In April 2021, Human Rights Watch published a 213-page report concluding that Israeli authorities were committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. Nine months earlier, B’Tselem — Israel’s oldest human rights organization — had reached the same conclusion. Three months after HRW published, Amnesty International released its own 280-page investigation arriving at an identical finding. Three separate organizations, three separate research processes, one verdict.
This is not coincidence. It is convergence — the product of decades of accumulated documentation, a maturing body of international criminal law, and a Palestinian rights discourse that had long named what the international community was only beginning to acknowledge.
What the Law Actually Says
Before examining what these organizations found, it is worth establishing what they were measuring against.
Apartheid is not merely a historical descriptor for South Africa under white minority rule. It is a crime against humanity defined in two binding international instruments: the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (“the Apartheid Convention”), and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Human Rights Watch notes that “the international community has over the years detached the term apartheid from its original South African context, developed a universal legal prohibition against its practice, and recognized it as a crime against humanity.”
The Apartheid Convention, adopted by the UN General Assembly on 30 November 1973 and currently with 109 states parties, defines the crime as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” EJIL: Talk! The Rome Statute, drafted in 1998 after the end of South African apartheid, uses a nearly identical formulation: “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Human Rights Watch
The critical point — and one each organization emphasizes — is that the Rome Statute was drafted after South Africa’s democratic transition and contains no reference to Southern Africa. Courts and investigators applying it today are not required to establish a comparison with the apartheid South Africa of the 1970s. Human Rights Watch The crime has three primary elements: intent to maintain the domination of one racial group over another; systematic oppression by that dominant group; and inhumane acts carried out pursuant to that system. All three must be present.
The State of Palestine acceded to the Rome Statute and the Apartheid Convention in 2014 and 2015 respectively. In February 2021, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I confirmed the court’s jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In March 2021, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor announced the opening of a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine. Human Rights Watch
The Landscape They Were Examining
The factual territory each organization analyzed is the same: approximately 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Throughout most of this area, as Human Rights Watch documented, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Human Rights Watch
Israel has maintained military rule over some portion of the Palestinian population for all but six months of its 73-year history at the time of the HRW report. Military rule applied to the vast majority of Palestinians inside Israel from 1948 until 1966. From 1967 to the present, it has applied to Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, excluding East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed. By contrast, Israel has since its founding governed all Jewish Israelis — including settlers in the OPT — under its more rights-respecting civil law. Human Rights Watch
The 2018 Nation-State Law, passed by the Knesset with constitutional status, is a document that each organization treats as a foundational exhibit. It declares Israel as “the nation state of the Jewish people,” stipulates that “the right to self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish people,” and establishes “Jewish settlement” as a national value. Amnesty International notes that this law “does not recognize any other national identity despite Palestinians comprising 19% of the population within Israel” and “establishes a superior ‘Jewish nationality’ status that is distinct from citizenship.” Amnesty International
Intent: The Demographic Architecture of Control
The first element of the crime — intent to maintain domination — is where each report begins and where the evidence is, in many ways, most explicit.
Human Rights Watch documents that Israeli authorities have openly described the Palestinian population as a demographic “threat,” adopting policies aimed at limiting Palestinian population and political power, granting the right to vote only to Palestinians living within the pre-1967 borders, and restricting Palestinian movement from the OPT into Israel and from elsewhere. It further documents a state policy of “Judaization” applied to areas with significant Palestinian populations — including Jerusalem, the Galilee, and the Negev — which concentrates Palestinians into “dense, under-served enclaves” while nurturing the growth of nearby Jewish communities. Human Rights Watch
Amnesty International frames the intent element similarly. Since Israel was established in 1948, it concludes, “its policies and legislation have been shaped by an overarching objective: to maintain a Jewish demographic majority and maximize Jewish Israeli control over land at the expense of Palestinians.” Amnesty International This objective, Amnesty finds, is not incidental or the byproduct of security policy. It is the organizing principle.
Human Rights Watch points to specific legislation as evidence of this intent: the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which effectively freezes family reunification for Palestinian citizens of Israel with spouses from the OPT; policies it describes as using “security as a pretext primarily to advance demographic objectives”; and a continuing settlement expansion program that a number of Israeli officials have stated they intend to maintain in perpetuity. Human Rights Watch
Systematic Oppression: The Architecture of Separation
Intent alone does not constitute the crime. The organizations document in granular detail how that intent is implemented through interlocking systems of law, administration, and physical infrastructure.
Human Rights Watch identifies several core mechanisms: sweeping restrictions on the movement of 4.7 million Palestinians in the OPT; the confiscation of much of their land; categorical denial of building permits across large parts of the West Bank, which has led thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes under conditions amounting to, in HRW’s legal characterization, forcible transfer; the denial of residency rights to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, largely due to absence during or after the 1967 occupation began; and a generalized closure on Gaza that sharply restricts the movement of people and goods. Human Rights Watch
Amnesty International identifies four key components of what it characterizes as the apartheid system: territorial fragmentation; segregation and control; dispossession of land and property; and denial of economic and social rights. Amnesty International It offers concrete examples: the movement restrictions in the West Bank enforced through checkpoints and a permit system requiring Palestinian residents to seek Israeli military permission to travel within their own territory; systematic denial of building permits to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, resulting in repeated demolitions and forced evictions; and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem that confines the Palestinian population to progressively smaller enclaves. Amnesty International
Both organizations directly address the deliberate fragmentation of the Palestinian population — between those inside the pre-1967 borders, those in the West Bank, those in Gaza, and those in exile — as itself a structural element of the system. “The geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is itself a foundational element of the apartheid system,” Amnesty states. Amnesty International Human Rights Watch similarly notes that this “fragmentation, in part deliberately engineered through Israeli restrictions on movement and residency, furthers the goal of domination and helps obscure the reality of the same Israeli government repressing the same Palestinian population group.” Human Rights Watch
Inhumane Acts: What the System Produces
The third element requires documentation of specific inhumane acts carried out pursuant to the system. Each organization produces an extensive record.
Human Rights Watch documents inhumane acts including: forcible transfer resulting from building permit denials across large parts of the West Bank; expropriation of land; the creation of what it characterizes as separate enclaves; and denial of residency rights and the right to return. Human Rights Watch
Amnesty International documents killings during the Great March of Return, in which Israeli forces killed 214 civilians, including 46 children, and injured more than 8,000 others — characterizing this lethal response to protests against the blockade as an inhumane act committed within the context of the apartheid system. Amnesty International It also documents administrative detention and torture, home demolitions and forced evictions of Bedouin Palestinians in the Negev, and the denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their villages. Amnesty International
Both organizations address the question of security justifications and reject their validity as a blanket defense. Human Rights Watch is explicit: “Many abuses, including categorical denials of building permits, mass residency revocations or restrictions, and large-scale land confiscations, have no legitimate security justifications. Instead, they are designed to engineer and maintain a Jewish majority in Israel and parts of the West Bank.” Human Rights Watch Amnesty reaches the same conclusion, noting that security-related policies must comply with international law and must be proportionate. Amnesty International
Geographic Scope: Where the Three Organizations Diverge Slightly
One area where the three reports differ is in their assessment of where the apartheid finding applies — a difference of scope rather than substance.
Human Rights Watch locates the full three-element crime specifically in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, while documenting discriminatory intent across all of Israel and the OPT. It found the systematic oppression and inhumane acts that complete the legal test specifically in the OPT. Human Rights Watch Israel’s Yesh Din organization similarly focused its own apartheid finding on the West Bank specifically.
Amnesty International takes the broadest view: it concludes that “Israeli authorities are enforcing a system of apartheid against all Palestinians living under their effective control — whether they live in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or in other countries as refugees.” Amnesty International It argues explicitly that examining the regions separately “misses the full picture” and that the Israeli government’s differential treatment of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians “knows no borders.” Amnesty International Amnesty’s analysis extends to Palestinian refugees outside Israel and the OPT, finding that Israel’s denial of their right to return contributes to maintaining the system of oppression as a whole.
B’Tselem, as noted by Amnesty, “found that Israel is maintaining a system of apartheid over Palestinians in the OPT as well as Palestinians living within its own borders.” Amnesty International
These are differences in the perimeter of the finding, not in its core.
The Convention’s Dormant Watchdog
One underexamined dimension of the apartheid framework is the monitoring mechanism that exists — on paper — under the Apartheid Convention itself. The Convention established a body known as the Group of Three, which reviewed states parties’ reports on compliance from 1978 until its suspension in 1995, following the end of South African apartheid.
According to legal scholars Victor Kattan and David Johnson writing in EJIL: Talk!, the Group of Three was suspended because, at the time, there was “no claim by any State party that apartheid, as defined by the Convention, exists anywhere else than in southern Africa.” But that suspension was made “without prejudice to any subsequent reactivation of the monitoring mechanism.” EJIL: Talk!
Kattan and Johnson note that even during the Group of Three’s active period, states parties including Belarus, Cuba, Iraq, Qatar, Syria, and the UAE referred to Israel’s policies and practices toward the Palestinian people as falling within the territorial scope of the Convention’s definition of apartheid. EJIL: Talk! The Convention currently has 109 states parties and has never been denounced. It remains in force.
The scholars argue that the reasons for suspending the monitoring mechanism “no longer hold” — given that several organizations have now documented apartheid claims concerning the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and given that an apartheid claim is likely to arise in proceedings before the International Court of Justice following the General Assembly’s request for an advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s prolonged occupation, settlement, and annexation of Palestinian territory. EJIL: Talk!
The Weight of Convergence
The convergence of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem did not emerge from coordination. It emerged from the application of the same legal framework to the same documented reality.
Human Rights Watch’s Senior Legal Adviser Clive Baldwin noted explicitly that the report’s findings on apartheid drew on years of research, examination of Israeli laws, government planning documents, statements by officials, and land records — and that the Israeli government, written to in July 2020 to solicit its perspectives, did not respond by the time of publication. Human Rights Watch Amnesty’s research spanned July 2017 through November 2021, included dozens of interviews with Palestinian communities, and was reviewed by external experts on international law before publication. Amnesty International
The finding carries specific legal and political implications. When crimes against humanity are committed, Amnesty states, “the international community has an obligation to hold the perpetrators to account.” Amnesty International Human Rights Watch calls on states to condition arms sales and military assistance to Israel on “concrete and verifiable steps toward ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” to impose individual sanctions against responsible officials, and to investigate and prosecute those credibly implicated under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Human Rights Watch
Palestinians have described the system under which they live as apartheid for more than two decades. What changed between 2021 and 2022 is that three of the most credentialed human rights institutions in the world, using the framework of international criminal law, concluded they were right.
Sources:
- Human Rights Watch — “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”
- Human Rights Watch — “Q&A: A Threshold Crossed”
- Human Rights Watch — “Human Rights Watch Responds: Reflections on Apartheid and Persecution in International Law”
- Amnesty International — “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity”
- Amnesty International — “Q&A: Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity”
- EJIL: Talk! — “The Crime of Apartheid beyond Southern Africa: A Call to Revive the Apartheid Convention’s ‘Group of Three’”
Palestinian writer and researcher documenting life under occupation, drawing on primary sources from B’Tselem, Al-Haq, OCHA oPt, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and named scholars.