“More than 14 million people, about half of them Jews and the other half Palestinians, live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean under one rule,” B’Tselem said in a new analysis entitled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid. “
The human rights group says Israel’s traditional vision of a democracy operating side by side with a temporary Israeli occupation in the territories “imposed by about five million Palestinian subjects … divorced from reality.”
“Most importantly, the distinction drives crazy the fact that the entire area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is organized under one principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians,” Tselem said in his controversial analysis.
Years of injustice against Palestinians, culminating in laws rooted in discrimination, mean that “the bar for labeling the Israeli regime as apartheid has been respected,” B’Tselem said.
The claim that Israel is an “apartheid state” has often been rejected by right-wing Israelis and their support groups as anti-Semitic. But this argument will be harder to formulate now that Israel has been labeled as such a well-respected Israeli institution, albeit one that enjoys only minority support in its home country.
The Israeli embassy in London rejected the report as “not based on reality, but on a distorted ideological vision.”
“The fact that B’Tselem has chosen not to present the Israeli government’s report for comment testifies to the fact that it is nothing more than a propaganda tool. Israel rejects the false statements in the so-called report … Israel is a strong and vibrant democracy that offers The full rights of all its citizens, regardless of religion, race or sex, are represented in all branches of government – in the Israeli parliament, in the courts (including the Supreme Court), in the civil service and even in the diplomatic corps where the state of Israel is represented. worldwide “.
Concerns have risen over the past decade among Israel’s traditional allies, especially in Europe, that the relentless loss of Palestinian territory to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law, has not only undermined a long-term peace process but the status quo. morality of Israel.
These concerns have been brought to the fore with the adoption in 2018 of the “Fundamental Law: Israel – the nation-state of the Jewish people” – which permanently enshrined Israel as a Jewish state in its constitution – and strengthened by the promises of Israeli politicians, especially the prime minister. Benjamin Netanyahu, to unilaterally annex large areas of the West Bank.
Israel captured and occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the first of which was signed in 1993, should lead to a “two-state solution” establishing a two-state solution. independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Twenty-eight years later there are no signs of this result.
B’Tselem argues that Israel has rather ingrained discrimination against non-Jews in areas under its control.
These include fewer rights for Palestinians living in Israel with Israeli citizenship (17% of the population). The most obvious example, says B’Tselem, is that non-Jews cannot emigrate to Israel. Palestinians marrying an Israeli need official Israeli permission to move to Israel.
In the West Bank, Jewish settlements are under construction, while building permits for Palestinians in areas officially under Israeli security are almost impossible to obtain, and “illegal” structures are frequently bulldozed.
Freedom of assembly and expression is also severely curtailed for Palestinians in the West Bank, the human rights group says, while Jews are largely unrestricted.
B’Tselem Executive Director Hagai El-Ad: “Israel is not a democracy with a temporary occupation attached: it is a regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and we need to look at the full picture and see it for what it is. : apartheid. This worrying view of reality must not lead to despair, but quite the opposite. It is a call for change. After all, people have created this regime and people can change it.
Between 1948 and 1994, South Africa’s apartheid system of racial segregation and “separate development” was designed to limit non-whites to “autonomous Bantustans”, stripping them of their citizenship and placing them under the regime of racial segregation. dolls that look like discontinuous ink stains. on a map.
The Palestinian Authority, established under Oslo, administers the majority of Palestinians in the West Bank, but is largely limited to urban areas separate from Israeli-controlled territory and mostly prevented from traveling on roads predominantly for Jewish and other Israeli settlers.
B’Tselem officials said they wanted the international community to “take action” on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
But they declined to say whether the “action” includes calls for international economic and cultural sanctions such as those imposed on apartheid South Africa before it gained freedom with a series of steps that led to the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. .