Apartheid

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3. Minimum Requirements for Ending Israeli Apartheid
Israel must implement United Nations Resolutions, abide by the Geneva Conventions
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and more in order to end apartheid in the state
of Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As a member of those organizations and
signatory to the relevant documents, it has a non-negotiable duty not to violate them. The
international community has a corresponding duty to make sure that Israel implements its
promises enshrined in those documents and principles (not to mention those of Israel’s own
laws that are supposed to safeguard human rights). If need be, Israel should be stopped by the
international community by force. More than anything else, the arrogant power of the USA,
including its undemocratic UN Security Council veto power, is of course blocking enforced
implementation, but Israel itself has to take full responsibility for its continued violations of
international law and basic human rights. Israel has most of the options now, the Palestinians
hardly have any. But the Palestinians must also take responsibility for human rights violations
and gross human rights violations committed by them. The following are in my view the
specific requirements necessary for jump-starting a peace process in the real meaning of the
phrase:
1. The Law of Return must be eliminated from Israel’s Basic Law, and it is not to be
replaced by anything that could be interpreted in the same way. The Law of Return
is a racist repopulation law.
2. The Basic Law text on the ‘Jewish character of Israel’ must also be scrapped. It
goes against all principles of democracy elsewhere in the world today to define a
country’s people in ethnic terms, rather than in terms of its citizens. Despite the
Bible, and despite Jewish suffering in the past, Jews cannot and should not expect
special treatment or ethnicist privilege. Israel is obligated under international law
to introduce a democratic Constitution. It has failed to do so for over 58 years. It is
high time for the world to either demand democracy in the place of ethnocracy in
Israel or to expel Israel from the United Nations. 746
3. The Israel Land Authority, which only allows Jews to own land, must be scrapped,
and its administrative work must be taken over by a secular, non-discriminatory
body.
4. Secular marriage must also become possible. In order to make Israeli-Palestinian
rapprochement possible, civil marriage must be introduced in Israel alongside
religious marriage, which is now used cynically by the apartheid elites to keep the
two ethnicities apart. The Palestinian National Authority must also introduce civil
marriage.
5. Israel must recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Not only
Israelis will be prosecuted. There are also many Palestinians who should stand
accused of crimes against humanity. They too must welcome this, since Palestinian
jurisdiction makes use of capital punishment, since Israel uses state death squads,
since Palestinian as well as Israeli jailers would torture them, and since Israelis
would bulldoze their families’ houses and deport their relatives and indulge in
other (often lethal) kinds of collective punishment, conditions which the ICC does
not and is not ever likely to carry out, endorse, or tolerate, given the prominence
and fame or notoriety of each person it convicts, and the rules governing the court
itself. Israelis in general should welcome ICC jurisdiction because it is better
equipped to achieve peace than the Israeli state measures, described in this
paragraph, are. They must also welcome justice being served to Israeli victims of
746 See footnotes 375-376, above.