- by Gareth Smith
- The Guardian
- Issue #2042
Photo: Alisdare Hickson – flickr.com (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley’s 2017 report for the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (“Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid”) was pulled from the UN website after only two days because it concluded “on the basis of scholarly enquiry and overwhelming evidence, that Israel has imposed a regime of apartheid on the Palestinian people as a whole, wherever they may be.”
Since then Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights NGO, B’Tselem have independently reached the same conclusion.
In 1975 Australia ratified the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid which obligates international bodies, and even individuals and private institutions, to take measures to combat apartheid wherever it is committed and to punish its perpetrators.
When Prime Minister Morrison received the Jerusalem Prize, he stated that “Israel was in his heart”! Australia’s intimate relationship with Israel is incompatible with the convention and marks Australia as an international law pariah.
Moreover, Australians are unwittingly supporting apartheid Israel, given that donations to the Jewish National Fund, which finances land acquisition, house demolitions and illegal settlement expansion, are tax deductible.
