Parallel report for Israel’s fifth periodic review by the Human Rights Committee

Introduction

1. Since its foundation as a State in 1948, the State of Israel has designed and instituted a series of discriminatory laws, military orders, policies, and practices that constitute the legal foundation of its institutionalized regime of racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people as a whole—including Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinian refugees and exiles abroad. As a result of this discriminatory system, the Palestinian people are oppressed and segregated across various territorial and legal domains and are subjected to an array of daily and systematic abuses of their fundamental human rights.

2. To realize the objective of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, the Zionist movement pursued settler colonialism—with its inherently racist ideology—and the transfer of the Palestinian population as foundational prerequisites. These policies have become the driving force behind Israel’s apartheid regime. This goal has been perpetuated through the foundation, establishment, and maintenance of a racial regime of systematic dispossession, domination and fragmentation of the Palestinian people living under Israeli effective control, while consistently denying the right of return of Palestinian refugees, exiles and other persons displaced from the very outset of the Zionist colonization project of Palestine. This regime, which ultimately aims to deprive the Palestinian people of their inalienable rights, including the right to self-determination, amounts to inter alia the crime of apartheid under international law.

3. These measures, policies, and practices have continued unabated since Israel signed and ratified the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR or “the Covenant”) on 19 December 1966 and 3 October 1991, respectively. Notably, the prohibition of apartheid and racial discrimination is a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens), accepted and recognized as non-derogable by the international community as a whole. The principle of non-discrimination and equality is also a cornerstone of international human rights law and is enshrined in all core human rights instruments. Apartheid, as an aggravated case of racial discrimination, breaches Article 2 of the ICCPR, which requires all States Parties to the Covenant to respect, protect, and fulfill all rights enshrined therein to all individuals within its territory and jurisdiction without distinction of any kind, including race.

4. Apartheid also constitutes a crime against humanity under international criminal law, giving rise to individual criminal responsibility and State responsibility to bring the illegal situation to an end. Under Article II of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, the ‘crime of apartheid’ appliesto a series of “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial