Recently, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, visited Malaysia. Her meeting with the speaker of the Malaysian parliament and later the prime minister of Malaysia was headline news, not only in Malaysia but also in the United States. But it was her subsequent visit to Taiwan that created more excitement and buzz because of the Chinese government’s opposition to it, as reflected by its strong statement issued before her trip. Chinese leader Xi Jinping went to the extent of giving a veiled threat over the issue of Taiwan when he told US President Joe Biden, “Those who play with fire will perish by it”.
But Pelosi wasn’t deterred by the warning and landed in Taipei on August 2. While there, she gave a speech pledging that the American commitment to support and preserve democracy in Taiwan and elsewhere remains ironclad. The pledge may appear to be strong and principled. But in reality, it exposes her blatant hypocrisy.
After all, she also used the exact words when describing US support for Israel, a country that blatantly ignores democratic values and fully engages in ethnic cleansing and apartheid crimes.
The fact that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid is glaringly evident from its Nation-State Bill passed by the Israeli Knesset in July 2018. Among other things, the law states that:
All of the above elements contained in the Nation-State Bill prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the state of Israel is not interested in giving equal rights to Palestinians, whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or even within historic Palestine.
A recent UN Commission of Inquiry to investigate violations in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, also determined in its report that Israel is responsible for severe human rights violations against Palestinians.
Moreover, reports by authoritative organizations have further reinforced that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians. These organizations are:
ESCWA is a body under the United Nations. It released a report in March 2017 which emphatically concluded that Israel is a racist state that is implementing an apartheid regime in the form of racial discrimination against Palestinians.
B’Tselem is a well-known Israeli human rights organization. In January 2021, it released a report stating that Israel is an `apartheid regime’ that cannot claim to be a democracy when it is still occupying Palestinian territories in the West Bank.
Human Rights Watch is a respected international organization. In April 2021, it released a report entitled “A Threshold Crossed,” which denounced Israel for committing apartheid crimes.
Amnesty International is an organization that needs no introduction. In its report released on February 1, 2022, entitled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime Against Humanity,” Amnesty International stated that Israeli authorities must be held accountable for perpetrating crimes of apartheid against Palestinians. The report details how Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it controls their rights. Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and displaced refugees in other countries are all victims of this system of oppression.
Israel’s apartheid policies and practices deserve to be categorized as crimes against humanity as enshrined in the 1973 Apartheid Convention, which defines apartheid as “inhumane acts committed for the purpose of creating and maintaining domination by one racial group of people over another racial group and oppress them systematically. “
Consequently, governments not beholden to the US, such as Malaysia and South Africa, have also acknowledged the truth of this matter. In a recent speech, Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, said there is now a global awareness that the State of Israel is committing crimes of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians. Her speech hopefully will make the international community, especially Americans, realize that Israel has murdered thousands of Palestinians, jailed tens of thousands of Palestinians, demolished hundreds of thousands of Palestinian homes, and confiscated tens of thousands of hectares of Palestinian lands.
However, despite the Israeli regime committing all the above crimes and the clear non-democratic nature of the regime, when she visited Israel in February this year, Nancy Pelosi said that American support for Israel remains “ironclad,” which was the exact term she used to express US support for Taiwan.
The truth is that as long as the US continues its blind support for Israeli crimes against humanity, it is not in any position to lecture anybody on the issue of human rights and democracy. Nancy Pelosi’s thousands of miles trip to Asia is nothing more than a blatant display of her own hypocrisy.