Israeli soldiers detaining a Palestinian boy during clashes in the West Bank city of Hebron in 2018. (Reuters)

Declaration of Israel as an apartheid state by Amnesty welcomed globally

Amnesty International is yet another reputable organisation that has declared Israel as an apartheid state, a fact Palestinians had long believed and experienced.

In its 280-page comprehensive report titled “Israel’s Aparthied against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crimes against humanity, Amnesty has systematically analyzed institutionalised discrimination committed by Israel against Palestinians considering then an inferior non-Jewish racial group.

The declaration by Amnesty has been welcomed by a number of Palestinian rights and advocacy groups including the BDS movement calling the  international community to enforce an end to apartheid against the Palestinian people.

“Australia must stop denying, minimising or excusing Israel’s criminal actions, and instead join with others in the international community in calling for an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, dating from 1967; the scrapping of the racist Nation State law of 2018 and the dozens of laws and regulations that discriminate against non-Jews, and for Palestinians to be facilitated in exercising their lawful right of return to the homes from which they were driven out at the inception of the State of Israel in 1948”, said Jake Lynch, patron of BDS Australia and Associate Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney.

The report begins with a quote from the former Israeli Prime Minister saying in a March 2019 statement that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens… [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.” Under international and human law, describe such a statement as racist.

Read the article by Dr Aslam Abdullah on AMUST.