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terminology, Words, labels, etc.
Accountability
Under international law, states that have signed the UN Fourth Geneva Convention are under an obligation to enforce the provisions of that convention when it is established that a member nation has violated the regulations of the Convention. Amnesty International has provided a clear summary of those obligations with regard to Palestine. Here is a quote it:
- The state obligation to ensure respect entails abstaining from acts that would be contrary to this objective, such as directly financing, favouring or facilitating economic activities that are directly connected to serious breaches of humanitarian law.
- As explained earlier, Israel’s settlement project entails serious breaches of peremptory norms which give rise to certain additional duties among all states. These duties are: the duty to “cooperate to bring to an end through lawful means” serious breaches; the duty to not “recognize as lawful” the situation created by such breaches; and the duty to not “render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation”.
- While the exact scope of the obligation to “bring to an end” serious breaches is debated, this duty implies, at a minimum, refraining from promoting, supporting or allowing economic activities that contribute to the exact opposite, such as those activities which result in maintaining and growing the settlements. The obligation of... read more here.
Apartheid
Apartheid is the Afrikaans word for ‘apartness’, originally used to describe the system of racial discrimination that existed in South Africa until 1994.
- The term apartheid is not only a reference to South Africa’s former regime; it is used in international law to describe a category of regime, defined in the United Nations (UN) International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973), to which more than 100 states are a party. The definition was refined in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002).
- The Convention defines the Crime of Apartheid as: “inhumane acts...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.”
There is overwhelming evidence that the system instituted by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people meets the UN definition of Apartheid. In effect, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory constitute one territorial unit under full Israeli control. Under Israeli law, and in practice, Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are treated differently in almost every aspect of life including freedom of movement, family, housing, education, employment and other basic human rights.
Dozens of Israeli laws and policies institutionalize this prevailing system of racial discrimination and domination. Jewish Israeli settlers are governed by Israeli civil law, while Palestinians also living in the occupied West Bank are governed by Israeli military law.
[above is from War on Want's Israeli apartheid factsheet]
New Yesh Din Report on Apartheid:
On Thursday, July 9, 2020, Yesh Din released a ground-breaking exhaustive legal opinion concluding that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, defined in international law as a crime against humanity. The opinion finds that, even without annexation, the military regime in the West Bank is intended to maintain the supremacy and domination of one population over another, constituting apartheid.
- Read the full legal opinion here.
- Read an executive summary of the legal opinion here.
- FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions here.
complicity
Complicity is defined as "the state of being involved with others in an illegal activity or wrongdoing." In varying degrees, many groups have been complicit in advancing Israel's colonial framework, from the Palestinian Authority to the United Nations. Complicity is present in the following arenas: corporate, academic, tourism, military, diplomatic, Legislative, and more.
Examples:
- Diplomatic complicity: "Selling out Palestinians: From the UN to the PA" from researcher Ramona Wadi appears in Middle East Monitor.
- Corporate complicity: UN Report of complicity of 206 corporations in violation of International Law.
- Academic complicity: Report: British universities invest £450m in companies complicit in Israeli crimes:
- Tourism complicity: By listing properties and attractions in Israeli settlements, digital tourism companies are profiting from war crimes. See Video section, #12.
- Legislative complicity: Attempts are being made to outlaw the personal right to boycott. See the US example here.
divestment
Divestment is an act of tracing our own financial links to war, oppression, and exploitation, to use them as leverage to expose, isolate, and withdraw from these harmful social structures. As far as companies go, once they are exposed and confronted with the potential controversy, reputational, and regulatory risks, many of them respond to engagement efforts by stakeholders, develop a human rights policy, or even step away from additional controversial activities.
When companies withdraw their investment in harmful institutions of state violence - such as Apartheid, prisons, militarized policing, and war - they also withdraw their political and financial support of these institutions and help create new behavior standards which respect human life, human rights, peace, and sustainability.
source: Investigate.afsc.org/divest
exceptionalism
Exceptionalism is “the idea that a person, country or political system can be allowed to be different from, and perhaps better than, others” ~The Cambridge Dictionary
- In the context of BDS advocacy and activism, exceptionalism as it relates to Israel means that the unique understanding of the State of Israel as Jewish state founded as a homeland following the Holocaust grants it a special status in its self-understanding as the only democracy in the Middle East. Thus, the issues of security, antisemitism, development of settlements and resources, generational trauma and victories in military conflicts since 1948 are used by the government and agencies of the State of Israel to grant it the “exceptional” justification for not having to fully comply with the United Nations laws, treaties and conventions on which it signed. (See Impunity.)
The effects of the position of Israeli exceptionalism lead to normalizing violations of international law, denial of human rights for Palestinians under Israeli control and continual land grabs in the building of settlements, blockades of Gaza, invasions of Palestinian lands and multiple forms of surveillance and imprisonment of Palestinian citizens under military law.
ethnic cleansing
‘The term ethnic cleansing refers to the removal of people who belong to a specific ethnic or religious group from a country, whether by forcefully displacing them, or by killing them. The goal of such actions is to establish an ethnically uniform country, or other geographic region. In addition to removing people, ethnic cleansing often involves removing any physical, cultural evidence of their existence in the region. To explore this concept, consider the following ethnic cleansing definition.
- Definition of Ethnic Cleansing - The removal of an unwanted ethnic group from a society, whether by forced emigration, or by genocide. The expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority, in order to achieve ethnic sameness.
- What is Ethnic Cleansing - Throughout history, leaders of certain nations have attempted to create an ethnically or religiously uniform people within the state. This is accomplished by engaging in cleansing campaigns, in which all of the people in a geographic region that do not meet a specific standard are forced out or killed. The term “ethnic cleansing” is a blanket term that does not refer to one specific crime. Rather, it refers to the act of forcing people from their homelands, through the use of fear, intimidation, violence, and murder.
In 1993, the United Nations (U.N.) Commission of Experts defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” The Commission reported, to the U.N. Security Council, that the former Yugoslavia had undergone ethnic cleansing through the use of arbitrary arrests, torture, rape, murder, executions outside the judicial system, confinement of civilians, military attacks on civilians, and malicious destruction of public and private property.
When the Commission issued its final report in 1994, the crimes of mistreatment of prisoners of war and civilian prisoners, use of civilians as human shields, mass murder, destruction of cultural property, theft of personal property, and violent attacks on hospitals, locations with Red Cross emblems, and medical personnel were added. ~quoted from Legal Dictionary.
impunity
Impunity means "exemption from punishment or loss or escape from fines". In the international law of human rights, it refers to the failure to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice and, as such, itself constitutes a denial of victims' right to justice and redress.
- In spite of resolutions and treaties, the international community has not held the State of Israel accountable nor imposed penalties nor required reparations for the Palestinian victims in the violation of human rights under international law. Impunity, thus, has been the de facto enacted policy toward Israel in its actions and policies of the occupation.
- BDS has been one of the tools used in the international community to bring attention to the impunity that the state of Israel has been allowed.
The amended Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights Through Action to Combat Impunity, submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on 8 February 2005, defines impunity as:
‘the impossibility, de jure or de facto, of bringing the perpetrators of violations to account – whether in criminal, civil, administrative or disciplinary proceedings – since they are not subject to any inquiry that might lead to their being accused, arrested, tried and, if found guilty, sentenced to appropriate penalties, and to making reparations to their victims.”
The UN Set of Principles to Combat Impunity (2005) is available in PDF here.
Investment screen
A securities and investment analysis technique in which the investor filters a large set of possible investments by separating according to a range of values for a predetermined set of variables. (read more: Investorwords.com)
Used in the context of BDS, an organization may decide on a set of variables (screens) connected to companies who profit from the manufacture of certain products or use of materials that are deemed to contribute to the oppression of Palestinians. Those screens then shape decisions about boycotting those products and material sources, investor engagement to change the human rights violations caused by a company’s policies, or to determine what investments or securities will be divested from or issued a do-not-purchase order by the organization for that company. This also is extended to screening against particular banks or other financial institutions for their role in financial exchanges or corporate financing of such companies.
See WhoProfits.org, an independent research center dedicated to exposing the commercial involvement of Israeli and international corporations in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Syrian lands.
The Israel Lobby
"John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science and Stephen M.Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government contend that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is its intimate relationship with Israel. They argue that although often justified as reflecting shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, the U.S. commitment to Israel is due primarily to the activities of the 'Israel Lobby.' In a describe the various activities that pro-Israel groups have undertaken in order to shift U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." Harvard Kennedy School
[The full paper is available for free download at the above link]
Walt and Mearsheimer's 2008 book, The Israel Lobby, is based on a paper of the same name that was published by The London Review of Books in 2006 after The Atlantic, a US periodical that commissioned it, refused to publish it when it was ready.
settler colonialism
Though often conflated with colonialism more generally, settler colonialism is a distinct ... formation. …[It] seeks to replace the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers. This new society needs land, and so settler colonialism depends primarily on access to territory. This is achieved by various means, either through treaties with indigenous inhabitants or simply by “taking possession.” Britain, for example, implemented the doctrine of “terra nullius” (“land belonging to no one”) to claim sovereignty over Australia. The entire continent was thereby declared legally uninhabited, despite millennia of Aboriginal occupation.
~Tate A. LeFevre, Anthropologist Settler Colonialism, 2015 paper
Zionism is settler colonialism
"Zionism is not a national movement, it’s a settler colonialist movement. ...if we will not use the right dictionary and the right language to describe what goes on on the ground, then we will continue to provide an umbrella of immunity to the settler colonial state of Israel to try and complete what it started in 1948—namely, to have as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible."~Ilan Pappe, Israeli Historian, The Value of Viewing Israel-Palestine Through the Lens of Settler-Colonialism,
~Ilan Pappe, Lecture at the National Press Club, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 24, 2017