US rejects Amnesty Int'l report Israel maintained 'system of oppression' on Palestine

Biden administration is rejecting an Amnesty International report that claims Israel has maintained “a system of oppression and domination” over the Palestinians going all the way back to its establishment in 1948, one that meets the international definition of apartheid. That view has gained strength in the decade since the peace process ground to a halt, as Israel has consolidated its control over the occupied territories and soured on the idea of a Palestinian state. On Wednesday, the State Department said it rejected the 278-page report.

"We don't offer our own public comprehensive evaluations of reports," said State Department Spokesman Ned Price. "But we certainly reject the label that has been attached to this."

Israel rejects any allegation of apartheid, saying its own Arab citizens enjoy equal rights. It granted limited autonomy to the Palestinian Authority at the height of the peace process in the 1990s and withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005. But Amnesty and the other groups, such as Human Rights Watch and the Israeli rights group, B'Tselem, say the very fragmentation of the territories in which Palestinians live is part of an overall regime of control designed to maintain Jewish hegemony from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

They point to discriminatory policies within Israel and in annexed east Jerusalem, Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has been ruled by the Hamas militant group since 2007, and its de facto annexation of the West Bank, where it exerts overall control and is actively building and expanding Jewish settlements that most of the international community considers illegal. Israel has dismissed previous reports as biased, but has adopted a far more adversarial stance toward Amnesty, accusing it of antisemitism and of delegitimizing Israel's very existence even before the report was published.