JERUSALEM (PA) – A major Israeli human rights group has begun describing both Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single “apartheid” regime, using an explosive term that the country’s leaders and supporters reject with vehemence.
In a report released on Tuesday, B’Tselem says that while Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, they blocked Gaza, annexed East Jerusalem and within Israel itself, have fewer rights than Jews throughout the West Bank. area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
“One of the key points of our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area governed by one government,” said Hagai El-Ad, director of B’Tselem. “It simply came to our notice then. This is apartheid between the river and the sea. “
The fact that a respected Israeli organization adopts a term considered taboo even by many critics of Israel points to a broader shift in the debate as its half-century-long occupation of war-torn land lengthens and is expected to be fade a two-state solution.
Peter Beinart, a prominent Jewish-American critic of Israel, caused a similar commotion 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 any position on whether there should be one or two.
Israel has long presented itself as a prosperous democracy in which Palestinian citizens, who make up about 20% of its population of 9.2 million, have the same rights. Israel seized East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during 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 militant group Hamas took power there two years later. He believes that the “disputed” territory of the West Bank whose fate should be determined in peace talks. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 in an internationally unrecognized movement 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 territories and using different means of control, Israel masks the underlying reality: approximately 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians live under the same system with very 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 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 used the term “apartheid” for decades, evoking the system of white government and racial segregation in South Africa that ended in 1994. The International Criminal Court defines apartheid as a “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by a racial group.”
“There is no country in the world clearer than Israel in its apartheid policies than Israel,” said Nabil Shaath, a senior 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 consolidated its dominance over the West Bank, Israeli writers have disappointed former generals and politicians opposed to their right-wing government. they have increasingly adopted the term.
But so far B’Tselem, established in 1989, had only used it in specific contexts.
Israel strongly rejects the term, saying the restrictions it imposes on Gaza and the West Bank are temporary security measures. Most Palestinians in the West Bank live in areas ruled by the Palestinian Authority, but these areas are surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and Israeli soldiers can enter at any time. Israel has total control over 60% of the West Bank.
Itay Milner, a spokesman for Israel’s consulate general in New York, rejected B’Tselem’s report as “another tool to advance his political agenda,” which he said was based on a “distorted ideological vision.” He noted that the 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 discussion of apartheid “inapplicable,” calling the B’Tselem report “surprisingly weak, dishonest and deceptive. ”
Palestinian leaders agreed to the current territorial divisions in the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, and Palestinian authority is recognized as a state by dozens of nations. This, says Kontorovich, is a long way from the designated territories for black South Africans under apartheid – known as the Bantustans – to which many Palestinians compare the PA-ruled areas.
Kontorovich said the use of the word “apartheid” was aimed at demonizing Israel in a way that “resonated with racial sensibilities and debates in America and the West.”
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York, rejects the term. “Employment, yes. Apartheid, absolutely not. “
But he acknowledged that Israeli critics who had refrained from using the term or who had used it and had been attacked “will conveniently say,” Hey, you know, the Israelis say 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 across North America, says the situation in the West Bank and Gaza is a “mess morality ”and an“ occupation ”. but not apartheid.
“What happens with saying that, for many in the international community, is that, therefore, Israel has no right to exist,” he said. “If the accusation is apartheid, that’s not just a strong critique, it’s an existential critique.”
El-Ad points to two recent developments that altered 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 downgraded Israel’s Palestinian minority to second-class citizenship and formalized the widespread discrimination they have faced since Israel’s founding in 1948. Supporters say it only recognized the Jewish character of Israel. ‘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 house about 500,000 Israelis. These plans were suspended as part of a normalization agreement reached with the United Arab Emirates last year, but Israel has said the pause is only temporary.
B’Tselem and other advocacy groups argue that 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 require permits to enter. Israel.
There have been no substantial peace talks in more than a decade. The occupation, which critics have long warned is unsustainable, has lasted for 53 years.
“Fifty more years, isn’t that enough to understand the permanence of Israeli control of the occupied territories?” El-Ad said. “We believe that people should wake up to reality and stop talking in future terms about something that has already happened.”