Amnesty’s report on Israel is relevant in name only. It is rather an indictment, grossly Manichean and which is basically pure calumny. Israel would be guilty of the crime of apartheid “since its creation in 1948” tells us Amnesty, which in doing so updates an old anti-Zionist refrain and thus takes up the ideological arsenal of the worst enemies of Israel and of peace. Because if Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid since its creation, its guilt is original. There is therefore no room for compromise because such infamy does not reform but suppresses itself. It is necessary to measure the symbolic violence that such an accusation conceals. It simply aims to delegitimize the Jewish state as such.
I have been a strong supporter of peace and a two-state solution for three decades. I was actively involved in the negotiations for the Israeli-Palestinian interim agreement signed in 1995 and in the subsequent permanent status talks at Camp David and then Taba in 2000 and 2001. I was the chief Israeli negotiator for the last formal agreement ever signed between Israel and the Palestinians, the Sharm el-Sheikh memorandum of September 1999. I still believe today that despite all the obstacles, missed opportunities, contradictory narratives and dead ends, the division of territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean into two nation states is an absolute necessity. It is the most viable option for ensuring the future of the approximately 14 million Israelis and Palestinians who live in this narrow territory. Israel would thus secure its future as a democratic nation-state of the Jewish people within secure and recognized borders while the Palestinians realize their right to political self-determination.
Amnesty’s report does nothing to bring regarding this peaceful solution. On the contrary, it takes us away from it. By stigmatizing and demonizing Israel while exonerating the Palestinians from any responsibility for the current impasse, it aggravates the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and inflames tensions.
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According to this report, Israel would set up an “institutionalized racist oppression” depriving “systematically the Palestinians of Israel of their rights”. This accusation is both false and preposterous.
My partner is an Israeli Arab and our law firm bears his name alongside mine. Israel has more than two million Arab citizens. These “Palestinians of Israel” enjoy strictly the same rights as their Jewish compatriots: participation in local and national elections, freedom of movement, freedom of enterprise, freedom of expression and association, freedom of worship, access to the health system. and equality before the law. If discrimination persists, many studies show that it is in sharp decline.
Indeed, the Arab citizens of Israel are currently represented in the government by a minister and in the Knesset by parliamentarians belonging to all the political parties that make up the political landscape of my country. They now hold leadership positions in all areas of public life. Arab Israeli doctors, lawyers, government officials and business leaders are legion. No state racism prevails in Israel which is a genuine democracy. It is enough to walk in universities, hospitals, shopping centers or public gardens to measure the enormity of the shameless lie conveyed by the Amnesty report.
The clash of two nationalisms
It goes without saying that Israel can and should be criticized. I am the first to admit that my government and the society of which I am a part might have been more proactive and consistent in the search for a negotiated agreement. Nevertheless, the Palestinians bear their own share of the responsibility. Their leadership has consistently rejected Israeli offers of territorial compromises and negotiated withdrawals, including, to name a few, when Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert were prime ministers and when Secretary of State John Kerry and the Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were in charge. A negotiated permanent solution would have ended the occupation, however, following a series of transitional phases, interim agreements and constructive measures.
Furthermore, this report ignores the recurrent use by radical Palestinian groups of terrorism once morest Israeli civilians mown down by missiles and rockets fired from Gaza, killed by inhumane bombs that exploded in buses, cafes and restaurants during the second Intifada or stabbed to death in the street. Curiously, the term Palestinian terrorism does not appear once in this 278-page report demonstrating, if necessary, Amnesty’s selective and deeply anti-Israeli vision.
Turning now to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the majority of the Palestinian population living there is not administered by Israel but by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas – a terrorist organization recognized as such by the international community – in Gaza. This territorial fragmentation was not created by Israel. It is the fruit of the internal war in which the Palestinian enemy brothers, Hamas and Fatah, are engaged.
Furthermore, Israel unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon evacuated 8,500 Israeli Jews from their homes and, since August 2005, the army Israel evacuated the entire Gaza Strip. It is from this territory that rockets and missiles are fired at regular intervals at southern and central Israel.
A two-state solution still essential
Therefore, applying the infamous label of apartheid to the situation in the West Bank and Gaza makes no more sense than in Israel stricto sensu. It disregards the belligerent context and the nature of the secular conflict which opposes the Palestinians to Israel: a politico-territorial conflict which has nothing to do with any kind of racism but everything to do with the confrontation of two nationalisms which claim the same rights in the same territory.
The vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians yearn for a normal and peaceful life. Extremists on both sides, however, harbor hatred and in effect promote the one-state paradigm that would spell disaster for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
This conflict can be resolved. To overcome the difficulties, it is essential to foster a culture of peace in order to prepare the ground for the emergence, when the time comes, of a two-State solution. From this point of view, it is imperative not to turn a blind eye to the violence and injustices committed by fundamentalists and extremists on both sides. Amnesty International’s biased report does just the opposite. I invite genuine supporters of a two-state solution to encourage those on the ground who are showing pragmatism, tenacity and political courage to build a future other than that of rejection and hatred, a future of peace and of reconciliation.
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Lawyer Gilead Sher, former chief of staff and political coordinator for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and chief peace negotiator, is a research associate of the Brochstein Chair for Peace and Security created in honor of Yitzhak Rabin at the Baker Institute of Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
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