PRESS RELEASE
Vienna, April 10, 2007
As Israel comes under increasing pressure over its policies against Palestinians, an independent Swedish researcher today releases an extensive analysis of the Middle Eastern conflict since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. According to Dr. Anthony Löwstedt, the vast majority of grave violations of human rights falls under the responsibility of the Jewish state.
In the third edition of his study, ‘Apartheid: Ancient, Past, and Present’, Löwstedt concludes that no less than 97.8 percent of gross human rights violations so far committed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are sole responsibilities of the Israeli Jews, and 2.2 percent, at the most, are Palestinian crimes.
Israel was accused of apartheid by John Dugard, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Special Envoy to the Occupied Palestinian Territories in February this year. In a report to the Council, Dugard recommended bringing the charge of apartheid, a crime against humanity under international law, against Israel to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Previously, two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and the former South African Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, had also raised accusations of apartheid against Israel.
According to all four and many others, Israel is implementing the same system of oppression that Whites used against the indigenous black majority in South Africa until 1994. And just like Blacks committed a number of violent crimes against Whites and occasionally incited people to violence against South African Whites in the liberation struggle there, Palestinians have carried out similar crimes against Israeli Jews.
However, the overwhelming majority of violent crimes as well as cases of incitement to violence are responsibilities of the privileged ethnicities in both countries, according to Löwstedt. Moreover, he points out seven kinds of systematic, racist crimes which he says are the sole responsibilities of the Israeli Jews and the South African Whites and of similar ethnic elites in other apartheid societies. These crimes include ethnically discriminatory repopulation, citizenship, land, work, access, education, and language policies and practices.
Löwstedt has worked in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as in South Africa as an academic and for the UN. He currently teaches at Webster University in Vienna, Austria.
Read the study:
Apartheid – Ancient, Past, and Present: Systematic and Gross Human Rights Violations in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine, Vienna: Gesellschaft für Phänomenologie und kritische Anthropologie, 2007, 3 rd edition,
http://www.dada.at/gems/gesellschaft/Apartheid.pdf
The author is available for additional comments and interviews by return e-mail at lowstedt@gmail.com.
John Dugard, the UN Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,has suggested that the evidence for Israel operating an Apartheid State, in breach of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, is so overwhelming that it ought to be taken back to the ICJ (International Court of Justice) in the Haigh for a new ruling.
Lowenstedt’s report provides further evidence to support this.Everybody should include web references for these two reports on their websites, literature etc and campaign for a new ICJ ruling. It is disgraceful that even now, to date, the Israeli Cabinet is asking the newly-formed Palestinian emergency government (the Quartet’s choice over and above the authentically elected government of Ismael Haniyeh which has been deposed) to “formally renounce violence and accept the State of Israel.” The hypocrisy, violence and injustice of the State of Israel and the Quartet is jaw-dropping!
John Dugard, the UN Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,has suggested that the evidence for Israel operating an Apartheid State, in breach of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, is so overwhelming that it ought to be taken back to the ICJ (International Court of Justice) in the Haigh for a new ruling.
Lowenstedt’s report provides further evidence to support this.Everybody should include web references for these two reports on their websites, literature etc and campaign for a new ICJ ruling. It is disgraceful that even now, to date, the Israeli Cabinet is asking the newly-formed Palestinian emergency government (the Quartet’s choice over and above the authentically elected government of Ismael Haniyeh which has been deposed) to “formally renounce violence and accept the State of Israel.†The hypocrisy, violence and injustice of the State of Israel and the Quartet is jaw-dropping!