In a recent commentary from Washington Post, there is description and analysis on the flood of illegal arms into Palestinian communities, including East Jerusalem, where local arms traffickers say “business has never been better”. This is also true of circumstances in Palestinian Israeli towns, where “a political and security vacuum has allowed criminal gangs to flourish, and spurred ordinary people to buy guns for their own protection”. Many black-market weapons are smuggled from neighboring countries; others are pieced together in makeshift factories or stolen from Israeli military armories.
Israel’s new hard-right government has pledged to retaliate with permits of new gun permits to Israeli civilians on the poorly constructed argument that “more guns in the hands of more trained Israelis will save lives, empowering citizens to act as a first line of defense”. The path to acute violence has opened up. The only way out of this dangerous impasse is for the international community to compel talks that will dismantle Israel’s racist-colonialist-apartheid system that are mediated in a platform with reliable mediators not just from the Western blocs.
There is criticism of the dominant approach that too much of the efforts to dismantle Israel’s apartheid and settler colonial systems of domination over the Palestinian people are following a purely legal approach. Scholars, activists and even policymakers are too invested in the path towards Palestinian liberation through securing a legal opinion officially defining Israel’s violent expulsion of Palestinians as apartheid and colonialism. Political activists and analysts argue that it is not useful to confine all efforts towards Palestinian liberation within the frames of human rights and international law. To them, the core of the Palestinian struggle has never been and will never be a legal one. It is a struggle of and for justice, not law. These analysts are asserting that there is a difference between opting for the legal route and neglecting the path of justice.
The resentment is growing in the human rights community too. 12 leading Israeli human rights organizations have expressed “grave concern” regarding the European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell Fontelles’ remarks insinuating that Amnesty International’s report accusing Israel of practicing apartheid against Palestinians as motivated by antisemitism. The letter also condemns “the escalating instrumentalization of allegations of antisemitism to prevent an open debate about Israel’s oppressive policies towards Palestinians.”
Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator and a human rights activist.
