We speak exclusively to the “godfather of human rights” Kenneth Roth on how the international community should be responding to the realities on the ground in Palestine and Israel today.

Kenneth Roth is an American attorney, human rights activist and writer. He was the executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022.

Writing for Deutsche Welle earlier this year, Roth asserts that after 56 years the pretence of Israel’s occupation being a temporary fixture can no longer be upheld, and what we actually witness today is a “one-state reality”, whereby Israel controls all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River while subjecting Palestinians to an apartheid system of domination and control.

“After more than five decades of occupation and 30 years of the ‘peace process,’ it is no longer tenable to regard the repression of Israel’s occupation as a mere temporary phenomenon to be cured by a ‘peace process’ without end. The ‘peace process’ is moribund. While governments speak of a two-state solution, what we have today is a ‘one-state reality.’ Indeed, the main people still invoking the two-state solution seem to be Western officials desperately trying to avoid coming to terms with the unceasing nature of Israeli oppression.”