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Should Indonesia normalize Israeli apartheid?
Standing against discrimination of all forms has been Indonesia's longstanding policy, not least as a legacy of its anti-colonial past.
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Close watch: A member of the Israeli security forces stands guard as a bulldozer demolishes a Palestinian home in Jawaya village near Yatta in area (AFP/Hazem Bader)
“The conference extended its warm sympathy and support for the courageous stand taken by the victims of racial discrimination, especially by the peoples of African and Indian and Pakistani origin in South Africa.”
This is an excerpt from the final communiqué of the inaugural 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, West Java. At a time when several of the world’s great powers were still deciding to look the other way, Indonesia was at the vanguard of a global campaign to denounce the repugnant racial segregation policy of the South African regime.
There should be no doubt as to where Indonesia should stand when it comes to apartheid. Nonetheless, that supposedly firm ground is increasingly under attack today by those who believe that we should normalize our relations with a country that still unabashedly practices apartheid: Israel.
Some deny the reality of Israel’s military occupation and systemic racial oppression of Palestine and its people. They argue that what is happening between Israel and Palestine is “only” a conflict and we should not take sides. However, Amnesty International recently joined Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, to confirm through the use of robust empirical evidence what many have been saying for decades, that what Israel had been practicing amounted to nothing less than apartheid.
According to B’Tselem, since the 2009 invasion of Gaza, almost 2,000 Palestinian noncombatants have been killed by Israeli forces. As heartbreaking as this figure is, the reality of apartheid in Palestine goes far beyond these tragic deaths. Even in the absence of massive violent flare-ups, Palestinians have to struggle on a daily basis with a system that glaringly puts their inferiority front and center. In other words, it is an apartheid system.
According to Amnesty, international law defines the crime of apartheid as occurring when serious human rights violations are committed in the context and with the specific intent of maintaining a regime or system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory control of one or more racial groups by another. Based on this definition, it is tremendously hard to deny that what Israel is doing is anything but apartheid.
Israel has the Law of Return, which gives automatic citizenship to any Jewish person in the world, while it has denied hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees the same right. It means that a Jewish person from New York has the right to settle in Tel Aviv, but a Palestinian refugee in Jordan whose grandparents are from Jerusalem is denied that same right.
