Academics and cultural personalities from around the world have signed an open letter calling the Israeli occupation of Palestine akin to apartheid. The letter has garnered as many as 800 signatures since first being released on Friday last week. A large number of Israeli academics, rabbis, artists, foundations leaders, and others have also signed onto the letter.
This year so far, Israeli security forces and illegal Jewish settlers have killed at least 208 Palestinians including 36 children—172 in violent military raids and settler attacks in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and 36 in Israeli air and drone strikes in Gaza—making this year among the deadliest for Palestinians living under occupation.
In addition to the escalation in violence, the Israeli government has also continued to annex more and more Palestinian land to approve the building and expansion of hundreds of illegal settlements in blatant violation of international law.
The letter titled “The Elephant in the Room” highlights the “direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” It says that the “Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity.”
It states: “without equal rights for all, whether in one state, two states, or in some other political framework, there is always a danger of dictatorship. There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population. The problems did not start with the current radical government: Jewish supremacism has been growing for years and was enshrined in law by the 2018 Nation State Law.”
The letter has been hailed as a significant development, particularly due to the large number of Jewish intellectuals who have signed onto it. Its primary organizer, Professor Omer Bartov, who teaches Holocaust and genocide studies in the US, said that “the broad inclusion of so many academics representing a stunningly broad spectrum of distinguished Jewish voices, indicates a watershed moment also in American Jewish views about Israel, and a new willingness by public figures, reflecting the sentiments of the younger generation, to honestly criticize Israeli policies.”
Signatories also call for a variety of actions, especially from the Jewish community in the US, who they say have significant influence over US government policy vis-a-vis Israel. The letter calls on them to a) support the Israeli protest movement but also call on it to embrace equality for Jews and Palestinians within the Green Line and in the occupied Palestinian territories, b) support human rights organizations which defend Palestinians and provide real-time information on the lived reality of occupation and apartheid, c) commit to overhaul educational norms and curricula for Jewish children and youth in order to provide a more honest appraisal of Israel’s past and present, and, most importantly, d) demand the elected leaders in the US to help end the occupation, restrict US military aid from being used in the occupied Palestinian territories, and end Israeli impunity at the UN and other international organizations.
Among the signatories are prominent figures including Professor Peter Beinart of City University New York, former speaker of the Israeli parliament Avrum Burg, Professor Emeritus at Ben Gurion University Benny Morris, and human rights lawyer Michael Sfard. Several other professors from prestigious universities including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, the Hebrew University, and the Tel Aviv University are also signatories.
Groups such as Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch have also previously highlighted the apartheid policies of Israel.
