The walls protecting Israel are quickly crumbling. A year ago, it was Israel's most celebrated human rights group, B'Tselem. Months later, it was the New York-based Human Rights Watch whose senior staff have often enjoyed a revolving door with the US State Department.
Now, the one speaking up is Amnesty International - an organisation widely viewed as the most authoritative arbiter of what constitutes human rights violations. Over the past year, all have reached the same conclusion: Israel is an apartheid state.
According to Amnesty's new report published on Tuesday: "Israel's system of institutionalized segregation and discrimination against Palestinians as a racial group in all areas under its control amounts to a system of apartheid."
This is not just a criticism of Israel's occupation. All three groups have been pointing out for decades Israel's flagrant disregard of international law and its likely commission of war crimes in the occupied territories.
But Israel was little concerned so long as public debate was confined to the occupation. Its advocates quickly learned that they could always deflect to matters of Israel's security by presenting any Palestinian resistance as terrorism.
Now, the consensus is shifting to entirely new terrain - a discursive battlefield where Israel has less effective weapons with which to defend itself. The biggest human rights watchdogs are agreed that everything about Israel's rule over Palestinians is connected, from its military oppression of those under occupation to the civil legal system inside Israel that systematically confers inferior rights on the country's large minority of nominal Palestinian "citizens".
In other words, Israel's apartheid structures cannot be disentangled, separating out the occupied territories from "Israel proper". It is all part of the same, single system of rule by one ethnic-national group, Jews, designed to oppress and marginalise another ethnic-national group, Palestinians.
Late in the day, the champions of human rights have fully understood that the divisions between Israel and the occupied territories are simply cosmetic. They have served a public relations purpose hiding Israel's true intent: to dispossess Palestinians wherever they find themselves under Israeli rule.
'Not perfect'Crucially, all the major human rights groups have now jettisoned the key artificial distinction insisted upon by Israel. Israel's premise was that its 1.8 million Palestinian "citizens" - a fifth of the population inside Israel faced informal and unconscious discrimination similar to that suffered by minorities in western democracies such as the US and UK.
The message was intended to reassure: Israel's treatment of its Palestinian citizens was not perfect but it was no worse than other liberal democratic states. That allowed it to rationalise its brutal, repressive treatment of Palestinians under occupation. The military occupation was supposedly an anomaly forced on Israel by the need to protect its citizens and democratic structures from constant, unprovoked Palestinian violence and terrorism.
Israel's foreign minister, Yair Lapid, rehearsed exactly that line in a pre-emptive strike against Amnesty. Shortly before the report was published, he said: "Israel isn't perfect, but we are a democracy committed to international law, open to criticism, with a free press and a strong and independent judicial system." For good measure, he accused Amnesty of echoing "the same lies shared by terrorist organisations".
In Britain, the Board of Deputies of British Jews took a similar approach: "Israel is a vibrant democracy and a state for all its citizens, as exemplified by its diverse government and robust civil society."
Except every mainstream Israeli politician vehemently rejects the idea that Israel could ever be a "state of all its citizens". That was the expressed view of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And four years ago, a council of legislators even took the rare step of banning a bill from being debated in the Israeli parliament because it promoted Israel as a "state of all its citizens".
In fact, the phrase itself is the slogan of Palestinian leaders inside Israel who have been mobilising their supporters in a campaign for sweeping change to end Israel's current status as a racist Jewish state. Well-worn deflection campaigns by Israel and its defenders are looking ever more threadbare.
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