AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Today, Palestinians mark the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 when Israel was created. Many Palestinians say they face a second Nakba today in both Gaza and in the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians marched in Ramallah to commemorate Nakba Day.

MOHAMMED ABU QAIYDAH: [translated] Despite all of the circumstances, we are maintaining our land and rooted here. Our right of return will never be forgotten, and Palestine will always be Palestine.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This comes as Democratic Congressmember Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, has introduced a resolution to commemorate Nakba Day, with support from a growing number of co-sponsors, including Congressmembers André Carson, Summer Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Delia Ramirez, Lateefah Simon and Bonnie Watson Coleman. This is Congressmember Tlaib.

REP. RASHIDA TLAIB: Hello. It’s Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. And this Thursday, May 15th, marks the 77th year of government of Israel’s ongoing Nakba against the Palestinian people. We all know that in 1948 the government of Israel destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages, towns and cities, and ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we turn to a major new report released today by U.S. academics that analyzes Israel’s actions in Gaza under the legal framework of the crime of apartheid. Citing dozens of experts, human rights organizations and judicial decisions, it concludes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, quote, “includes mass killing, arbitrary detention, torture, and the imposition of a legal regime that provides far less due process than that provided to Israelis living in the same territory, meets the legal threshold of apartheid,” unquote.

We’re joined by one of the report’s principal authors, Sandra Babcock, director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School, where she is clinical professor and is joining us from now.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Professor Babcock. If you can talk about the significance of today, the day you’re releasing this report, and your major findings?

SANDRA BABCOCK: Thank you, Amy. It’s so nice to be back on the show.

We are releasing this report that concludes that Israel has committed and is committing the crime of apartheid, which is a crime against humanity, on Nakba Day, because Palestinians are now living through the most brutal phase of the decadeslong occupation of their territory, that the International Court of Justice has recognized is an illegal occupation. We are — our report confirms that there is now a broad international consensus that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid. We’re not the first people to say this, but we are the first group of academics to analyze over 25 reports and judicial opinions against the backdrop of what is now happening in Gaza.

And our conclusions are that Israel is not only isolating Palestinians into segregated enclaves in the West Bank, that it is subjecting them to a different legal regime than their Jewish settler neighbors, that it is not only subjecting them to arbitrary detention, torture and killings, but it is doing this against a backdrop of policies that are designed to ensure the perpetual racial subordination of the Palestinian people.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Professor Babcock, last year, in 2024, you co-authored a report which found that Israel’s actions meet the international definition of genocide. So, if you could elaborate on the links that you see between Israel’s complicity in genocide and the fact that you found that it is an apartheid state?

SANDRA BABCOCK: You know, I think there are important links between the two crimes. These are both crimes. They are both crimes that are recognized under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. And both, what they have in common is a treatment of a group that is motivated in part by racism. The International Court of Justice has found that Palestinians are a distinct national, ethnic or racial group that is the subject — that is, appropriately, the subject of the crime of genocide. And what we found is that Israeli leaders have, for decades now, and this is leaders at the top echelons — the prime minister, the former defense minister — have made comments about Palestinians that evoke age-old racist tropes, comparing Palestinians to animals, dehumanizing them in a way that is very familiar to your previous guests, who were speaking about apartheid in South Africa.

What I was really struck by in listening to the South Africans that you just had on the show is when they described the features of apartheid South Africa. If you took out the word “South Africa” and you replaced it with “Israel,” that would perfectly describe the policies and laws that Israel has in place today. We don’t often think of them as apartheid, because our thinking of apartheid is rooted in our perceptions of how white South Africans treated Black South Africans. But, in fact, what is happening in Israel today is reflective of exactly that same treatment that we saw in South Africa..

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Professor Babcock, about the significance of you, along with dozens of other senior professors, human rights lawyers, taking part in this report. You’re speaking to us from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Talk about that as protests continue across the country, students who participated in encampments are arrested or put in ICE jails. Some judges have ordered those people released.

SANDRA BABCOCK: You know, Amy, it is a very tough time to be issuing a report that is critical of Israel. It has never been easy to criticize Israel. But this is what we do. We are human rights defenders. We are human rights lawyers. We are human rights professors. And if we can’t call out genocide and apartheid when we see it, we can’t call ourselves human rights defenders. There is a double standard when it comes to Israel. When we criticize Israel, however, it is really important to recognize we are criticizing a state. We are criticizing a government. We are not criticizing its people. This is what we do. We call out human rights abuses and government repression where we see it. And those of us who have authored this report have been involved in human rights work in every single continent, and we do not make an exception when it comes to Israel.

What universities have done is, instead of protecting students, faculty and staff who are standing up and taking a very principled stance, and a risky stance, to protest Israel’s policies of genocide and apartheid, they are penalizing those students. They are subjecting them to disciplinary sanctions for peaceful protests. They are criminalizing them and jeopardizing their futures, when under international human rights law, which protects the right of people who are protesting against human rights violations anywhere in the world, to their rights to freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly — instead of doing that, the university is criminalizing them.

Instead of invest — and I’m talking about universities in general, mind you. I am not speaking on behalf of Cornell University. I’m speaking in my capacity as a professor who has witnessed the criminalization and disciplinary sanctions that are being imposed on students across the country. And that is wrong, and it needs to stop. Students are doing the right thing. They are standing in the line of fire. They are standing up for people whose rights are being subjected to the most horrific repression, who are being slaughtered every day, who are being starved. This is what we should all be doing. We cannot silence ourselves, and we cannot silence — we especially cannot silence ourselves when people are trying to censor what we say.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you so much, Sandra Babcock, for being with us, clinical professor at Cornell Law School, director of the International Human Rights Clinic, co-author of the newly released report, “Apartheid in Israel: An Analysis of Israel’s Laws and Policies and the Responsibilities of US Academic and Other Institutions.” She co-wrote a new op-ed in The Guardian today headlined “We are human rights lawyers. Our new report is clear: Israel perpetrates apartheid.” Among those who co-authored that report are professor Susan Akram, clinical professor and director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law; Thomas Becker, legal and policy director at the University Network for Human Rights, teaches human rights at Columbia Law School; and James Cavallaro, executive director of the University Network for Human Rights, visiting professor at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.

When we come back, as Israel’s brutal assault continues, we look at starvation in Gaza with Alex de Waal. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Sow ’Em on the Mountain” performed by [Stephanie] Coleman and Nora Brown in our Democracy Now! studio.