Amnesty’s apartheid claim ‘divorced from reality’, says Israel foreign minister

Yair Lapid accuses the London-based human rights group of quoting ‘lies spread by terrorist organisations’.

Agnes Callamard stressed the group was not comparing the situation in the Palestinian territories to apartheid-era South Africa. Picture: AFP

Israel’s Foreign Minister has slammed the decision by Amnesty International to label Israel an “apartheid” state that treats Palestinians as “an inferior racial group”.

Yair Lapid on Wednesday rejected the claims as “divorced from reality” and charged that “Amnesty quotes lies spread by terrorist organisations”.

Amnesty secretary general Agnes Callamard stressed the group was not comparing the situation in the Palestinian territories to apartheid-era South Africa but said Israeli conduct met the criteria for the crime of apartheid under international law.

“Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid,” she said. “Whether they live in Gaza, east Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights.”

A year ago, Israel-based rights group B’Tselem drew fire when it asserted that Israeli policies had been designed to enforce “Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” and met the definition of “apartheid”.

Israel’s foreign ministry has called on Amnesty to withdraw the report. “Israel is not perfect, but it is a democracy committed to international law and open to scrutiny,” said Mr Lapid.

He also charged that Amnesty had an anti-Semitic agenda. “I hate to use the argument that if Israel were not a Jewish state, nobody in Amnesty would dare argue against it, but in this case, there is no other possibility,” he said.

The US State Department rejected the apartheid label. “We reject the view that Israel’s actions constitute apartheid,” said spokesman Ned Price.

But he added that the US takes “all allegations of human rights abuses seriously”. “We support the efforts of the Israeli government, of the Palestinian Authority, alongside human rights activists, to ensure accountability for human rights violations and abuses.”

The president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, said Amnesty’s report “does absolutely nothing to offer a constructive way forward and has no real interest in promoting the human rights of Palestinians”. “It will only serve, like previous similar prejudiced reports, to fuel the fires of anti-Semites under the guise of political correctness.”

AFP