Middle East Monitor / February 9, 2022
The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University has issued a warning about the increasing number of parties classifying Israel as an apartheid state, Arab48.com reported on Tuesday. The INSS stressed that the reports which describe Israeli apartheid “should be an alarm bell for the future.”
The INSS warning follows the release of Amnesty International’s report in which Israel is described as an apartheid state. Last year, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch came to the same conclusion, while a legal opinion issued by Yesh Din in 2020 also said that “the crime against humanity of apartheid is being committed in the West Bank.”
Although the INSS claimed that all four organizations “distort the reality”, it warned that this could be the reality of a one-state solution that maintains Jewish identity and hegemony across all of historic Palestine. “These reports are part of a wide campaign not only seeking to classify Israel as a state that carries out war crimes in the frame of a national struggle, but also as a state that implements apartheid policies just for being a Jewish state.”
According to the institute, rights groups are putting pressure on the International Criminal Court prosecutor in order to advance the probe into Israeli crimes, including the crime of apartheid, in the occupied territories of the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
