Like their U.S. counterparts, Australian senators from both sides of the aisle have jointly rejected Amnesty International’s recent report accusing Israel of engaging in “apartheid.”
“Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime. 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,” Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International (AI), said in a statement.
“We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession, and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act,” she added.
Apartheid is a system of institutionalised partition on racial and ethnic grounds.
It is most often associated with South Africa, where it lasted for 46 years, ending in 1994, with F. W. de Klerk serving as the last apartheid leader and as a high official in the post-apartheid government headed by Nelson Mandela.
In response to AI’s claims, the chair and deputy chair of the Australian Parliamentary Friends of Israel, Liberal Senator Eric Abetz and Australian Labor Party (ALP) Senator Kimberley Kitching, said Israel’s diverse and inclusive society “powerfully rebuts” any attempt to equate the Middle Eastern country with the apartheid regime in South Africa.
They were also concerned the report could be used to justify “Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment” (BDS) campaigns against Israel.
“Amnesty International’s report is littered with errors that rehash discredited claims from other biased reports. It’s wrong in detail and disturbing in its intent,” they said in a statement to The Epoch Times.
“Israel is a vibrant beacon of democracy in the Middle East, comprised of Jews and Arabs, Druze and Christians—both secular and religious—whose rights and liberties are protected in equal measure,” they added.
“We won’t help Israel or the Palestinians by pretending things are different from what they actually are in Israel, or by encouraging delusions that the concept of the Jewish state can be crushed by external forces, be they military or trade.”
The chairs were also disappointed with the timing of the report, which was released just days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day calling the move “odious” and an attempt to connect Israel to Nazism.
Meanwhile, Eric Louw, associate professor of political communication and former member of the African National Congress, said there was a complete lack of understanding and misapplication of the term apartheid.
“The key point to note is that the people who designed apartheid explicitly rejected ‘segregation.’ Segregation involves integrating different races and ethnicities into one state. All these people work in one economy, but they live in separate social worlds,” he told The Epoch Times, noting that under segregation not everyone could vote.
“The people who invented apartheid said such a system was unsustainable and would produce anger and rebellion. The apartheid alternative was to create entirely different and separate states for each ethnic group—Zulus, Tswanas, Xhosas, and so on,” he added.
The apartheid creators in South Africa wanted to encourage the development of a separate national identity for each ethnic group, and for people in each state to vote for their own representatives, in turn, they would serve together on a council to govern the nation.
According to Louw, such a system would have ended the old British “segregated” state where Black Africans would work as labourers for Whites.
“Since the AI document does not understand what apartheid actually was (their definition is wrong), everything they say about Israel being an apartheid state is invalidated,” he said.
“What AI has done is to take a long-standing, left-leaning, anti-nationalist definition of apartheid (which ignores facts and realities) and just rehash this tired old demonisation,” he added.
