Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The UN Office of Human Rights, headed by Volker Türk, on Wednesday issued an extensive report on the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank in which it for the first time described Israeli policies there as Apartheid. The executive summary says, “The report warns that Israel is violating international law requiring States to prohibit and eradicate racial segregation and apartheid.”
Türk told the UN, “There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank. Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives – every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices.”
“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before.” He is referring to racial discrimination in Apartheid South Africa from the late 1940s through the early 1990s.
He concluded, “Every negative trend documented in the report has not only continued but accelerated. And every day this is allowed to continue, the consequences worsen for Palestinians.”
The report ( PDF here) stresses how drastically the human rights situation for Palestinians in the West Bank has deteriorated since 2022:
* Palestinians in the West bank live under a different and harsher set of laws than do the Israeli squatters who have flooded into the territory
* Palestinians therefore have less access to resources, including land and water, than do the squatters
* The report notes that the International Court of Justice in the Hague found in 2024 that “the systemic discrimination against Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, together with the restrictions of movement imposed on Palestinians through checkpoints, as well as limited access to roads, natural resources, land and basic social facilities, amounted to a situation of racial segregation.” The ICJ noted then that the situation verged on Apartheid and would be properly so characterized if the Israelis did not take immediate ameliorating steps (they did not). The ICJ, indeed, ruled the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories it seized in 1967 to now be illegal, since it had departed so extensively from International Humanitarian Law in its rule of these people. Moreover, IHL had envisioned occupations to be short and to endure only during an active war, not to stretch into decades.
* Palestinians’ land and homes are routinely taken away from them by the Israeli authorities or are arbitrarily and lawlessly encroached on by the Israeli squatters. In Jenin, Tulkarem and Tubas Governorates, some 32,000 people were recently expelled by Israeli troops from the refugee camps in which they had lived. The report adds, “Thousands of Palestinians have also been evicted from their homes across the West Bank, which may amount to unlawful transfer, a war crime.” That is, the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute forbid transferring people in militarily occupied territories out of their homes. When the Nazis occupied Poland they expelled a lot of Poles from it in hopes of replacing them with Germans, and these laws were designed prevent a repeat of such policies. The IHRA people can jump up and down all they like, but the Nazi plan for Poland and the Zionist plan for Gaza and the West Bank are very similar.
* Palestinians face “criminal prosecution in military courts during which their due process and fair trial rights are systematically violated.” This treatment is only accorded Palestinians. Israeli squatters on the West Bank who do get into trouble with the law are tried in Israeli civil courts as though they were living in Israel
Photo of predominantly Palestinian Silwan by Steve Marquez on Unsplash
* The UN says, “The report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe the separation, segregation and subordination are intended to be permanent, to maintain oppression and domination of Palestinians. ‘Acts committed with the intention to maintain such a policy amount to a violation of Article 3 of ICERD (the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination), which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid,’ it finds.”
* Israeli troops and squatters sometimes just shoot down innocent Palestinians. They don’t treat Israelis that way, an obvious sign of discrimination. The High Commission on Human Rights, the report says,”has consistently documented patterns of unlawful killings of Palestinians, including apparent extra- judicial executions by the ISF [the Israeli military], with almost complete impunity.” Elsewhere the report notes, “ISF [Israeli Security Forces] have killed 2,321 Palestinians (1,760 men, 65 women, 496 children) in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in the absence of hostilities there, and injured thousands more, in many instances causing life-long injuries and disabilities. In the same period, 205 Israelis (including 148 men, 32 women, 25 children) have been killed in the occupied West Bank,” In the old days, the Israelis maintained a ten to one ration of Palestinians killed to Israelis. The report doesn’t say so, but that ratio has been raised to 100 to one or 1000 to one in some cases.
* The Israelis have demolished the infrastructure of water for the Palestinian West Bank, and then confiscated the water. They make the Palestinians buy back their own water from an Israeli corporation.
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