Amnesty International (AI) today accused Israel of systematic repression and domination over the Palestinians, which has been ongoing since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 and coincides with the international definition of apartheid.
In the 278-page report, which was prepared over four years, the London-based human rights organization joined Human Rights Watch and the Israeli organization Bezelem in accusing apartheid inside Israel and in the occupied territories.
It is part of a growing international movement to redefine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a struggle for equal rights rather than a territorial dispute.
Such efforts have been intensified in the past decade because the peace process is at a complete standstill, and Israel has consolidated its control over the occupied territories, and interest in a two-state solution to the conflict, i.e. the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish one, is disappearing.
Israel rejects all accusations of apartheid, arguing that Arab citizens have the same rights as others.
That country agreed to limited autonomy for the Palestinian Authority at the height of the peace process in the 2005s and withdrew soldiers and Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in XNUMX.
Amnesty and other organizations, however, say that the fragmentation of the territories where Palestinians live is part of a regime of control aimed at maintaining Jewish hegemony in the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Those organizations point to the discriminatory policy within Israel and in the annexed East Jerusalem, the blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has been ruled by the Islamic extremist Hamas since 2007, and the de facto annexation of the West Bank.
Israel has overall control over it and builds and expands Jewish settlements even though most of the international community considers them illegal.
Palestinians have accused Israel of apartheid for years, and their president, Mahmoud Abbas, made the accusation last September in a speech at the UN.
Amnesty says that such policy began in 1948, when about 700.000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in the Israeli-Arab war.
They made up 80 percent of the population in the territory where the state of Israel is today, a state that forbids them to return in order to preserve the Jewish majority.
The Palestinians who remained inside Israel lived under military control until before the 1967 war in which Israel conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinians want to establish their future state on these territories.
Today, Palestinians in Israel have citizenship, the right to vote, and some are successful businessmen, lawyers, doctors, and artists, but they face widespread discrimination in employment and the real estate market.
Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli military control, and those in Gaza are under a paralyzing blockade by both Israel and Egypt.
In Israel itself, they make up about a fifth of the total population of 9,4 million, and the number of Jews and Arabs is approximately equal if those living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are included.
"Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued a policy of maintaining Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over the land in favor of Israeli Jews and preventing Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes," the AI report said, adding that Israel had extended that policy to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Earlier reports about apartheid were rejected by the Israeli authorities as biased, but now they reacted more harshly and before publication accused AI of anti-Semitism and delegitimizing the very existence of the Jewish state.
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