JERUSALEM (AP) – A leading Israeli human rights group has begun to describe both Israel and its control over the Palestinian territories as a single “apartheid regime,” with an explosive term that the country’s leaders and their 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, blocked Gaza, annexed East Jerusalem and within Israel itself, they have fewer rights than Jews in the entire area between the Mediterranean. Sea and Jordan.
“One of the key points in our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area ruled by one government,” said B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad. “This is not democracy plus occupation. This is apartheid between the river and the sea. “
That a well-respected Israeli organization adopts a term long considered taboo by many critics of Israel points to a broader shift in the debate as the occupation of war-won countries continues for half a century and hopes for a two-state solution fade.
Peter Beinart, a leading Jewish-American critic of Israel, caused a similar uproar last year when he spoke out for 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 been profiling itself as a thriving democracy in which Palestinian citizens, who make up about 20% of the population of 9.2 million, have equal rights. Israel conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war – lands where nearly 5 million Palestinians live and the Palestinians want for a future state.
Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but imposed a blockade after the militant Hamas group seized power there two years later. It sees the West Bank as a ‘disputed’ area whose fate must be determined in peace talks. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 in a movement that is not internationally recognized and considers the entire city its unified capital. Most Palestinians in East Jerusalem are Israeli “residents,” but not voting citizens.
B’Tselem argues that by dividing the territories and using different means of control, Israel masks the underlying reality – that about 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians live under a single system with vastly unequal rights.
“We are not saying that the degree of discrimination a Palestinian faces is the same if he is a citizen of the State of Israel or if he is under siege in Gaza,” said El-Ad. “The point is, there isn’t one square inch between the river and the sea where a Palestinian and a Jew are equal.”
Israel’s harshest critics have used the term ‘apartheid’ for decades, referring to the system of white rule and racial segregation in South Africa that ended 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 more evident in its apartheid policy than Israel,” said Nabil Shaath, a senior adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “It is a state based on racist decisions aimed at seizing land, expelling indigenous peoples, demolishing homes and establishing settlements.”
In recent years, as Israel has further entrenched its rule over the West Bank, Israeli writers, disillusioned former generals and politicians have opposed the right-wing government. have increasingly adopted the term.
But until now, B’Tselem, founded in 1989, only used it in specific contexts.
Israel firmly rejects the term, saying that the restrictions it imposes in Gaza and the West Bank are temporary measures necessary for security. Most Palestinians in the West Bank live in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, but those areas are surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and Israeli soldiers can enter at any time. Israel is in full control of 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 promote their political agenda,” which he said was based on a ” distorted ideological vision ”. 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 Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum, says the fact that the Palestinians have their own government makes any talk of apartheid “inapplicable”, calling the B’Tselem report “shockingly weak, unfair and misleading”.
Palestinian leaders agreed to the current territorial divisions in the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, and the Palestinian Authority is recognized as a state by dozens of nations. That, Kontorovich says, is a far cry from the areas designated for black South Africans under apartheid – known as bantustans – to which many Palestinians compare the areas controlled by the PA.
Kontorovich said the use of the word “apartheid” was instead intended 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, dismisses the term. Profession, yes. Apartheid, absolutely not. “
But he acknowledged that critics of Israel who had either refrained from using the term, or who had used it and attacked it, “will now conveniently say, ‘Hey, you know, Israelis are saying it themselves.’ ”
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, which estimates its reach at more than 1.5 million people in 850 congregations in North America, says the situation in the West Bank and Gaza is a “moral plague” and a ” occupation “is. but no apartheid.
“What goes with 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 only a strong criticism, it is an existential criticism.”
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 Israel’s Palestinian minority to a second-class citizen and formalized the widespread discrimination they have faced since Israel’s founding in 1948. Proponents say it only recognized Israel’s Jewish character and that similar laws exist in many Western countries. countries can be found.
The second was Israel’s 2019 announcement of its intention to annex up to a third of the occupied West Bank, including all of its Jewish settlements, which are home to nearly 500,000 Israelis. Those plans were shelved as part of a normalization deal reached with the United Arab Emirates last year, but Israel has said the hiatus is only temporary.
B’Tselem and other rights groups claim the borders between Israel and the West Bank have long since disappeared – at least for Israeli settlers, who are free to travel back and forth, while their Palestinian neighbors need a permit to enter Israel .
There have been no substantial peace talks for over a decade. The occupation, of which critics have long warned, is unsustainable, lasting 53 years.
“Fifty years plus, isn’t that enough to understand the endurance of Israeli control over the occupied territories?” El-Ad said. “We think people should wake up to reality and stop talking about something that has already happened in the future.”