JERUSALEM (PA) – A major Israeli human rights group has begun describing both Israel and control of the Palestinian territories as a unique “apartheid” regime, using an explosive term that the country’s leaders and supporters vehemently reject.
In a report released Tuesday, B’Tselem says that while Palestinians live under various forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, they have blocked Gaza, annexed East Jerusalem, and even in Israel, they have fewer rights than Jews throughout. area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
“One of the key points in our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area led by a single government,” said B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad. “This is not democracy plus occupation. This is apartheid between the river and the sea. “
The fact that a respected Israeli organization adopts a term long considered taboo by many critics of Israel indicates a broader shift in debate as its half-century occupation of war-torn land continues and hopes for a two-state solution. disappears.
Peter Beinart, a prominent Jewish-American critic of Israel, caused a similar agitation last year when it came out in favor of a single binational state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. B’Tselem does not take a position on whether there should be a state or two.
Israel has long presented itself as a thriving democracy in which Palestinian citizens, who make up about 20 percent of its 9.2 million population, have equal rights. Israel took control of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war – lands that house nearly 5 million Palestinians and that Palestinians want for a future state.
Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but imposed a blockade after the Hamas militant group took power there two years later. He considers the West Bank a “disputed” territory whose fate should be determined in peace negotiations. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 through an internationally unrecognized movement and considers the entire city its unified capital. Most Palestinians in East Jerusalem are Israeli “residents,” but not citizens with the right to vote.
B’Tselem argues that by dividing territories and using various means of control, Israel is masking the underlying reality – that about 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians live under a single system with extremely unequal rights.
“We are not saying that the degree of discrimination that a Palestinian has to endure is the same if he is a citizen of the state of Israel or if he is besieged in Gaza,” El-Ad said. “The idea is that there is no square centimeter between the river and the sea in which a Palestinian and a Jew are equal.”
Israel’s harshest critics have used the term “apartheid” for decades, citing the system of white government and racial segregation in South Africa, which ended in 1994. The International Criminal Court defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of oppression and systematic domination by a racial group. ”
“There is no country in the world that is clearer in its apartheid policies than Israel,” said Nabil Shaath, chief adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “It is a state based on racist decisions aimed at confiscating land, evicting indigenous people, demolishing houses and establishing settlements.”
In recent years, as Israel has further strengthened its leadership over the West Bank, Israeli writers have disappointed former generals and politicians who opposed its right-wing government. they have increasingly adopted the term.
But so far B’Tselem, which was established in 1989, had only used it in specific contexts.
Israel strongly rejects the deadline, saying the restrictions it imposes in Gaza and the West Bank are temporary security measures. Most Palestinians in the West Bank live in areas ruled by the Palestinian Authority, but those areas are surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and Israeli soldiers can enter at any time. Israel has full control over 60% of the West Bank.
Itay Milner, a spokesman for Israel’s consulate general in New York, rejected the B’Tselem report as “another tool for advancing their political agenda,” which he said was based on a “distorted ideological vision.” He stressed that the Arab citizens of Israel are represented in the entire government, including the diplomatic corps.
Eugene Kontorovich, director of international law at the Kohelet Policy Forum in Jerusalem, says the fact that the Palestinians have their own government makes any discussion of apartheid “inapplicable”, calling the B’Tselem report “shockingly weak, dishonest and misleading.” .
Palestinian leaders agreed to the current territorial divisions in the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, and the Palestinian Authority is recognized as a state of dozens of nations. This, says Kontorovich, is far from the territories designated for black apartheid South Africans – known as the Bantustans – with whom many Palestinians compare the areas ruled by the PA.
Kontorovici said the use of the word “apartheid” instead sought to demonize Israel in a way that “resonates with racial sensibilities and debates in America and the West.”
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York, rejects the term. “Occupation, yes. Apartheid, absolutely not. “
But he acknowledged that Israeli critics who refrained from using the term, or who used it and were attacked, “will now conveniently say,” Hey, you know, the Israelis say it themselves. “
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Union for Reformed Judaism, which estimates that it will reach more than 1.5 million people in 850 congregations in North America, says the situation in the West Bank and Gaza is a “moral injury” and a ” occupation”. but not apartheid.
“What goes along with saying that for many in the international community is that Israel therefore has no right to exist,” he said. “If the accusation is apartheid, it is not simply a strong critique, but an existential critique.”
El-Ad indicates two recent developments that have changed B’Tselem’s thinking.
The first was a controversial law passed in 2018, which defines Israel as a “nation-state of the Jewish people.” Critics say it has demoted Israel’s Palestinian minority to second-class citizenship and formalized the widespread discrimination they have faced since Israel’s founding in 1948. Proponents say it has recognized only Israel’s Jewish character and that similar laws can be found in many western countries.
The second was Israel’s announcement in 2019 of its intention to annex up to a third of the occupied West Bank, including all of its Jewish settlements, which house nearly 500,000 Israelis. These plans were suspended as part of a normalization deal with the United Arab Emirates last year, but Israel said the break was only temporary.
B’Tselem and other rights groups say the borders between Israel and the West Bank disappeared long ago – at least for Israeli settlers, who can travel freely back and forth, while their Palestinian neighbors need permits to enter. Israel.
There have been no substantive peace talks for more than a decade. The occupation, which critics have long warned is unsustainable, lasted 53 years.
“Fifty more years, isn’t that enough to understand the permanence of Israeli control over the occupied territories?” El-Ad said. “We believe that people need to wake up to reality and stop talking in the future about something that has already happened.”