Netanyahu’s West Bank Apartheid

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). As defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1998 and going into effect in 2002, the crime of apartheid is defined as inhumane acts of a character similar to other crimes against humanity “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.”

Since February 2024, 124 states have signed onto the treaty. The United States had been a signatory nation, but it has subsequently withdrawn.

Many people by now are aware of the policy of apartheid in South Africa under the white European heritage minority over the Black and mixed-race majority population for much of the latter half of the last century. It included the sanctioning of racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against nonwhites.

The social and economic discriminatory legacy of apartheid continues today even though legislation to end the apartheid system passed in the early 1990s.

During Nazi Germany, the regime passed laws that fit into the definition of apartheid. It announced two new laws at a rally held in Nuremberg related to race on September 15, 1935: The Reich Citizenship Law, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. These have subsequently been referred to as the Nuremberg Laws.

These laws specifically applied to German Jews, whom the Nazis racialized as “non-Aryan,” “non-German,” or as “subaltern” even though Jews around the world come from every so-called “race” (which is actually a social construction rather than a biological fact), people of African and Asian descent, Roma (falsely referred to as “gypsies”), and all of the so-called “lesser European races,” specifically throughout Eastern and Southern Europe.

The Nazis argued that Jews in their presence endangered the German people. The Nuremberg Laws were part of their agenda to separate Jews from other Germans to protect and strengthen Germany. Their platform before attaining power promised that only “racially pure” Germans would be permitted to attain power and to hold German citizens.

Following their victory in the 1933 German elections, Jews had to relinquish their citizenship rights. On their official papers, including passports, officials stamped a large “J” signifying that the holders were Jews, and therefore, were to be seen as second class residents.

The Nuremberg laws banned intermarriages between Jews and “Aryans,” which the regime defined as “race defilement” (“Rassenschande”). Nuremberg Laws defined a Jew as a person with three or four Jewish grandparents. The law stated that a Mischlinge was neither German nor Jewish. These were people who had one or two Jewish grandparents.

Ultimately, the Nazis disallowed Jewish children from attending school, confiscated Jewish businesses and homes, which culminated in the “final solution”: the murder of an estimated 6 million European Jews.

Hitler and his regime engaged in a concerted terror campaign against any person or group they did not consider as Aryan “racially,” and anyone not supporting the National Socialist cause, for example, communists of any racial category.

Terrorist Nations

The United States government, as determined by the Department of State, has declared that specific countries across the globe shall be defined as state supporters or sponsors of international acts of terrorism pursuant to three laws: section1754(c) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, section 40 of the Arms Export Control Act, and section 620A of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.

Recommended sanctions include restrictions of U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions.

Countries currently listed as state supporters of international acts of terror by the U.S. government are Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), Iran, and Syria.

Other countries, most certainly, should be included on that list, for example Russia. In addition, as thoroughly invested and reported by the International Court of Justice, Israel should be added to this gallery of shame.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) serves in an advisory position on international legal issues for the United Nations. It issued an advisory opinion on July 19, 2024, with significant consequences for human rights protections in Palestine under Israel’s 57-year occupation.

In December 2022, the United Nations General Assembly requested the ICJ to consider the legal consequences of Israel’s policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The ICJ’s major finding included:

To qualify the legal status of Israel’s presence in the territories confiscated and occupied after the 1967 war, including the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the ICJ found definitely that this is illegal under international law and, therefore, must end.
Israel has violated its temporary power to control the West Bank since the occupation was never meant to be permanent as determined by the “international law of aggression” and “international laws of belligerent occupation” established following World War II. Israel has violated this prohibition by annexing Palestinian territories.
The Israeli government has imposed a system of apartheid in the occupied territories, a key feature which includes the discrimination of Palestinians in a dual system of laws on the basis of “racial” discrimination and segregation. The duality grants modern liberal democratic laws for Israelis while imposing draconian military laws on Palestinians. (An update of the Nuremberg laws?)

Since the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas in southern Israel, so-called “Jewish settlers” (sanctioned by the Israeli government) have forcefully and fully displaced 19 Palestinian towns and partially displaced another 12 in the West Bank.

The ICJ refers to the character of the Israeli occupation as discriminatory both systemically and systematically toward Palestinians and by confiscating their resources and handing them over to the Jewish “settlers.”

Though criticized and sanctioned for violating international law by such countries as the United Kingdom, European Union nations, and the United States, Netanyahu and his government, with the full support from the World Zionist Organization, has taken over and has plans to annex an ever-increasing amount of Palestinian land and property on the West Bank.

Plans are being finalized in Israel to increase the number of so-called Jewish “settlers” (a.k.a. land and property thieves = terrorists) to one million in the West Bank by 2050. Currently, approximately half a million Jews are living illegally on the West Bank.

Constant state supported terrorist violence permeates the West Bank with little or no law enforcement efforts on the part of Israeli police forces and defense forces.

Members of the ICJ affirms that Israel has violated Articles 2 and 3 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted December 21, 1965, by UN General Assembly resolution 2106

Article 2: Racial discrimination is wrong and unlawful,
Article 3: The most abhorrent types of racial discrimination are racial segregation and apartheid.

As a Jew myself, it hurts and shames me to report these very disturbing issues and results.

We as Jews must remember our history and the history of the world, of how we have been viewed and treated, of how we have been racialized, segregated, violated, and murdered, of how our homes had been taken from us, of how our loved ones had been taken away from us, of how our history has been censored, denied, and trivialized.

As a part of this, we must remember the effects of the Nuremberg Laws and its legacies.

Known as “the longest hatred,” we must not repeat or reproduce the oppression we faced onto another group. We cannot act like the abused child who grows into the adult child abuser. The cycle must stop here and now!

For in the poignant and insightful wisdom of Black lesbian feminist, essayist, and social activist, Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Think about it.