A leading Israeli human rights group has called Israel an ‘apartheid regime’ for the first time, sparking fierce controversy by using a term that Israel leaders have strongly rejected.
B’Tselem, a prominent rights organization, said in an explosive report on Tuesday that Israel could not be a democracy while maintaining an occupation of the Palestinian territories.
“This is one regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and we need to look at the whole picture and see what it is: apartheid,” the group’s executive director, Hagai El-Ad, said in a statement.
Some of Israel’s critics have used the term “apartheid” to describe how Palestinians have fewer rights than Jews in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, annexed eastern Jerusalem, and Israel itself.
The term, which evokes the system of white rule and racial segregation in South Africa that ended in 1994, has nevertheless remained taboo for many.
Ohad Zemet, the spokesman for the Israeli embassy in the United Kingdom, downplayed the organization’s report, saying it was nothing more than a ‘propaganda tool’.
“Israel rejects the false allegations in the so-called report, as it is not based on reality, but on a distorted ideological view,” he said.. “Israel is a strong and vibrant democracy that grants full rights to all its citizens, regardless of religion, race or gender.”
Download the NBC News app for news and politics
According to The Associated Press, Palestinian citizens make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population of 9.2 million. Israel has also exercised varying levels of control over Palestinian territories since the east of Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of Jordan and Egypt were seized during the Arab-Israeli war in 1967, and the land that Palestinians want for a future state have.
Most of the international community views the Palestinian territories as occupied. However, US officials had already begun dropping public references to the West Bank as ‘occupied’ in 2017, and in 2019 the US reversed its decades-long position that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were illegal.
In recent years, rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have said that Israeli authorities wanted to undermine the work of rights defenders, including through the defense of Israeli rights advocates and the arrest of Palestinian activists.
In 2019, Israel suspended Omar Shakir, the local director of Human Rights Watch, for allegedly supporting an international boycott movement against the country. Human Rights Watch said no more Shakir had called for a direct boycott of Israel.
In his report, B’Tselem said that one organizing principle lay behind a whole range of Israeli policies: “The supremacy and perpetuation of the supremacy of one group – Jews – above another – Palestinians.”
The organization said Israel used land, among other things, tools to implement the principle of ‘Jewish supremacy’, with Jews living in a space where they enjoy full rights and self-determination, while Palestinians live in a fragmented area, each with his own set of rights given or denied by Israel, but always inferior to the rights granted to Jews.
Two recent developments have shown that Israel has been more explicit with its ‘Jewish supremacist ideology’, he added.
The first, he said, was a controversial law passed in 2018 that stipulated, among other things, that only Jews had the right to self-determination. Critics of the laws said it would perpetuate the inferior status of the Arabs in Israel.
The second, according to the statement, was the announcement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2019 that he planned to annex parts of the West Bank. The group said it testified to Israel’s long-term intentions and denied claims of ‘temporary occupation’.
Eugene Kontorovich, director of international law at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum, a Conservative thanks, says B’Tselem’s accusation is “shockingly weak, dishonest and misleading.”
Israel “has no policy of racial or ethnic segregation,” he said in a statement.
“By creating a ‘big lie’, B’Tselem not only wants to criticize Israel, but thoroughly delegates Israel and demands that it be destroyed – because one does not reform an apartheid reform, you end it,” he said. added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.