March 23, 2017 CounterPunch

BDS, Women’s Rights, Human Rights and the Failings of Security States

by Howard Lisnoff

Photo by Kate Ausburn | CC BY 2.0

Dr. Jeff Halper, a co-founder and director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was detained in the West Bank in the middle of leading a tour of an Israeli “colony” there. Halper, an Israeli, who immigrated to Israel in the early 1970s from the U.S., was allegedly detained for possessing materials from the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS).

Two laws passed by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, one recent, affects the BDS movement. The first allows Israeli companies to sue BDS protesters for compensation. To date, that law has not been used against those who support the BDS movement. The second bans supporters of the BDS movement from entering Israel. There are no such laws that apply to Israelis who distribute BDS materials, or support the BDS movement in Israel, but official sanctions are not always the most effective kind. In Israel, those who oppose the occupation of the Palestinian territories are often harassed and threatened.

With the right-wing Trump administration in power, the right-wing government of Israel has received a green light to continue building settlements. Over the last several years, aid from the U.S. continued to flow into Israel uninterrupted, even despite the obvious dislike between former President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As the end of the Obama administration neared, the U.S. agreed to provide Israel with $38 billion of new military aid over the next decade.

Halper was conducting a tour of the Ma’ale Adumin colony in the West Bank when he was detained. That settlement is not small, with 40,000 residents and a substantial infrastructure. Jerusalem can be seen in the distance from the settlement. He was detained for “incitement,” by simply possessing materials about the BDS movement (“BDS Activist Speaks About His Arrest by Israeli Police,” The Real News Network, March 17, 2017). In other words, he was being an obvious thorn in the side of consensus politics in Israel and taking part in a movement for justice that most Israelis do not support.

“It was only when Haaretz did a story about it, Haaretz Newspaper that they contacted the police. And the police told them that I was detained for incitement, that’s what it was. It wasn’t so much BDS per se.”

Halper believes that Israelis “don’t know anything when it comes to these kinds of issues… occupation, Palestinians, war, peace, and so on, human rights, are completely non-issues in Israel.” Halper believes that the issue of BDS has “impacted the American Jewish community much more than Israelis” (The Real News Network). He believes the latter is true because of the general nature of liberalism among the Jewish community in the U.S.

The attacks against the civil liberties of BDS supporters in Israel isn’t the only human rights issue that’s pressing there. Recently, Sarah Moody, a young woman studying to become a rabbi, was “knocked to the ground” while attempting to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site. She was attacked by a mob of zealots who yelled taunts of “evil-doers” and “anarchists,” as the bruised rabbinical student got back on her feet (“Banned and barred, Israel’s women stand up to religious hardliners,” The Guardian, March 18, 2017).

“Over the last decade in different parts of Israel, women have been barred from sections of buses, banned from speaking at cemeteries, blocked from pavements, physically attacked for their clothing choices, airbrushed from newspapers and magazines and removed from the airwaves and photos” (The Guardian).

Segments of the ultra-Orthodox community have been behind these assaults against women. Courts in Israel have stood for the rights of women, but the enforcement mechanisms on the streets of Israel are sometimes missing in defense of women’s rights.

Although a comparison is very imperfect, it merits noting that one of the reasons touted by the U.S. in its presence in Afghanistan after the beginning of the war in 2001 was to improve the rights of women. Strange that one of our strongest allies in the Middle East, Israel, has not come to terms in some ways with this most basic of human rights.

In December 2016, the Brookings Institute published a poll that showed 60 percent of Americans favored economic sanctions against Israel for its occupation of the Palestinian territories. The figure of support among those  Republicans polled was 31 percent (“Nearly half of Americans support sanctions on Israel, poll finds,” +972 Magazine, December 3, 2016).  Compare the support for sanctions among those polled in the U.S. with the fact that 22 U.S. states now have legislation “that punishes companies for answering the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.”

National security states, whether republican democracies or not, can give rise to some destructive and hateful outcomes. The other, or dissident, can easily be cast into the domestic enemy in the service of power.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer.

MARIKANA MASSACRE - THE COVER UP CONTINUES

Apartheid officially ended when Nelson Mandela was elected President in April 1994. We thought the police state of apartheid South Africa was over, and then we get Marikana and Zuma and his government and Lonmin and the South African Police - colour change but apartheid tactics remain. Think of all those people assassinated during the apartheid regime and then look at what happened to the miners at Marikana and weep!

22 March 2017

MARIKANA MASSACRE - THE COVER UP CONTINUES

For people who didn't join the struggle to be stupid

21 March 2017 14:43 (South Africa)

South Africa

Marikana Massacre: “He is fine, let him die”

• Greg Nicolson
• South Africa
• 20 Mar 2017 11:38 (South Africa)
41 Reactions

It’s been four-and-a-half years since the Marikana Massacre. This weekend the sons of one of the mineworkers, Modisaotsile Van Wyk Sagalala, found out how their father allegedly died. By GREG NICOLSON. 

No one knows exactly when Modisaotsile Van Wyk Sagalala died. The 60-year-old was shot twice by police on 16 August 2012, at Marikana’s deadly “scene two”. The circumstances were never fully explained. 
 

Sagalala was the sole breadwinner for his mother and two sons, Hendrik and David. Preparing for retirement, he had started building his dream home.

“I want to see where my father died and how he died,” his son, David Sagalala, told the Marikana Commission of Inquiry. “I want those responsible for his death to be arrested and brought to justice because everyone who breaks the law must be held accountable.”

According to police, Sagalala was one of three people who died in hospital, but four-and-a-half years after the Marikana Massacre evidence has emerged that he died in a police vehicle at a detention centre, and multiple police officers lied to cover-up the circumstances of his death. 

The Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) has been investigating SAPS officials since the 2015 release of retired Judge Ian Farlam’s Marikana Inquiry report. IPID spokesperson Moses Dlamini told Daily Maverick, “IPID has evidence to prove that the deceased died in the police canter at the detention centre.” He added, “The matter was never revealed during the Farlam Judicial Commission of Inquiry.”

The Marikana report said it was not possible to ascertain the precise location where Sagalala was shot, but it was somewhere at “scene two”, dubbed the “killing koppie”. Describing the shooting of Sagalala and another striker, Molefi Osiel Ntsoele, lawyers for the families of the deceased mineworkers told the commission “there is simply no information about how they were killed. It isn’t even known where in koppie three they were shot and killed. The only reasonable conclusion therefore is that they were killed unlawfully.”

The commission believed SAPS’s claim Sagalala died at the Andrew Saffy Memorial Hospital. IPID, however, has evidence he died while being transported to a detention centre. Dlamini said there are photographs, observation book entries, and statements from SAPS members deployed to the detention centre “and they concur that indeed the victim died in the police canter at the detention centre.” The first reports of the alleged crimes came in an update from the Presidency last year and IPID outlined aspects of the allegations in Parliament last week.

The crime scene at the detention centre was never reported to IPID, which has recommended prosecutions should proceed for cases of non-compliance and defeating the ends of justice. The investigation is complete and IPID has recommended charges be laid against the four officials responsible for managing the detention centre: Major General William Mpembe, Brigadier Jacobus Van Zyl, and two other suspects we only know as Colonel Madoda, and Lieutenant-Colonel Pule.

Daily Maverick was unable to get further comment before deadline from Dlamini on whether Sagalala’s death could have been avoided if he received timely medical care and why cases of culpable homicide haven’t been opened. 

Statements given by striking mineworkers to IPID, which Daily Maverick has seen, include graphic details that likely refer to Sagalala:

“We were then put in the police truck and inside the truck there was an African male who was shot on his chest and was bleeding. We told the police that someone was shot but they said that he must die because we also killed the police,” reads one statement. 

“One guy was shot in the chest and was put in the truck while injured. I notified the police that there is a person who needs help as he is injured. The police officers said he is fine, let him die,” reads another.

Yet another: “We also reported to the police officers that there was a person who will die. They never listen to us. On arrival at B3 that person passed away.” B3 is a part of mining company Lonmin’s facilities in Marikana where arrested miners were initially detained and processed before they were taken to police stations. 

Dlamini said it’s still unclear how Sagalala ended up at Andrew Saffy Memorial Hospital, but his body was collected there by the Phokeng government mortuary and given the designation “body 33”. A total of 34 people were killed by police on 16 August, with 10 people killed in the preceding week, seven killed by the striking mineworkers and three by police. 

The Sagalala family first heard about IPID’s case this weekend: 

“The family wants the whole truth to come out and for justice to be done,” said Hendrik Sagalala, Modisaotsile Van Wyk Sagalala’s son. “The commission of inquiry process did not go far enough in investigating the circumstances of my father’s death. Almost five years after, we still don’t see any justice and we cannot find closure.” 

Representing the families of the deceased mineworkers, Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI) attorney Keamogetswe Thobakgale said: 

“The contempt and indignity with which the criminal justice system has treated the Marikana victims is appalling.” 

The commission of inquiry sat for over 300 days and the Claassen Board of Inquiry was established to investigate suspended National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega’s role regarding Marikana, but families are yet to see any real accountability. 

“We have written to IPID and the NPA, on instructions from the families, inquiring about criminal investigations and prosecutions against the police. It is the loved ones of these families who were killed,” said Thobakgale, claiming neither institution has been forthcoming with information.

The SAPS was criticised for failing to disclose certain information to the Marikana Commission of Inquiry and the Farlam report even has a section titled, “The consequences of the SAPS attempt to mislead the Commission”. In 2012, before the commission, police met in Potchefstroom to prepare for the inquiry. Evidence leaders called the meeting an “exculpatory exercise” and claimed “there is a complete absence of any self-criticism in Exhibit L” – the police version of events drafted at the Potchefstroom meeting and presented at the inquiry. The Farlam report said the police leaders decided to mislead the commission by not revealing when the decision to “go tactical” came about and national and provincial SAPS leaders signed off on Exhibit L, which did not offer a truthful version of the events.

SAPS spokesperson Brigadier Sally de Beer on Monday was brief in her response to the claims stemming from IPID’s investigation. “The department respects the mandate of IPID to conduct investigations. We are awaiting the outcome of IPID’s investigations into this matter which will inform internal processes as provided for in our disciplinary code,” she said. 

National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) spokesperson Luvuyo Mfaku on Monday said prosecutors are still analysing and evaluating evidence regarding the Sagalala case: 

“No decision has been taken to prosecute any person(s) in relation to the Farlam Commission report.” 

Sagalala’s death in custody also raises the issue of timeous medical treatment. Mineworker Bongani Mdze died during the massacre after suffering shotgun wounds to his upper arm (it’s still unknown who fired the shotgun rounds at the miners, as SAPS had previously withdrawn the ammunition from operational use). Mdze had a 90 percent chance of survival if police applied a basic tourniquet. Literally, a sock could have saved his life. Instead, he bled to death. The commission recommended future SAPS operations should ensure those injured receive adequate and speedy first aid. Sagalala’s case suggests another life might have been saved if police provided rapid medical assistance. 

This week SERI is embarking on a campaign to raise awareness about the slow progress on behalf the state and Lonmin in ensuring justice for the families of those killed and the injured and arrested mineworkers. On Human Rights Day, the group will launch a video and throughout its campaign will call for a genuine apology from the state and Lonmin, for police officers involved in the Marikana operation to be criminally charged, and for victims to be paid compensation. DM 

Photo: Lonmin employees gather on a hill called Wonderkop at Marikana, August 15, 2012. Photograph Greg Marinovich / Daily Maverick 

Read more:

Marikana Massacre: Police absolve 87 of their own in Daily Maverick

MARIKANA MASSACRE - THE COVER UP CONTINUES

For people who didn't join the struggle to be stupid

21 March 2017 14:43 (South Africa)

South Africa

Marikana Massacre: “He is fine, let him die”

• Greg Nicolson
• South Africa
• 20 Mar 2017 11:38 (South Africa)
41 Reactions

It’s been four-and-a-half years since the Marikana Massacre. This weekend the sons of one of the mineworkers, Modisaotsile Van Wyk Sagalala, found out how their father allegedly died. By GREG NICOLSON. 

No one knows exactly when Modisaotsile Van Wyk Sagalala died. The 60-year-old was shot twice by police on 16 August 2012, at Marikana’s deadly “scene two”. The circumstances were never fully explained. 

Sagalala was the sole breadwinner for his mother and two sons, Hendrik and David. Preparing for retirement, he had started building his dream home.

“I want to see where my father died and how he died,” his son, David Sagalala, told the Marikana Commission of Inquiry. “I want those responsible for his death to be arrested and brought to justice because everyone who breaks the law must be held accountable.”

According to police, Sagalala was one of three people who died in hospital, but four-and-a-half years after the Marikana Massacre evidence has emerged that he died in a police vehicle at a detention centre, and multiple police officers lied to cover-up the circumstances of his death. 

The Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) has been investigating SAPS officials since the 2015 release of retired Judge Ian Farlam’s Marikana Inquiry report. IPID spokesperson Moses Dlamini told Daily Maverick, “IPID has evidence to prove that the deceased died in the police canter at the detention centre.” He added, “The matter was never revealed during the Farlam Judicial Commission of Inquiry.”

The Marikana report said it was not possible to ascertain the precise location where Sagalala was shot, but it was somewhere at “scene two”, dubbed the “killing koppie”. Describing the shooting of Sagalala and another striker, Molefi Osiel Ntsoele, lawyers for the families of the deceased mineworkers told the commission “there is simply no information about how they were killed. It isn’t even known where in koppie three they were shot and killed. The only reasonable conclusion therefore is that they were killed unlawfully.”

The commission believed SAPS’s claim Sagalala died at the Andrew Saffy Memorial Hospital. IPID, however, has evidence he died while being transported to a detention centre. Dlamini said there are photographs, observation book entries, and statements from SAPS members deployed to the detention centre “and they concur that indeed the victim died in the police canter at the detention centre.” The first reports of the alleged crimes came in an update from the Presidency last year and IPID outlined aspects of the allegations in Parliament last week.

The crime scene at the detention centre was never reported to IPID, which has recommended prosecutions should proceed for cases of non-compliance and defeating the ends of justice. The investigation is complete and IPID has recommended charges be laid against the four officials responsible for managing the detention centre: Major General William Mpembe, Brigadier Jacobus Van Zyl, and two other suspects we only know as Colonel Madoda, and Lieutenant-Colonel Pule.

Daily Maverick was unable to get further comment before deadline from Dlamini on whether Sagalala’s death could have been avoided if he received timely medical care and why cases of culpable homicide haven’t been opened. 

Statements given by striking mineworkers to IPID, which Daily Maverick has seen, include graphic details that likely refer to Sagalala:

“We were then put in the police truck and inside the truck there was an African male who was shot on his chest and was bleeding. We told the police that someone was shot but they said that he must die because we also killed the police,” reads one statement. 

“One guy was shot in the chest and was put in the truck while injured. I notified the police that there is a person who needs help as he is injured. The police officers said he is fine, let him die,” reads another.

Yet another: “We also reported to the police officers that there was a person who will die. They never listen to us. On arrival at B3 that person passed away.” B3 is a part of mining company Lonmin’s facilities in Marikana where arrested miners were initially detained and processed before they were taken to police stations. 

Dlamini said it’s still unclear how Sagalala ended up at Andrew Saffy Memorial Hospital, but his body was collected there by the Phokeng government mortuary and given the designation “body 33”. A total of 34 people were killed by police on 16 August, with 10 people killed in the preceding week, seven killed by the striking mineworkers and three by police. 

The Sagalala family first heard about IPID’s case this weekend: 

“The family wants the whole truth to come out and for justice to be done,” said Hendrik Sagalala, Modisaotsile Van Wyk Sagalala’s son. “The commission of inquiry process did not go far enough in investigating the circumstances of my father’s death. Almost five years after, we still don’t see any justice and we cannot find closure.” 

Representing the families of the deceased mineworkers, Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI) attorney Keamogetswe Thobakgale said: 

“The contempt and indignity with which the criminal justice system has treated the Marikana victims is appalling.” 

The commission of inquiry sat for over 300 days and the Claassen Board of Inquiry was established to investigate suspended National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega’s role regarding Marikana, but families are yet to see any real accountability. 

“We have written to IPID and the NPA, on instructions from the families, inquiring about criminal investigations and prosecutions against the police. It is the loved ones of these families who were killed,” said Thobakgale, claiming neither institution has been forthcoming with information.

The SAPS was criticised for failing to disclose certain information to the Marikana Commission of Inquiry and the Farlam report even has a section titled, “The consequences of the SAPS attempt to mislead the Commission”. In 2012, before the commission, police met in Potchefstroom to prepare for the inquiry. Evidence leaders called the meeting an “exculpatory exercise” and claimed “there is a complete absence of any self-criticism in Exhibit L” – the police version of events drafted at the Potchefstroom meeting and presented at the inquiry. The Farlam report said the police leaders decided to mislead the commission by not revealing when the decision to “go tactical” came about and national and provincial SAPS leaders signed off on Exhibit L, which did not offer a truthful version of the events.

SAPS spokesperson Brigadier Sally de Beer on Monday was brief in her response to the claims stemming from IPID’s investigation. “The department respects the mandate of IPID to conduct investigations. We are awaiting the outcome of IPID’s investigations into this matter which will inform internal processes as provided for in our disciplinary code,” she said. 

National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) spokesperson Luvuyo Mfaku on Monday said prosecutors are still analysing and evaluating evidence regarding the Sagalala case: 

“No decision has been taken to prosecute any person(s) in relation to the Farlam Commission report.” 

Sagalala’s death in custody also raises the issue of timeous medical treatment. Mineworker Bongani Mdze died during the massacre after suffering shotgun wounds to his upper arm (it’s still unknown who fired the shotgun rounds at the miners, as SAPS had previously withdrawn the ammunition from operational use). Mdze had a 90 percent chance of survival if police applied a basic tourniquet. Literally, a sock could have saved his life. Instead, he bled to death. The commission recommended future SAPS operations should ensure those injured receive adequate and speedy first aid. Sagalala’s case suggests another life might have been saved if police provided rapid medical assistance. 

This week SERI is embarking on a campaign to raise awareness about the slow progress on behalf the state and Lonmin in ensuring justice for the families of those killed and the injured and arrested mineworkers. On Human Rights Day, the group will launch a video and throughout its campaign will call for a genuine apology from the state and Lonmin, for police officers involved in the Marikana operation to be criminally charged, and for victims to be paid compensation. DM 

Photo: Lonmin employees gather on a hill called Wonderkop at Marikana, August 15, 2012. Photograph Greg Marinovich / Daily Maverick 

Read more:

Marikana Massacre: Police absolve 87 of their own in Daily Maverick

The following report was from Mondoweiss on 20 MARCH 2017 after the Israeli authorities had done their best to censor its publication by the United Nations:

ISRAELI PRACTICES TOWARDS THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE AND THE QUESTION OF APARTHEID

DUTTON, JOYCE, TURNBULL AND ALL OTHER PARLIAMENTARIANS

It really is time that parliamentarians got their acts together.

Their behaviour is becoming more and more appalling as time passes, and instead of the prime minister Malcolm Turnbull putting a stop to the abuse, he just ignores it. In the ultimate, is there any difference between Turnbull and Abbott?

Peter Dutton has made a pronouncement about certain business leaders - I don't hold many briefs for them either - which is disgusting, to say the least, by saying that they should just get on with their knitting and leave pronouncements about gay marriage to others who are involved with the political scene.

What unbelievable arrogance!

Then Barnaby Joyce throws in his penny's worth on the same and similar issues - parliament has more important issues to deal with than dykes and poofters wanting to tie the knot.

Let's face it - homophobia is alive and well and living in Australia, and we in the gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV/AIDS (GLTH) communities will have to continue fighting until we have achieved equality in every aspect of society.

Taking Dutton to other levels, his behaviour and that of his government and opposition colleagues have been guilty of breaching every human rights conditions available and contnue to do so on a daily basis.

We watch with horror the unfolding of the dramas of desperate people in Australia's concentration camps in Nauru and Manus and the ones in Australia's mainland and wonder how long this nightmare will continue.

We watch with horror the ongoing apartheid in our communities with out of proportion incarceration rates of the indigenous population, racism attacks on people of various communities, unquestioning support in overseas policies of apartheid states such as Israel, Palestinians living in the world's biggest concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank occupied territories. and the horrors of ongoing wars in many countires aided and abetted by the military countries USA, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Australia, China, and many others too numerous to mention.

Disaster at every turn, and no end it sight.

ISRAEL AND THE A-WORD (APARTHEID)

March 17, 2017

Israel and the A-Word

From CounterPunch

by John Reynolds

• 

Photo by Alan Ireland | CC BY 2.0

The word resonated loud and clear from South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, widely described as a key architect of apartheid, was the far-right National Party’s propagandist, political strategist and, ultimately, party leader. In 1961, as South African Prime Minister, he noted that Israel was built on land taken ‘from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years.’ The point was to express his approval and to highlight Zionism’s common cause with the Afrikaner pioneers: ‘In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.’

Verwoerd was able to make this diagnosis without needing to live to see the brutality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967. Israel’s apartheid foundations were laid in its dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948. They were reinforced by the immediate erection of colonial constitutional structures that cemented the exclusion of the colonised.

Since then, Israeli law and policy has only deepened the state apparatus of separation and segregation, discrimination and domination. Over the years, countless activists, authors and artists, as well as leading anti-apartheid figures from South Africa, have referred to Israel’s particular brand of structural discrimination as akin to apartheid. In the last decade, international lawyers have also begun to do likewise, but with reference to the definition of apartheid under international law rather than by analogy to southern Africa.

This week, a report commissioned and published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) has concluded that ‘Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole’. According to the report, the Israeli regime governing Palestinians is a racial regime of institutionalised domination – the essence of the international legal definition of apartheid. The maintenance of Israel’s exclusionary constitutional character as the state of the Jewish people has entailed a “strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people”. It has involved expulsion of Palestinian refugees into exile, discrimination against Palestinians inside Israel as second-class citizens, oppression of Palestinians under occupation; all through a concerted array of law, policy and practice that forges ‘a comprehensive policy of apartheid’.

This finding breaks new ground in the context of UN analysis on Israel/Palestine. Specialised UN bodies – such as the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine – have in recent years categorised Israeli law and policy in terms of racial segregation and apartheid. This framing has been geographically limited to the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however – as distinct from inside Israel itself, or Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian people writ large.

This was a somewhat necessary distinction, given the UN practice of analysing the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel as two separate territories under international law. But it was also in certain respects an artificial distinction. Much of what renders the situation in the occupied territory as apartheid is the separate and preferential legal system applied to Israeli settlers – a hierarchical legalism which is central to the constitution of Israel itself. Laws on citizenship, residency and family unification, as well as land, planning and housing rights, apply inside Israel to benefit Jewish-Israeli citizens over Palestinians. Those laws are then channeled into the West Bank to further stratify the population there. Colonisers living in the settlements are endowed with legal status and privilege that is denied to the Palestinian population of the same territory.

There are of course differences in the modalities of Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians – depending on whether they are inside Israel, in occupied territory, or in exile. The crucial point that the UN report highlights, however, is that this is nonetheless best viewed as a single overarching institutional regime which discriminates against the Palestinian people as a whole.

For a UN Commission report to state this so clearly, and to theorise Israel as a “racial state”, is significant. A people’s tribunal, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, did arrive at similar conclusions back in 2011. The momentum that this analysis has gathered in official UN settings since then shows the possibilities of an international law from below – one which is not afraid to confront the realities of a state in which increasingly discriminatory legislation has spewed thick and fast from an ascendant far-right.

While the report’s findings do hinge on the legal definition of apartheid, the Commission itself does not have the authority of an international tribunal. The International Court of Justice and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are among the relevant actors when it comes to determining Israel’s state responsibility for an unlawful apartheid regime. The International Criminal Court enters the fray for determining the criminal responsibility of individual Israeli officials for the perpetration of acts of apartheid, as crimes against humanity. Any adjudications from these and other legal institutions can feed into the UN political organs vested with the capacity to impose sanctions and arms embargoes, as was (eventually) done with apartheid South Africa. In this context, the report offers a potential platform for further developments in the political arena of the UN.

A UN spokesperson has said that ‘the report as it stands does not reflect the view of the Secretary-General’. The report made no claim to represent the views of the UN as a whole. It does, however, reflect the views of a regional UN commission, made up of eighteen member states of North Africa and West Asia. And here it is important to remember that the genesis of the UN sanctions and arms embargo against South Africa flowed up from below and inwards from the periphery, not down from on high or out from the core. The Third World states led the charge against apartheid for many years in the face of Western resistance and support for South Africa. It was 1952 when a group of thirteen Arab and Asian states first succeeded in adding ‘The Question of Race Conflict resulting from the policies of apartheid’ to the UN General Assembly’s agenda. It took another 25 years – after multiple abstentions and vetoes by Britain, France and the US, and a rising global social movement against apartheid – before the Security Council eventually imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa.

In the current conjuncture, the significance of this week’s report extends beyond Israel/Palestine. Verwoerd’s National Party is not the only white supremacist political movement to have seen the attraction of Israel’s constitutional structures. The “alt-right” movement in the US is premised on a white nationalism that incorporates very real antisemitic discourse and intimidation among its multiplicity of racisms. At the same time, it admires Israel’s exclusionary policies. Richard Spencer describes the alt-right project as ‘a sort of white Zionism’ and argues, as Omri Boehm has noted, that Israel’s ethnic-based politics is the basis of a strong, cohesive identity which the alt-right is seeking to emulate in the US.

With the alt-right now maintaining a foothold in the White House, it is imperative to think seriously about the apartheid nature of Israel’s constitutional order and about how to deepen anti-racist alliances and solidarities across borders. The Trump/Bannon travel ban agenda of course finds some parallel in Israel’s own long-standing border policies, and comes at a time when Israel has adopted new legislation purporting to ban boycott adherents. In that context, the ESCWA report’s call for member states and civil society to support and ‘broaden support for boycott, divestment and sanctions initiatives’ is another significant political move.

John Reynolds teaches international law at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

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