CD (Portland) — Leading human rights organizations have urged European Union (EU) officials to “publicly and unequivocally denounce” Israel’s disregard for international law and its apartheid system during this week’s EU-Israel Association Council meeting.

“Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians,” Eve Geddie, director of Amnesty International’s EU office, said in a statement issued before top EU officials sat down with Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

“The Israeli authorities are subjecting Palestinians to land seizures, unlawful killings, forcible transfers, and severe movement restrictions while denying their humanity, equal nationality, and status,” said Geddie.

Geddie stressed that “this is a crime against humanity requiring the European Union to hold Israel’s leaders to account, and to ensure it in no way supports their apartheid system.”

“The European Union cannot claim shared human rights commitments with a state perpetrating apartheid and which has in recent months shuttered the offices of renowned Palestinian civil society organizations, scaled up the demolition of homes in the occupied West Bank, and carried out apparently unlawful attacks in the Gaza Strip,” she added.

Ten days ago, in a letter sent to EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, EU Special Representative for Human Rights Eamon Gilmore, and the foreign affairs ministers of EU member states, Geddie implored officials from the bloc to “reconsider their approach to resuming these meetings” in the absence of any clear-cut condemnation.

“The European Union appears to be sacrificing human rights concerns in the interest of reviving EU-Israel relations at the upcoming Association Council,” states the letter.

EUobserver reported last month, for instance, that European Union representatives were planning to weaken language on key human rights issues in their Association Council statement, including dropping the bloc’s call for an “independent” investigation into the May assassination of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a renowned Al-Jazeera reporter who was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers while covering a military raid in the occupied West Bank.

“Impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity including apartheid is pervasive, and the European Union and its member states have a responsibility to bring it to an end,” says the letter. It continues:

Carrying on with business as usual while the Israeli authorities escalate their crackdown on Palestinian human rights and further entrench a cruel system of oppression and domination, would embolden not just the Israeli authorities, but rights-abusing governments across the globe. At a time when the international human rights system faces unprecedented challenges, such short-sighted approaches would only reproduce past policy mistakes, while sabotaging the European Union’s own human rights policy and its credibility as an international actor.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) echoed Amnesty’s message in a statement released late last week.

“European officials should know they’ll be shaking hands with representatives of a government committing crimes against humanity and that has outlawed prominent civil society groups challenging these abuses,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at HRW. “Pretending its business as usual with Israel amid escalating repression sends the message that European Union condemnation is worth little more than the paper it’s written on,” he added.

Last year, prominent Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published an exhaustive report detailing how Israel is an anti-democratic “apartheid regime” whose policies—supported by US$3.8 billion in annual military aid and other assistance from the United States—impose Jewish supremacy over Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Soon after, Amnesty and HRW corroborated those findings in painstakingly detailed reports of their own, and Palestinian groups have long made the case that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution with help from the United States.

Despite the recent intensification of Israel’s long-standing assault on Palestinians, “the European Union apparently did not demand any action by the Israeli authorities to end abuses ahead of the Association Council,” HRW noted last week. “These could have included Israeli authorities reversing their decision to outlaw prominent Palestinian civil society groups, easing the Gaza closure, or releasing Salah Hamouri, a French-Palestinian human rights defender, from months-long administrative detention.”

Alon Liel, the former director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said in a recent interview: “As long as the Europeans don’t take concrete measures on the diplomatic, security, and economic level, Israel doesn’t give a damn. It feels very confident that this anti-human rights behavior will have no cost politically in the international arena.”

Claudio Francavilla, EU advocate at HRW, argued that “the decades-long European failure to take action in the face of grave human rights abuses has emboldened Israeli authorities to brazenly escalate their repression of Palestinians.”

“Instead of reciting empty platitudes,” said Francavilla, “European officials should use the Association Council to finally condemn Israel’s apartheid and persecution and make clear there will be meaningful consequences should the Israeli government not reverse course.”

Originally published at Common Dreams. Republished by cc by-sa 3.0. Minor edits for style and content.

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