TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) – Israel’s Education Minister says he prohibits groups calling Israel an “apartheid state” from teaching in schools – an action targeting one of the country’s leading human rights organizations after it began describing both Israel and its control. of the Palestinian Territories as one apartheid system.
The explosive term, long seen as taboo and usually used by the country’s harshest critics, is vehemently rejected by Israel’s leaders and many ordinary Israelis.
Education Minister Yoav Galant tweeted late Sunday that he had instructed the ministry’s director general “to prevent organizations calling Israel an ‘apartheid state’ or humiliating Israeli soldiers from teaching their classes in schools.”
“The Ministry of Education under my leadership has raised the flag of promoting Jewish, Democratic and Zionist values and is acting accordingly,” he said. It was not immediately clear whether he had the authority to ban speakers from schools.
In a report released last weekrights group B’Tselem said that while Palestinians live under various forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, Gaza is blocked, East Jerusalem annexed and within Israel itself, they have fewer rights than Jews in the entire area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.
B’Tselem said it would not be deterred by the minister’s announcement and that despite this, the group delivered a lecture on the subject via a video call Monday at a school in the northern city of Haifa.
“B’Tselem is committed to sticking to its mission to document reality, analyze it and make our findings publicly known to the Israeli public and worldwide,” he said in a statement.
Adalah, an Arab legal rights group, said it had appealed to the country’s attorney general to cancel Galant’s directive, saying it had been drafted without proper authority and was intended to “legitimately vote it out.” to silence “.
Israel passed a law in 2018 banning lectures or activities in schools by groups supporting legal action against Israeli soldiers abroad. The law was apparently drafted in response to the work of Breaking the Silence, a whistleblower group for former Israeli soldiers who oppose policies in the occupied West Bank. It was not clear whether Galant’s decision was rooted in the 2018 law.
Israel has long presented itself as a thriving democracy. The native Arab citizens, who make up about 20% of the population of 9.3 million, have citizenship rights but often suffer discrimination in housing and other areas. Arab citizens of Israel have representatives in parliament, serve in the government bureaucracy, and collaborate with Jewish Israelis in various fields.
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.
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 .
Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but imposed a blockade after the Palestinian militant Hamas group seized power there two years later. It considers the “disputed” area of the West Bank whose fate is to be determined in peace talks with the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, the autonomous government for its Palestinian residents.
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.
Israel strongly rejects the term apartheid, saying that the restrictions it imposes in 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 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.
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.