‘Human Rights Watch’ will accuse Israel of ‘crime of apartheid,’ rightwing site reports

A leading American human rights group will declare this week that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, according to a rightwing pro-Israel publication.

The apartheid finding by Human Rights Watch has been rumored for weeks, including on our site. Yesterday Algemeiner said that the report will be published tomorrow and is titled, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.”

The report is said to support the International Criminal Court investigation of Israel and to call for global sanctions against some Israeli actions that serve apartheid.

The Human Rights Watch report appears to be part of a trend in which mainstream organizations come out for an end to Israeli impunity. In January the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said that Israel maintains an “apartheid… regime of Jewish supremacy” from the river to the sea. Then last week the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace called on the U.S. government to begin pressuring Israel to guarantee equal rights to Palestinians under its rule.

The article in Algemeiner says that the Human Rights Watch report on apartheid identifies several “racist” Israeli policies that have “demographic goals,” aimed at increasing the number of Jews in lands controlled by Israel and reducing the number of Palestinians. One such policy is Israeli law that discriminates against Palestinians from the occupied territories who establish residency inside Israel. The laws, HRW says per the article, exploit “security as a justification to advance demographic objectives” and “many of these abuses … have no legitimate security justifications.”

HRW seeks an end to Israeli impunity, according to Algemeiner:

The publication then states that the International Criminal Court (ICC) should “investigate and prosecute individuals credibly implicated in the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution.”

It also recommends sanctions on Israel and Israeli citizens and conditions on arms sales, pushes for “due diligence” in regard to trading with Israel, advocates another in a long list of United Nations investigations into Israel as well as “the role of other actors, including companies and officials of other states,” and says that “businesses active in Israel … directly contribute to the crimes of apartheid and persecution.”

Last week Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, said on a Carnegie webinar that the apartheid accusation had been leveled by “blue chip human rights organizations in Palestine and Israel… and the global human rights organizations are apparently not far behind.”

On Saturday Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment, three times used the term “apartheid” to refer to Israeli governance in a webinar by the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs. Hassan said that as the peace process has collapsed and failed to deliver, there is growing impatience even among Washington insiders over Israel’s intransigent conduct.

The B’Tselem finding of apartheid in January got little response in the U.S. Our leading papers ignored it, and liberal Zionist groups all but dismissed it. The Human Rights Watch report may be different, given HRW’s global status. Algemeiner says that the Israel lobby group NGO Watch is gearing up to attack the report.

We’ll get you a full account of the HRW report when it comes out.

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