s economy 'on the brink of collapse' while avoiding a humanitarian crisis." (p. 137)
"[...] the 1980 Drobles Plan, which guided the government's settlement policy in the West Bank at the time and built on prior plans, called for authorities to 'settle the land between the [Arab] minority population centers and their surroundings,' noting that doing so would make it 'hard for Palestinians to create territorial contiguity and political unity' and 'remove any trace of doubt about our intention to control Judea and Samaria forever'." (p. 12)
"Inside Israel, Israel’s Proclamation of Independence affirms the 'complete equality' of all residents, but a two-track citizenship structure contradicts that vow and effectively regards Jews and Palestinians separately and unequally. Israel’s 1952 Citizenship Law contains a separate track exclusively for Jews to obtain automatic citizenship. [...] This law creates a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country, cannot." (p. 17)
"Between 2005 and 2019, police closed 91 percent of the complaints tracked by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din of reported settler violence against Palestinian persons and property without indicting anyone." (p. 91)
"[...] Israeli authorities offer a range of incentives, including housing benefits, budgetary perks, and tax breaks to encourage Jewish Israelis to move to settlements. In doing so, they have steadily and unlawfully expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank for decades." (p. 92)
"The decades-long 'peace process' has neither significantly improved the human rights situation on the ground nor altered the reality of overall Israeli control across Israel and the OPT. Instead, the peace process is regularly cited to oppose efforts for rights-based international action or accountability, and as cover for Israel’s entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians in the OPT." (p. 26)
"Israeli authorities demolished more than 10,000 Bedouin homes in the Negev between 2013 and 2019, according to government data. They razed on unrecognized village that challenged the expropriation of its lands, al-Araqib, 185 times." (p. 13)
"Even within Israel where both Jews and Palestinians are citizens, authorities classify Jews and Palestinians as belonging to different 'nationalities'." (p. 38)
"Palestinian citizens of Israel [are] barred effectively from hundreds of small Jewish towns in Israel & largely concentrated on about 3% of the land." (p. 11)
"Human Rights Watch in 2014 and 2015 interviewed fourteen farmers from Salfit and the village of Marda, just north of Ariel, who own land that Israeli authorities either confiscated or restricted their access to in order to build settlements or fences or as a result of their construction. The farmers who maintained ownership of their land can access it only with prior permission of the Israeli army, which often only permits them to do so two or three times a year for a limited number of days. In each case, the farmers described how Israeli restrictions, including how often they could cultivate the land and what equipment they could use, drastically reduced the productivity of their harvest and even limited what crops they could grow. Two farmers stopped cultivating all or part of their land altogether, despite their fears that Israel may designate it as state land on the basis that Palestinians have not continuously cultivated it.” (p. 102)
In other words, Israel places absurd restrictions on when these farmers can access their land, what equipment they can use on it, and even what crops they can grow--and then holds them to a standard of "continuously" cultivating it. If they fall short of the standard, Israeli law permits the government to seize the land. How utterly infuriating.
November 18, 2023
This report is extremely nuanced and well-researched; it aligns with my own experience having been born and grown up into adulthood in the West Bank, where one's entire life experience, right to citizenship, range of movement and even tolerable physical presence, right to water consumption, the type of laws one is judged by...etc are all defined in terms of one's ethnicity.
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November 18, 2023i read this 200 page report for a 15 min podcast i deserve to have it count on goodreads towards my reading goal
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