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Crimes of apartheid do not have a statute of limitations

February 21, 2022 at 4:32 pm

Israeli police arrest a Palestinian man in the village of Al-Atrash in the Negev desert on 12 January 2022 [AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP/Getty Images]

There is no doubt that the report by Amnesty International issued earlier this month pleased all the free people of the world, not only the Palestinians, and gave us a little hope that there is still some conscience in the international institutions which are typically totally biased towards Israel and turn a blind eye to the injustice and brutal Israeli aggression taking place in Palestine against the people, their land and their property. The importance of this report lies in the fact that is was issued by a world-renowned international organisation.

Amnesty International’s 280-page report details the manifestations of discrimination practiced by the occupying state against the steadfast Palestinian people. The report confirmed that the occupation authorities treat the Palestinians as an ethnic group inferior to the Jewish people and that Israel views the Palestinians as a demographic threat. Israel has established this discrimination through laws in all places where the Palestinians are located, not only in the occupied territories after the defeat of June 1967, but in the other territories occupied in 1948, within the usurper state itself.

The report also indicated that the forcibly displaced continue to be prevented from returning to their towns of origin, and that this prohibition represents a flagrant violation of international law.

Of course, this refers to all components of the Palestinian people, including the refugees outside the borders of historic Palestine.

Timeline: Israel’s anti-Palestinian laws since 1948

There is no doubt that the most praiseworthy matter regarding this report is the fact that it referred to historical Palestine as being from the river to the sea and not just on the 1967 borders, and this means that the problem is no longer related only to the territories occupied in 1967, but rather means that there is a fundamental problem at the heart of the Zionist state itself. Twenty per cent of Israel’s population is made up of Palestinians, known as the Arabs of 1948, and they are oppressed and living under the policy of racial discrimination.

The report also urged the international community to go beyond just verbal condemnations of Israeli policies and to work to dismantle the apartheid system.

The report took the example of the Negev as a representation of the embodiment of the systematic Israeli policies in the displacement of Palestinians, the seizure of their lands and racial discrimination against them. I wish the international community, which adopts double standards, would respond to that call, but it is a deaf, dumb and one-eyed society that only listens to the voice of the Zionists and only speaks in favour of the Zionists and does not see the crimes that they commit against the Palestinians.

It is no coincidence that Amnesty International’s report coincided with the release of a documentary by director Alon Schwarz, in which he documented the testimonies of Israeli soldiers about the massacre committed in the village of Tantura in 1948.

People from the Israeli state itself, i.e. Haaretz newspaper, also admitted the brutal crimes committed by the Zionist gangs during the Nakba, revealing the documents showing details of a number of those massacres.

The story of officer Shmuel Lahis, which was mentioned in the report published by Haaretz is enough to confirm the nature of the occupation’s racist regime. This racist criminal officer was the head of one of the Zionist gangs in the 1948 war, and the gang he led took control of the Hula village in Lebanon. The gang committed two massacres on two consecutive days, where this officer gathered 15 civilians in a room in a destroyed house and shot them, and three decades later, he became the director general of the Jewish Agency!

The report also reveals that Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the occupation state, was aware of the ethnic cleansing and massacres that took place during the war and pretended otherwise and demanded sham trials. Studies by the modern Jewish historians have shown that Ben-Gurion made a mistake because he did not complete his mission to expel all the Palestinians in 1948.

Haaretz reported many heinous stories that we are familiar with and are even familiar with stories that are even more heinous and horrific, and we keep them in our memory so that they do not get lost in the current events. However, the importance of this report is that it is issued from within Israeli itself, as if it is admitting, and perhaps even boasting that it is an apartheid regime.

The Tantura massacre is another Israeli crime for which prosecutions must follow

Unfortunately, all these reports come at a time when the nation is in a state of unprecedented silence and extreme weakness, and the Palestinians are being led by a puppet authority that carries out security coordination with the Israeli enemy and arrests resistance fighters, throwing them into prison. This authority does not believe in the resistance to liberate Palestine, but rather believes in the chair on which Mahmoud Abbas sits as a fictitious president of a fictitious authority, and in the red carpet laid out for him when the world’s leaders receive him. He has been blinded by this fake authority and cannot see what he knows for sure, i.e. that he is just a tool in the hands of the Zionists and that they brought him to guard their entity and protect them from the honourable resistance.

If this authority was truly patriotic and worked for the benefit of Palestine, it would have made much more noise with these reports and used them in their battle against the Israeli enemy. If it does not believe in resistance as a means to liberate Palestine due to the balance of power being tipped in favour of the occupation, as it claims, and if its choice is a peaceful one, then it is on the peaceful path it has been on since the ill-fated Oslo Accords and it must follow it to all of the international forums and demand what Amnesty International has demanded, which is to go beyond verbal condemnations of Israeli policies and work to dismantle the apartheid system.

However, it will not do so because it is a puppet authority, and it must be removed from the Palestinian scene, and even tried for the crimes it committed against Palestine, crimes that amount to high treason.

Resistance is the solution to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.