Statement of Solidarity with Palestinian Civil Society
Respect the rights of God and the rights of people, and likewise, persuade your companions and kin to do likewise. Otherwise, you will be committing injustice against yourself and injustice to humanity… Nothing deprives people of divine blessings or invites divine wrath against them more easily than cruelty. Verily, God listens to the voice of the oppressed and comes down on the oppressor.
— Excerpt from Head of State Ali Ibn Abi Talib’s (pbuh) letter to Governor Malik Al Ashtar, 658 AD
We, the American Muslim Bar Association (AMBA), an organization of concerned American lawyers, and the undersigned civil and human rights organizations, legal associations, and policy institutes, condemn Israel’s plan to annex large swaths of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt). [1] Formal annexation will allow Israel to accelerate its demographic engineering strategies, i.e. to maximize the land available for Jewish-Israelis while minimizing the number of Palestinians. This de jure [2] annexation will displace more Palestinians from their homes, limit their freedom of movement across the oPt, restrict their access to natural resources, and normalize the countless systemic violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law (IHL) that Israel has committed over the past 50 years. [3] In fact, dozens of UN experts have condemned the proposed annexation plan and stated it would memorialize a “21st century apartheid.” It is worth noting that Israel already subjects Palestinians to a dual legal regime [4] based on ethnic supremacy reminiscent of South African apartheid. [5] The fact that it’s being carried out with our American tax dollars and with the support of our government is reprehensible.
The Illegality of Annexation & Outrage over U.S. Support to Israel
The acquisition of territory by force is illegal under international law. However, since Israel’s inception, Israel’s government has illegally occupied and unlawfully annexed Palestinian land, an example including but not limited to the capture of East Jerusalem in 1967, eventually leading to its illegal de jure annexation in 1980. [6] Multiple United Nations resolutions emphasize that Israel’s annexation of occupied territories is illegal and a war crime, and demand Israel’s compliance with fundamental principles of international law. [7] However, the Trump Administration has flouted these findings in its American Peace to Prosperity Plan, which seeks to endorse Israel’s continued annexation plans as a supposed path to peace despite “failing to meet minimum rights of Palestinians.” The Trump “peace plan” is only the most recent example of the U.S. government empowering Israel’s ongoing violations of international law and silencing critique of Israel domestically and internationally. [8]
The U.S. is also instrumental in financing Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians. For example, the U.S. has set aside $38 billion in U.S. taxpayer money toward Israel’s defense budget from from 2019 to 2028 alone, which is the largest defense budget funding that any nation in the world receives from the United States. In addition, a Pulitzer Center supported investigation uncovered that, from 2009 to 2013 alone, over $280 million dollars were funneled to Jewish settlements, including providing financial support to settler oppressors, in the West Bank through a network of U.S. non-profits’ use of tax-exempt monies. This means that the U.S. government and American taxpayers are indirectly incentivizing settler oppression and violence and paying for the construction of Israeli settlements and associated infrastructure, made by forcing thousands of Palestinians off their land and destroying their homes and livelihoods to permanently house Israeli civilians, extract natural resources, and further entrench Israel’s military presence and apartheid system of governance. Construction and maintenance of these settlements on occupied Palestinian land is a breach of Israel’s responsibilities as an occupying power and is classified as a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Formal annexation will not shield Israel from the Rome Statute’s application. [9]
Intersectionality & Solidarity Building
As we call to end support for apartheid and colonialism abroad, we can draw lessons from our own history of colonialism and violence toward Indigenous tribes and the Black community. In this moment of reckoning at home, [10] AMBA sees a parallel opportunity in revoking the United States’ support for Israel’s colonial project in historic Palestine. We are empowered to take such a stance because of the long history of solidarity work with the Palestinian struggle by fearless Black [11] and Indigenous [12] human rights activists and leaders, including but not limited to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Dr. Cornel West, Russell Means, Splitting the Sky (John Bancore), Lee Maracle, and Larry Comodore.
Amplifying Palestinian Voices
With this hope in our hearts and echoing the momentum of change agents who have come before us, we urge our elected officials to demand the dismantling of all Israeli settlements; oppose both the current and other existing annexation plans; hold Israel accountable for its gross human rights violations against Palestinians; and guarantee Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, including the right of return to their homes. We must end the United States’ culture of impunity surrounding Israel’s abuses. While we are sharing this statement of solidarity at a time of immense fear surrounding the annexation of the oPt, our call to action is not limited to this particular moment.
To that end, please join us in co-signing the demands of Palestinian Civil Society, which we have tailored to application in the United States.
Apply Section 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act (the “Leahy Law”) and Section 4 of the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 (the “AECA”), and all other relevant U.S. legislation and regulations, and cease military-security funding, ban arms trade, and end cooperation with Israel and its defense forces for its gross violation of human rights. [13]
If Israel continues to violate international law, suspend existing trade and cooperation agreements with Israel, including the Israel–United States Free Trade Agreement. [14]
Apply all relevant U.S. legislation and regulations, including but not limited to the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act (CCPIA), to prohibit the entry of goods that are the proceeds of the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise to U.S. markets and that all business or other dealings with Israel's illegal settlement enterprise are terminated. Ensure that the U.S. government or any of its agencies take no actions that recognize, implicitly or explicitly, Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territory. Finally, ensure proper oversight and accountability for U.S. organizations that contribute to the settlement enterprise. [15]
Ensure that individuals and corporate actors responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity under Israel’s regime of illegal occupation and apartheid are brought to justice and cease attacks on all parties seeking to bring the aforementioned actors to justice through international forums, including the ICC.
Reverse the move of the U.S. embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem and rescind its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in line with international law and UN resolutions. [16]
We must take corrective action and vehemently condemn Israel’s blatant acts of state-sanctioned violence and apartheid governance against Palestinians, including the proposed annexation. AMBA calls upon our political leaders to take the aforementioned measures to send a clear message to Israel that the United States no longer condones or tolerates its violations of international law.
In solidarity,
American Muslim Bar Association
Center for Constitutional Rights
Palestine Legal
Adalah Justice Project
Tef Poe - Gangland Political Party
US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
American Muslims for Palestine
Dream Defenders
Project South
Jewish Voice for Peace
Palestinian Youth Movement
Water Protector Legal Collective
National Lawyers Guild
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
Justice for Muslims Collective
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Black Women Radicals
Claudia Jones School for Political Education
Law for Black Lives
Footnotes
[1] Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announced plans to unilaterally annex 30% of the West Bank (which, with Gaza, makes up the oPt), which was slated for July 1, 2020, and build more settlements. The proposed annexation includes some of the unlawful settlements already constructed in the West Bank (3%) as well as the fertile land in the Jordan Valley that is inhabited by Palestinians, which shares the international border with Jordan (27%). To date, Israel’s government has stalled this annexation plan, with some commentators speculating Israel’s desire to minimize diplomatic pushback - as many states have warned against this unilateral move.
[2] Today, the West Bank is home to some [2.9] million Palestinians and over 600,000 Israeli settlers [if those around Jerusalem are counted]. Together with Gaza, the West Bank only represents 22 percent of historic Palestine, although this is a somewhat arbitrary division of the land, based on the armistice line - aka the “Green Line,” which was drawn up in 1949 after the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and separates land Israel colonized in 1948 from the West Bank. Since at least 1967, Israel has maintained an expansionist vision to settle as many Jewish Israelis in the oPt to extend the borders of the state. To do so, Israel’s regimes have systematically violated international law with impunity through the gradual annexation and colonization of occupied Arab territory both by de jure annexation of Palestinian East Jerusalem in 1980 and the Syrian Golan Heights in 1982, and by de facto annexation, where Israel constructed and established illegal settlements and erected the apartheid wall in the West Bank, which have been repeatedly held to violate IHL. It is worth noting that Israel has never specified its own borders.
[3] These violations include: Extrajudicial killings; military detention and incarceration of children and adults in violation of IHL; torture; collective punishment; land and natural resource confiscation; exposure to toxic waste; house demolitions; discriminatory planning laws; impunity for racially-motivated hate crimes committed by Israeli settlers; forced evictions; forcible population transfer and displacement; revocation of residency rights and rights to family unification>; illegal use of force in contravention to the applicable rules of international humanitarian law; food insecurity; labor exploitation; economic deprivation and extreme poverty; surveillance; restrictions on movement; restrictions on freedom of expression and press, including the targeting of women activists and journalists; discriminatory policing; and the formal application of Israeli civil law in the oPt applying a two-tier system of disparate rights based on ethnic identity to prohibit Palestinians from enjoying legal, social, cultural, civil and economic rights.
[4] Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Basic Law (2018) “established a constitutional order based on systematic ethnic supremacy, domination, and segregation” in the “Land of Israel” against Palestinians. Article 7 of this law promotes Jewish settlements as “a national value to be encouraged and strengthened,” empowering state authorities with legal tools to deploy an illegal settlement enterprise in historic Palestine and Syrian territories. This law constitutionally justifies segregation in land and housing policies that targets all Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel.
[5] Apartheid, an Afrikaans word meaning “separateness” has its roots in white South Africa and is prohibited by various international norms, including the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of Apartheid, the 1998 Rome Statute, and the general peremptory norm prohibiting apartheid. Israel’s official policy is to govern as an apartheid state, where it subjects Palestinians who do remain under its control to a different legal, economic, and political system that affords them less rights and protections. These human rights violations and violations of IHL would only intensify after annexation. Effectively, the West Bank would be a “Palestinian Bantustan,” islands of noncontiguous land completely surrounded by Israel with no territorial connection to each other or neighboring nation-states.
[7] The prohibition on territorial aggrandizement and forcible acquisition of land violates jus cogens including Section 2(4) of the UN Charter and Article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Annexation of the oPt would also trigger the application of the fundamental rule of “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force,” which has been repeatedly affirmed by the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly. In its 2004 decision on the wall, the International Court of Justice determined that “the construction of the wall and its associated regime create a ‘fait accompli’ on the ground that could well become permanent, in which case … it would be tantamount to de facto annexation;” and the Security Council has repeatedly deemed Israel’s settlements a flagrant violation of international law, most recently in UNSC Resolution 2334 (December 2016).
[8] Over the years, the US has vetoed 40 Security Council Resolutions condemning Israel’s violations of international law and has stripped funding to UNESCO for recognizing Palestine as a member. More recently, the Trump Administration, in its attempts to delegitimize critiques of Israel, withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council and UNESCO, defunded organizations that support Palestinians or condemn Israel’s abuses, including the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA. Domestically, U.S. Congress and state legislators have introduced bills that criminalize boycott of Israel and curtail free speech by precluding proponents of the BDS movement access to government funding and barring proponents from employment opportunities. At least 30 states have passed anti-BDS laws, the constitutionality of which are widely in question but reflect a desire to chill any support for Palestinians and stifle any criticism of Israel.
[9] Article 8 bis of the Rome Statute defines a crime of aggression, citing to the definition laid out in UN General Assembly Resolution 3314, as the following “the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations.”
[10] As we issue this statement, social movements across the country have made unwavering demands for political change, calling most vocally for racial justice in the United States. Demands to end systemic violence and discrimination against Black communities and to instead invest in uplifting minoritized communities are gaining unprecedented traction and the recent win for Indigenous rights in the Supreme Court inspire hope for actualizing policies, actions and initiatives rooted in principles of justice, accountability, and equity.
[11] See also, Michael R. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (2019); Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of A Movement (2016).
[12] Please view this resource for more information about the links between First Nations and Palestinians’ struggles against settler colonialism, genocide, displacement, and environmental destruction to their homelands. See also, the Statement on the Responsibility of American Studies to Palestine by the American Studies Association.
[13] An arms trade ban and revocation of military-security cooperation with Israel, as an effective countermeasure pursuant to the UN’s Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts in Chapter II to end its gross violations of international law are lawful sanctions under the UN International Law Commission and are proportional to the gravity of Israel’s violations of international law against the Palestinian people. These sanctions would not constitute threat or use of force and do not violate humanitarian obligations or fundamental human rights.
[14] Economic sanctions are a lawful responsive measure under international law and legal norms to deter state and private actors from continuing human rights violations. See GA Res ES-9/1 (5 February 1982); GA Res 38/180A (19 December 1983); S/RES/232 (1966).
[15] The aiding and abetting of international crimes are prohibited by international legal norms; all relevant international laws that apply to the actions of parties directly furthering the settlement enterprise are extended to those who aid and abet in the illegal actions. See also, UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights; UN Security Council Resolution 2334; and UN Database on Settlement Goods.
[16] UN General Assembly Resolution ES- 10/19, adopted on 21 December 2017, para. 1.
