Address to the Congress of the Red Party

It is my honour to present to you in my capacity as Head of Legal Research and Advocacy at Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights NGO, based in Ramallah. Thank you to the Red Party for providing this vital platform to hear the messages from the ground in Palestine.

Our General Director Shawan Jabarin, sends his personal message for a successful Congress. Shawan stresses that it is crucial that the Red Party challenge Norway’s treatment of Israel as an Occupying Power and an Apartheid regime. Shawan wishes to thank the Red Party for the nominations of Al-Haq for the Nobel Prize and sends his deepest personal greetings.

Across Palestine, we are now witnessing an unwavering acceleration of Israeli military and settler attacks, administrative detentions, house demolitions, forcible displacements, residency revocations, and even deportations for breach of allegiance to the State of Israel. For Jerusalem, Israel has introduced a new land registration law to transfer unregistered Palestinians lands to the Israeli State portfolio. At the same time Israel has greenlighted settlement expansion, fast-tracking a bill for 7,000 new settlement units in the E1 area which will completely break the territorial contiguity of the West Bank. In February, Israel transferred the Civil Administration and COGAT from the military commander to the competence of the Minister of Finance, a measure which effectively extends Israel’s sovereignty de jure over the entirety of the West Bank, in an outright territorial annexation.

In December Israel voted in the most right-wing government to date. As settlers attacked Huwarra in the West Bank, Israel’s Minster for Finance, Smotrich urged that «Huwara needs to be wiped out. State of Israel should do it». This week, Israel’s Minister of Defence Gallant, joked about «flattening» the city of Beit Hanoun in Gaza and building settlements there.

These measures are not new. They are the inhumane acts of a settler colonial apartheid regime, established to maintain the domination of Israeli Jews over Palestinians, and crippling Palestinian autonomy by fragmenting the population both territorially into Bantustan style enclaves and administratively under different governing regimes. For sixteen years, 2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been denied their freedom of movement, locked under military siege. While 12 million Palestinians refugees in the diaspora are collectively denied their right of return. This seven decades long settler colonial apartheid regime, in breach of peremptory norms of international law, incurs obligations on all States erga omnes, to bring the illegal situation to an end.

The apartheid has been recognised in the Concluding Observations of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and by UN Special Rapporteurs, and by former UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon.

The apartheid has been recognised in the UN Human Rights Council statements of Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon, Luxemburg, Malaysia, Mauritania, Namibia, Pakistan, Qatar, South Africa, Venezuela, intergovernmental organisations such as the the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the group of Arab States.

The apartheid has been recognised in an open letter of two former Israeli Ambassadors to South Africa, Ilan Baruch and Dr Alon Liel, who write that «Israel has crossed a threshold and its actions in the occupied territories now meet the legal definition of the crime of apartheid under international law».

Meanwhile when the Red Party laudably raised the issue of apartheid in a parliamentary question in February this year, the response received was that Norway considered that «It is primarily the task of the judiciary to determine whether such a serious international crime has taken place and that the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will be able to assess the question in connection with the investigation on an independent basis».

We absolutely reject this shielding of an Apartheid State behind sham considerations that the International Criminal Court needs to make determinations on apartheid. While Apartheid is both a crime under the Rome Statute and States of course cannot interfere in judicial processes, apartheid is also a breach of customary international law and as a jus cogens norm from which no derogation is permitted, it is a matter of both State and Third State responsibility. States have clear obligations of non-recognition of internationally wrongful acts which breach peremptory norms of international law. And in this case, there is an obligation to not recognise Israel’s apartheid regime as lawful.

On this basis we once more call on Norway, to take the right steps and to recognise that Israel is operating a settler colonial apartheid regime of discriminatory laws, policies, and practices over the Palestinian people. We call on Norway to support a General Assembly resolution in December for the reconstitution of the UN Special Committee on Apartheid and the UN Centre Against Apartheid.

We note that international corporations and financial institutions profit from Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise, in flagrant disregard of their responsibilities to conduct enhanced due diligence in conflict affected areas and for disengagement. The failure of States to regulate their corporations and financial institutions operating in Palestine, brings those States directly in breach of the obligations to respect and ensure respect for the Geneva Conventions, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the UN Security Council resolutions requiring that States distinguish in their dealings between the territory of the State of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.

We commend the divestments of Norwegian pension company KLP from 16 settlement companies in July 2021, and the divestment by Norwegian asset manager Storebrand from over 20 settlement companies in the past decade. However, the Government Pension Fund Global (Norway) is recorded as having the largest shareholdings and bond holdings in settlement banks and companies, more than any other EU institution, to a tune of USD 13.90 billion. But so far, it has only divested from three settlement companies. It is imperative that divestments include settlement corporations and Israeli banks and financial institutions operating in the settlements.

We also welcome the strident inroads lead by the Red Party in ensuring that local municipalities and regional councils across Norway do not contribute to the illegal settlement enterprise in their procurement policies.

However more can be done. The Palestinian people deprived of their property, must receive reparations from Pension Funds and other investors who have acquired profits from the proceeds of crime.

We urge also that Norway adopt legislation at the national level to prohibit the import of all settlement goods and services, from all occupied territories into Norway. At an international level, we ask that Norway call for economic sanctions and countermeasures against Israel’s unlawful acquisition of territory through use of force.

We note that the right to freedom of expression includes the right to boycott. We applaud the Red Party for its strong principled stance in protecting this right for the Palestinian people, in its nomination of BDS for a Nobel Prize.

Today almost 30 years on from the Oslo Accords, with the construction of 300 settlements and the transfer in of 700,000 Israeli settlers, we believe that a new path forward is necessary to protect Palestinian lives. It is time to recognise the illegality of the occupation, dismantle the occupying administration and ensure the immediate, unconditional and total withdrawal of Israeli occupying forces, as required under numerous UN General Assembly resolutions. We urgently call for Norway to make a submission to the International Court of Justice, explaining that the prolonged occupation which breaches the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, is illegal.

As Israel outlaw’s Palestinian human rights organisations as «terror organisations», and introduces a bill for the death penalty for «terrorists», we are now entering a very grim new reality. Palestinians are left to operate in world eroded of the rule of law and human rights.

When you offer a Palestinian NGO a platform at the Red Party Congress, you offer a channel through the violence and repression. When you nominate Palestinian human rights organisations for the Nobel Peace prize, you place a protective shield around our work to ensure that we are able to continue, against threats of arrest and incarceration, to ensure the accountability of the perpetrators of international crimes. Together we will work to fulfil the international promise of the exercise of the inalienable Palestinian right of self-determination, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.

Thank You !