Comment by tycho-newman

Important to understand that Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and rejects the ICC’s jurisdiction (neither is the USA). On the other hand, the Geneva Convention is about as “universal” a treaty as you can find, Israel itself ratified the GV without any reservations, all UN members (US and Israel included) are subject to the authority of the ICJ/World Court, and there’s even a fsir consensus that the GC applies to everyone, even if a state weren’t a UN member and signatory.

(While the USA and Israel have shown immense disdain for the ICC and the USA has levied sanctions against it, its chief prosecutor, and The Hague in the past, the US officially sponsored Khan’s nomination for the post of chief prosecutor this past round and Israel has been extremely chummy with him and the ICC compared to under Bensouda. The ICC under Khan hasn’t done anything about Gaza.)

It's worth noting that system does not apply to 2 million Israeli Arabs (nearly all of whom self-identify as "Palestinian" from an ethnic/national perspective) of the exact same race as the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The overt driver of the system - and the one that is agreed to across the whole Jewish-Israeli population - is the security issue of a Palestinian population that has held since 1948 that they are still at war with Israel, will never accept a Jewish state in the region, and will one day drive the Jews into the sea. This belief is propped up by constant propaganda from other Arab states and UNRWA (which has defined itself to exist because of a Right of Return that applies to 750k Palestinians and their descendants in perpetuity, but doesn't apply to the 14 millions Indians & Pakistanis, 12 million Germans, or 2-3 million Poles & Ukrainians who were also displaced by ethnic partitions established in 1947-1948).

Israel shows every day that they are willing and able to live closely with the Palestinians who accept their right to exist and aren't trying to murder their families, without using apartheid-like systems of control. Israeli Arabs certainly face suspicion and unofficial day-to-day discrimination, but if you asked Israelis how they would feel about an equal two-state system where West Bank and Gaza were a sovereign nation populated by Palestinians who were like the Israeli Arabs, they would largely be on board. There would be friction for a while, but it would be tolerable for both states to survive and thrive without the security apparatus that needs to be in place right now.

There is no doubt that Netanyahu's current governing coalition is made up of racists and religious extremists who would NOT be okay with that. Many of those secretaries want to use security issues as a pretext to fully take over "greater Israel," and use the border wall as much to keep their actions there hidden from the Israeli public as they use it to keep Hamas and IJ terror attacks to a minimum. But the PA - for all its collaboration and security partnership with the IDF - still pays bounties to the families of suicide bombers. And the reason more moderate Palestinian leaders have never been able to really negotiate a settlement is that they would be immediately overthrown by a populace who never accepted 1948 as the end of a decades-long attempt to throw the Jews out of Palestine.

This has not been adjudicated in court, but I think it's difficult to claim that the current system is primarily an ethnic or racial one when it doesn't apply to the millions of Palestinians who are accepting of their neighbors. Even if it is often abused by racists.

> Netanyahu's approach to the Palestinians likely fits into this definition.

Indeed that understanding is corroborated by several human rights organizations, like HRW and Amnesty international:

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2022/02/qa-israel...