Thread by @HagaiElAd

Brilliantly analyzed and vividly articulated, the recent apartheid report by U.N. Special Rapporteur @MichaelLynk5 is a document you should read. Following are a few highlights 🧵 ohchr.org/en/press-relea…

2/ While acknowledging the growing number of reports looking at apartheid in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory *together*, this report -- consistent with the mandate of the Special Rapporteur -- only addresses Israeli rule over the oPt. btselem.org/apartheid

3/ For more on why “democracy here and apartheid there” is so utterly nonsensical, read @NathanThrall's seminal piece in the @LRB
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/…

4/ Before apartheid, the SR sharply addresses the human rights situation. He frames Israel's state violence thus: "Palestinians continue to face daily and ongoing state violence with a high incidence of arbitrary use of force – physical and administrative" btselem.org/topic/routine_…

5/ On settler violence: "rising levels have been made possible by a permanent lack of accountability" + "outside of official expropriation policies are the tolerated actions of settlers, whose violence has been regularly employed to seize Palestinian land" btselem.org/publications/2…

6/ Regarding the recent "terror" designation by Israel of six Palestinian CSOs, he points out that "no evidence proving these allegations has been presented by Israeli authorities despite several requests by the international community and concerned organizations" #StandWithThe6

7/ SR Lynk names Israel's "apparent strategy" of "indefinite warehousing of an unwanted population of two million Palestinians" in #Gaza "a method of population control unique in the modern world"

8/ Juxtaposing International Humanitarian Law against the endless amounts of concrete Israel continues to pour in and around the occupied Palestinian territory, the SR goes on to point out how "by their very nature, occupations are required to be built with wood, not concrete".

9/ "[Israel's] 55yo occupation long ago burst through the restraints of temporariness... its proliferating facts on the ground have virtually extinguished what lingering prospects remain for a genuine Palestinian state. A legal oxymoron has emerged: an occupation in perpetuity."

10/ "Palestinians have urged the international community to understand their predicament as #apartheid... Two of Palestine’s premier human rights orgs – @alhaq_org and @Addameer – concluded that Israel is maintaining an apartheid regime over the Palestinian people as a whole."

11/ "the legal and political starting point to determine apartheid in a time and place [other than the historical practice of apartheid in southern Africa] is the application of a commonly-accepted definition, drawn from the Convention [Against Apartheid] + the [Rome] Statute"

12/ "The past 70 years has taught us that a covetous alien power has two choices: either to abandon the fever-dream of settler-colonialism and recognize the freedom of the indigenous people, or instead to double-down with increasingly...harsher methods of population control"

13/ "At the heart of Israel’s settler-colonial project is a comprehensive dual legal and political system which provides comprehensive rights...for the Jewish Israeli settlers... while imposing upon the Palestinians military rule and control without any basic protections"

14/ "A central strategy of Israeli rule has been the strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian territory into separate areas of population control... divide et impera... enforced by Israel through an elaborate series of walls, check-points, barricades..." conquer-and-divide.btselem.org

15/ "No other society in the world faces such an array of cumulative challenges that includes belligerent occupation, territorial discontinuity, political and administrative divergence, geographic confinement and economic disconnectedness."

16/ Spelling out the consensus "across most of Israel’s political spectrum" that "Palestinians will remain under permanent security control", Lynk quotes Labor leader @MeravMichaeli ('left'): "No one thinks that half-a-million settlers will be evacuated from Judea and Samaria"

17/ Speaking of Labor, Michaeli didn't invent anything. The SR's report quotes Yigal Allon from 1969: "Here, we create a Greater Eretz Israel from a strategic point of view, and establish a Jewish state from a demographic point of view."

18 /Lynk proceeds to quote the current foreign minister, @yairlapid ('center') who explained in 2016 that: "My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians."

19/ "Among Israeli leaders, the debate regarding Palestinians has come down to...whether they'll be granted a shrunken statelet with its own postage stamps and a UN seat -- or be kept in their state of statelessness. Either way... a museum relic of 21st century colonialism."

20/ "Israel’s plans for more Jewish settlements cannot be accomplished without the expropriation of more Palestinian land together with harsher methods of population control... Under this system, the freedoms of one group are inextricably bound up in the subjugation of the other"

21/ The SR points out the key roles of Israel's parliament and judicial system: "The repetition of these acts over long periods of time, and their endorsement by the Knesset and the Israeli judicial system, indicates that they are... integral to Israel’s system of rule."

22/ And so: "the political system of entrenched rule which endows one racial-national-ethnic group with substantial privileges while intentionally subjecting another group to live...'sans droits, sans égalité, sans dignité et sans liberté' satisfies the standard for apartheid" //