After weeks of an historic cultural boycott of the 2022 Sydney Festival for “doing business with an apartheid regime”, we are at a critical juncture. On February 1, a mere two days after the close of the festival, Amnesty International published a landmark 280-page report: Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity. If vindication was needed, this was it.
Joining dozens of Palestinian, international and Israeli human rights organisations, Amnesty’s report reveals how Israel has developed political, legal and military systems to exercise control over every aspect of Palestinian life, through fragmentation, deprivation, dispossession, segregation and institutionalised laws, policies and practices intending to oppress and dominate.
For Palestinians, none of this is new. In a world where Palestinian testimonies, expertise and evidence are frequently silenced and dismissed, our argument that Israel practises the crime against humanity of apartheid has long been central in conversations and our archives.
The importance of Amnesty’s report is that now, those who discount Palestinian voices cannot ignore the fact that one of the world’s leading and most respected human rights agencies has affirmed, through meticulous evidence and detail, what Palestinian organisations and experts have been documenting for years. It also means Amnesty supporters who have traditionally left Palestine out of their progressive politics will need to reconcile the inconsistencies in their views.
Read the article by Randa Abdel-Fattah, Sara Saleh in The Canberra Times.