1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
“Israel is not a state of all its citizens… [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them” Message posted online in March 2019 by Israel’s then prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu
On 18 May 2021, Palestinians across cities and villages in Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip closed their offices, shops, restaurants and schools, abandoned construction sites, and refused to report to work for the whole day. In a display of unity not seen for decades, they defied the territorial fragmentation and segregation they face in their daily lives and observed a general strike to protest their shared repression by Israel. The strike was sparked by the Israeli authorities’ plan to evict seven Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian residential neighbourhood near the Old City in East Jerusalem, which has been repeatedly targeted by Israel’s sustained campaign to expand illegal settlements and transfer Jewish settlers. To stop the threatened evictions, the Palestinian families launched a campaign on social media under the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah attracting worldwide attention and mobilizing protesters on the ground. Israeli security forces responded to the protests with the same excessive force they have been using to stifle Palestinian dissent for decades. They arbitrarily arrested peaceful demonstrators, threw sound and stun grenades at crowds, dispersed them with excessive force and skunk water, and fired concussion grenades at worshippers and protesters gathered in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound. The brutal repression generated a wave of solidarity elsewhere in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and amongst Palestinian citizens of Israel, across the Green Line (the demarcation line set out in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and its neighbours that served as the de facto borders of the State of Israel until 1967). In Israel, police forces orchestrated a discriminatory campaign against Palestinian citizens involving mass arbitrary arrests of, and unlawful force against, peaceful protesters, while failing to protect Palestinians from organized assaults by Jewish attackers following the outbreak of intercommunal violence. Meanwhile, armed hostilities broke out on 10 May as Palestinian armed groups fired indiscriminate rockets into Israel from Gaza. Israel responded with a ruthless 11-day military offensive against the territory, targeting residential homes without effective advance warning, damaging essential infrastructure, displacing tens of thousands of people and killing and injuring hundreds of others. It thereby exacerbated the chronic humanitarian crisis caused primarily by Israel’s long-standing unlawful blockade. For many Palestinians who observed the general strike in Israel and the OPT, these discriminatory and repressive actions in East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and Palestinian cities and towns, as well as “mixed cities” with Jewish and Palestinian populations, in Israel represented different manifestations of an overall system of oppression and domination by Israel. This system, which operates with varying levels of intensity and repression based on Palestinians’ status in the separate enclaves where Palestinians live today, and violates their rights in different ways, ultimately seeks to establish and maintain Jewish hegemony wherever
ISRAEL’S APARTHEID AGAINST PALESTINIANS CRUEL SYSTEM OF DOMINATION AND CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY Amnesty International
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