SPECIAL TO THE South Florida SUN SENTINEL MAY 04, 2021
By DONNA NEVEL
Palestinian laborers some wearing protective face masks amid concerns over the country’s coronavirus outbreak, cross illegally into Israel from the West Bank through an opening in a fence, south of the West Bank town of Hebron on Sept. 6, 2020. One of the world’s best-known human rights groups says Israel is guilty of the international crimes of apartheid and persecution. Human Rights Watch cites discriminatory policies toward Palestinians within Israel’s own borders and in the occupied territories. In so doing, the New York-based group joins a growing number of commentators and rights groups that consider Israel and the territories as a single entity in which Palestinians are denied basic rights that are granted to Jews. (Oded Balilty/AP)
While he wears his great friendship with Israel as a badge of honor, it would do the governor well to read a historic report just released by the prominent global human rights organizations, Human Rights Watch, which documents in great detail and over a period of many years the ways that Israel is committing “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians.Advertisement
Gov. DeSantis has long championed the state of Israel and has called himself Israel’s greatest friend. In fact, while campaigning for governor, DeSantis proclaimed, “As soon as I take the oath of office, that very day, we’ll have the most pro-Israel governor in the country.”
This comes on the heels of another position paper the governor should have read, issued last January by Israel’s premier human rights organization, B’Tselem, which came to similar conclusions. While the charge of apartheid continues to be denied by Israel’s defenders, the evidence could not be any clearer, as laid out in this 213-page report and the numerous well-documented accounts of Israeli apartheid that preceded it.
The Human Rights Watch report details how Israel, in order to achieve its goal of domination over the Palestinians living there, practices institutional discrimination. As stated in the report, “On the basis of its research, Human Rights Watch concludes that the Israeli government has demonstrated an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territory). In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.”
The report goes on to point out that government policy has, for decades, been guided by the clear objective “of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power and land.” And, as the report also documents, “In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
One often hears Israel claiming that it carries out certain practices for security reasons, yet the Human Rights Watch report makes clear that the Israeli government often uses security as a justification to advance its demographic objectives, and so its claims of security needs have served as a pretext for its acts of aggression and violence against Palestinians.
It is no secret that Israel has sought since its inception and in whatever ways it had at its disposal to maintain its control over the land, and that it has long-denied Palestinians their civil, human and national rights. Palestinian human rights groups, scholars, writers, activists and researchers have long described and applied the apartheid framework to Israel. Israel’s laws have always been discriminatory toward Palestinians, and the government has engaged in massive land theft and displacement of Palestinians from their homes. According to Adalah, a legal justice center protecting the human rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the OPT, which has welcomed the HRW report, “Israel has long promoted Jewish supremacy and racial segregation between Jews and Palestinians in all the territories under its control.”
The HRW Report echoes what Palestinians have been saying in great detail for decades. It is also worth noting that over the years, no fewer than four Israeli prime ministers, from David Ben Gurion in 1967 to Ehud Olmert in 2007, have warned that Israel would be an apartheid state if it continued to rule over Palestinians. It is impossible to read the HRW and other reports and testimonies and not recognize the reality of Israeli apartheid. Florida doesn’t need a governor who is an apologist or cheerleader for Israel’s discriminatory system, but, rather, one who stands firmly for liberty, human rights and justice.
Donna Nevel, a community psychologist and educator, is a Jewish social justice activist living in South Florida.
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