It was standing room only at this year’s Oxford Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), the ninth to be held at Oxford University. Since the first Oxford IAW in 2005 – when Oxford students and academics initiated the first IAW in Europe – Oxford has been one of the most active contributors to a series of events now taking place across the globe. Hosted by the Oxford University Arab Cultural Society, Israeli Apartheid Week has brought together people of all backgrounds for a clear purpose: to further the analysis of Israel as an apartheid state and build support for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with its obligations under international law.
Where Israel was once able to commit its crimes against the Palestinians with impunity – hidden away from world’s media and defended by the world’s most powerful states – it now faces a broad and growing international movement demanding that it be held accountable for its actions. The basic analysis advanced by IAW is that Israel’s well-documented crimes: routine killings, house demolitions, forced population transfer and other violations of human rights are core elements of Israel’s system of institutionalized racial discrimination. The distinction in Israeli law between individuals based on their ethnicity is the basic legal means by which the rights of Palestinians – those in the West Bank and Gaza, those in forced exile and Palestinian citizens of Israel – are denied and abused.
Institutionalized racial discrimination of this type is defined as the crime of Apartheid in international customary law. The definition comes from the 1973 Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, later incorporated into the Rome Statute – the founding document of the International Criminal Court.
In recent years, the view that Israel is guilty of practicing Apartheid has gained increasing unanimity across legal and academic communities. Both the current UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights to the Occupied Palestinian Territories Professor Richard Falk and his predecessor in the post, Professor John Dugard, have provided legal analyses detailing how this Apartheid system functions. Many other prominent figures, including former US President Jimmy Carter have also brought attention to this. And this past December, the faculty members of the American Studies Association in the US voted to support the academic boycott of Israeli institutions.
Few have been more outspoken in their condemnation of Israeli Apartheid than South Africans themselves. Once fraternal allies with the Palestinians in the struggle for liberation, today South Africans are leading solidarity in the movement against Israeli apartheid. This week IAW was held in fifteen South African cities and campuses. Two years ago, the ANC passed a resolution declaring its support for the BDS movement. ANC Chair and former Deputy President of South Africa Baleka Mbete echoed similar comments made by Desmond Tutu and other prominent South Africans; that the situation in Palestine is not only comparable to Apartheid South Africa, but having witnessed it herself, she declared, it was ‘far worse’.
This year’s IAW approached these questions from a number of vantage points. Professor Ilan Pappé from the University of Exeter, in a session chaired by fellow Israeli historian, Professor Avi Shlaim (St Antony’s), addressed the continuing struggle of the Palestinian people. His lecture focused on the need for concepts like apartheid, settler colonialism, and ethnic cleansing, in order to illuminate the reality on the ground in historical Palestine.
Dr Abdel Razzaq Takriti from Sheffield University pointed to the particular responsibilities that Britain carries for building and sustaining Israeli Apartheid, and identified the meaning and importance of international solidarity to those struggling against colonialism and Apartheid. Dr Paul Kelemen from Manchester University, chaired by Dr Sudhir Hazareesingh (Balliol) described the enthusiastic role of the British left, for much of the 20th century, in supporting Zionist expulsion of Palestinians from their country. Referring to the left’s ‘history of a divorce’ with Zionism, Dr Keleman gave a further indication of the growing support for Palestinian rights in Britain.
While the racist logic of Israeli apartheid in essence is simple, its victims are diverse. Sami Adwan from Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria spoke of the precarious existence of Palestinian refugees living in exile and denied their legal and moral right to return to their homeland. On Tuesday Haneen Maikey, co-founder and director of al Qaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian society and Palestinian Queers for BDS described the experience of being queer under apartheid. She described the resistance of Palestinian queers to Israeli attempts at ‘pinkwashing’ and how the Palestinian LGBTQ movement has been working to mobilize across historic Palestine despite the range of legal and military obstacles.
The reality of Israeli apartheid described this week denies our common humanity, the Palestinian struggle for freedom and equality appeals to simple but noble ideals for which people have always fought. The call from Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law, went out to all people of conscience and it is now time for it to be answered. This week, in the year of his passing, Oxford students once again renewed our commitment to the late Nelson Mandela’s statement that ‘our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’.
