Ireland urged to find Israel is committing apartheid against Palestinians

Ireland is the most “historically appropriate” country in Europe to formally acknowledge that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, an Israeli human rights campaigner has said.

Hagai El-Ad, the director of the human rights organisation B’Tselem, urged the Government to take the “important step” of officially backing the separate findings of his own organisation, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

After meeting with Minister of State Joe O’Brien as well as a number of TDs and senators in Dublin, Mr El-Ad said Ireland could be “a leading voice internationally in ending this apartheid”.

“This is an opportunity to show leadership,” he told The Irish Times. He said there was a growing consensus on the issue, and “nowhere in Europe has a more historically appropriate position [than Ireland] to take this step forward”.

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Last month, the foreign affairs committee of Catalonia’s parliament passed a motion recognising Israeli actions as apartheid. South Africa’s foreign minister Naledi Pandor has urged a further downgrading of her country’s diplomatic ties with Israel over what she called apartheid.*

“I would like to see the Irish parliament do the same,” said Mr El-Ad. “That would be a very important step. There is a deep sense of emotional identification [in Ireland] of the reality for what it is. I think that comes directly from the history of the Irish people.”

Apartheid is a crime against humanity under international law, prohibited under three major treaties, including the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

In a report in February denouncing Israel’s “apartheid against Palestinians”, Amnesty International said Israel engaged in a regime of institutionalised “oppression and domination of the Palestinian population for the benefit of Jewish Israelis”.

B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch made similar findings of apartheid, while a report in March by Michael Lynk, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory, came to the same conclusion.

Responding to the Amnesty report at the time, Israel’s then foreign minister Yair Lapid, now interim prime minister, accused the human rights organisation of being a “radical grouping of uninformed activists that echoes propaganda with no serious examination of the facts”.

Mr Lapid described the report as “delusional – divorced from reality”, adding that Israel was “a strong and vibrant democracy that grants all its citizens equal rights, regardless of religious or race”.

“The report denies the state of Israel’s right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people. Its extremist language and distortion of historical context were designed to demonise Israel and pour fuel onto the fire of antisemitism,” he said.

Mr El-Ad said Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians should be recognised as apartheid and dealt with as such. “That is what I said in the meeting with Minister O’Brien. We are very hopeful that Ireland will step forward and take a leading position in joining the human rights community in calling it what it is.

“Israel controls everything between river and sea and applies the same principle everywhere, advancing the supremacy and domination of one group of people – Jewish individuals like myself – at the expense of other half of population, the Palestinian population.

“Jews are made to enjoy full protection and privilege, no matter where they live, while Palestinians are never offered equality anywhere under Israeli control – they are second class citizens.”

Mr El-Ad said accusations of anti-Semitism levelled against critics of Israel were a “cynical tactic” by the Israeli government to “silence fact-based criticism of its policy”.

“The government never argues about facts, because it can’t dispute facts that are happening in broad daylight. So what they do is to resort to the only thing left for them, besides fixing the situation, which is trying to shoot the messenger.

“It is cynical and it is absolutely not acceptable. It is even worse because there is genuine anti-Semitism, and of course it needs to be defeated like any form of racism. But making false accusations is losing the ability to fight against real anti-Semitism.”

*This article was amended on Tuesday, July 12th, 2022.