JERUSALEM (AP) – A leading Israeli human rights group has begun describing Israel as well as its control over the Palestinian territories as a single ‘apartheid regime’, using an explosive term that strongly rejects the country’s leaders and their supporters.
In a report released on Tuesday, B’Tselem said that although Palestinians lived under various forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, blocked Gaza, annexed east Jerusalem and within Israel itself, they had fewer rights than Jews. in the whole 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 ruled by one government,” said Hagai El-Ad, director of B’Tselem. “It’s not democracy plus occupation. It is apartheid between the river and the sea. ”
That a respected Israeli organization is adopting a term that is considered taboo even by many critics of Israel indicates a broader shift in the debate as the occupation of warring nations continues into the half-century and hopes for a two-state solution.
Peter Beinart, a prominent Jewish-American critic of Israel, caused a similar uproar last year when he 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 one or two states.
Israel has long presented itself as a thriving democracy in which Palestinian citizens, who make up about 20% of its population of 9.2 million, have equal rights. During the 1967 war, Israel seized East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – countries where nearly 5 million Palestinians live and who want the Palestinians for a future state.
Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but imposed a blockade after the militant Hamas group took power there two years later. It regards the West Bank as a ‘controversial’ area whose fate must be determined in peace negotiations. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 in a move that is not internationally recognized and regards the entire city as its united capital. Most Palestinians in east Jerusalem are Israeli “residents”, but not citizens with the right to vote.
B’Tselem argues that Israel divides the territories and uses different modes of control, obscuring the underlying reality – that about 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians live under a single system with many unequal rights.
“We are not saying that the degree of discrimination that a Palestinian must endure is the same if you are a citizen of the state of Israel or if you are besieged in Gaza,” El-Ad said. “The point is that there is not a single square centimeter between the river and the sea in which a Palestinian and a Jew are equal.”
Israel’s harshest critics have been using the term “apartheid” for decades, calling for a system of white rule and racial segregation in South Africa that came to an end in 1994. The International Criminal Court defines apartheid as an ‘institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination. by one racial group. ”
“There is no country in the world that is clearer in its apartheid policy than Israel,” said Nabil Shaath, a senior adviser to Mahmoud Abbas. “It is a state based on racist decisions aimed at confiscating land, evicting indigenous people, demolishing houses and establishing settlements.”
As Israel further entrenched its rule over the West Bank, Israeli writers, former generals and politicians disillusioned with the right-wing government. increasingly accepted the term.
But until now, B’Tselem, founded in 1989, has only used it in specific contexts.
Israel strongly rejects the term, saying the restrictions it imposes on Gaza and the West Bank are temporary measures needed for security. Most Palestinians in the West Bank live in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, but the 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 the Israeli consulate general in New York, dismissed the B’Tselem report as “another tool for them to advance their political agenda”, which he said was based on a ” distorted ideological view ‘. He pointed out that Arab citizens of Israel are represented throughout the 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 every apartheid speech “irrelevant”, calling the B’Tselem report “shockingly weak”, dishonest and deceptive. ”
Palestinian leaders agreed to the current territorial divisions in the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, and the Palestinian Authority is recognized as a state by dozens of nations. Kontorovich says that it is very far from the areas designated for black South Africans under apartheid – known as bantustans – with which many Palestinians compare the areas managed by the PA.
Kontorovich said the use of the word “apartheid” was rather aimed at demonizing Israel in a way that “resonates with racial sensitivities 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 admits that critics of Israel who did not use the term, or who used it and were attacked, ‘will now comfortably say,’ Hey, you know, Israelites say it themselves. ‘
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, which estimates the reach of more than 1.5 million people in 850 congregations across North America, says the situation in the West Bank and Gaza is a ‘moral struggle’ and a ‘occupation’. but not apartheid.
“What goes on to say to many people in the international community is that Israel therefore has no right to exist,” he said. “If the accusation is apartheid, it’s not just a strong critique, it’s an existential critique.”
El-Ad points to two recent developments that have changed B’Tselem’s thinking.
The first was a controversial law passed in 2018 that defines Israel as the ‘nation state of the Jewish people’. Critics say it has downgraded the Palestinian minority from Israel to second-class citizenship and formalized the widespread discrimination they have faced since the founding of Israel in 1948. Supporters believe that it merely acknowledges the Jewish character of Israel 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 is home to nearly 500,000 Israelis. These plans were suspended as part of a normalization agreement reached with the United Arab Emirates last year, but Israel said the break was only temporary.
B’Tselem and other rights groups claim that the borders separating Israel and the West Bank have long since disappeared – 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 negotiations for more than a decade. The occupation, which critics have long warned is unsustainable, has been going on for 53 years.
“Fifty years plus, isn’t that enough to understand the permanent control of Israeli control over the occupied territories?” El-Ad said. “We think people need to wake up to reality and stop talking about something that has already happened in the future.”