The Ha’Penny & The Gingerbread by Les May

INFAMY, Infamy, they’ve all got it in for me! is a line by Julius Caesar (Kenneth Williams) from the 1964 comedy film Carry on Cleo. But it sums up the response of recent Israeli governments and their apologists whenever they are confronted with questions about their behaviour in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

Apartheid is recognized as a crime against humanity in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (“Apartheid Convention”) and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which also sets out the crime against humanity of persecution.

Because the state of Palestine is a party to both the Rome Statute and the Apartheid Convention the International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled in February 2021, that it has jurisdiction over serious international crimes committed in the entirety of the OPT, including East Jerusalem, which would include the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution committed in that territory. In March 2021, the ICC announced the opening of a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine.

On 27 April the organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a 213 page report which claims that the overarching Israeli government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians authorities amounts to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

Predictably the response of the apologists for the Israeli government has been to both reject the report and to try to muddy the water by claiming that organisations which try to bring pressure on Israel to change its policies are intent on denying its right to exist.

Legal measures such as those we may see from the ICC are necessarily directed against individuals within a state, not against the state itself, so it is difficult to see how this is a credible argument if say the Israeli Prime Minister were tried in his absence. If found guilty it would be for other states to decide what sanctions should be place on the individual concerned. It would also be a massive embarrassment for the state of Israel.

Such a case could only meaningfully be brought so long as Israel remains as the Occupying Power in Palestine and continues its annexation of East Jerusalem, which is itself prohibited by international law. If Israel does not want to be seen as a country whose rulers could face the ignominy of being declared guilty of crimes against humanity it has the option of simply ending its occupation and allowing a functioning state of Palestine to come into being.

But Israel wants both the Ha’Penny and the Gingerbread; it wants to continue its occupation and be given a Persilschein.

The HRW report is called A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. It is available on WWW.

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