Kairos Palestine welcomes Amnesty International Report: “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians”
The board, staff and supporters of Kairos Palestine welcome Amnesty International’s momentous report, Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity. We appreciate Amnesty International’s courage in publicly documenting what for decades Palestinian human rights organizations and, more recently, prominent Israeli and international human rights groups have concluded: Israel’s laws, policies and practices constitute an apartheid state.
The over 250-page report exposes the reality that “Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis while minimizing the number of Palestinians, restricting their rights and obstructing their ability to challenge this dispossession.”
We are particularly grateful that Amnesty International begins its report by pointing to the roots of the May 2021 Unity Uprising that brought Palestinians together across ’48 Israel, Gaza and the West Bank (including illegally annexed East Jerusalem). Israel’s brutal response not only put the world on notice regarding Israel’s over seventy-year occupation, it also served to strengthen our cry for justice and our sense of unity.
Kairos Palestine calls on the Church, civil society and governments around the world to recognize the ongoing discrimination, dispossession of land, repression of nonviolent resistance, suppression of civil society organizations and indiscriminate killings, and pressure the State of Israel to end its occupation and apartheid.
Palestinian Christians across the religious spectrum gathered in 2009 to issue the historic document, “A Moment
of Truth: A Word of Faith, Hope and Love from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering.” As we declared:
“Our message to the Jews tells them: Even though we have fought one another in the recent past and still struggle today, we are able to love and live together. We can organize our political life, with all its complexity, according to the logic of this love and its power, after ending the occupation and establishing justice. (Kairos Palestine document chapter 5.4.2)
We believe in God, good and just. We believe that God’s goodness will finally triumph over the evil of hate and of death that still persist in our land. We will see here “a new land” and “a new human being”, capable of rising up in the spirit to love each one of his or her brothers and sisters. (Kairos Palestine document chapter 10)
Related: “Palestinian Christians Welcome Amnesty’s Apartheid Report” (Mondoweiss, Feb. 7. 2022)