TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) – Israel’s education minister says it bans groups calling Israel an “apartheid state” from teaching in schools, an action aimed at one of the country’s leading human rights groups after he began to describe both Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single system of apartheid.
The term explosive, long seen as taboo and used primarily by the country’s harshest critics, is vehemently rejected by Israeli leaders and many ordinary Israelis.
Education Minister Yoav Galant tweeted on Sunday afternoon that he had instructed the ministry’s director general to “prevent the entry of organizations that call Israel” a state of apartheid “or that degrade Israeli soldiers to teach in schools “.
“The Ministry of Education under my leadership raised the banner of advancing Jewish, democratic and Zionist values and is acting accordingly,” he said. It was not immediately known if he had the authority to ban school speakers.
In a report released last week, the rights group B’Tselem said that while Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, they have 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.
B’Tselem said he would not be deterred by the minister’s announcement and that despite this, the group gave a lecture on the subject on Monday at a school in the northern city of Haifa.
“B’Tselem is determined to maintain its mission of documenting reality, analyzing it and making our findings public to the Israeli public and around the world,” he said in a statement.
Adalah, an Arab legal rights group, said it had appealed to the country’s attorney general to overturn Galant’s directive, saying it was done without proper authority and intended to “silence legitimate voices”.
Israel passed a law in 2018 that banned conferences or activities in group schools that supported legal action against Israeli soldiers abroad. Apparently, the law was drafted in response to the work of Breaking the Silence, a group of whistleblowers for former Israeli soldiers who oppose the policies of the occupied West Bank. It was unclear whether Galant’s decree had its roots in the 2018 law.
Israel has long presented itself as a prosperous democracy. Its own Arab citizens, who make up approximately 20% of its 9.3 million population, 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 work in various camps alongside Jewish Israelis.
Israel seized East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the 1967 war, lands that are home to nearly 5 million Palestinians and that Palestinians want for a future state.
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.
Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but imposed a blockade after the Palestinian militant group Hamas took power there two years later. It considers the “disputed” territory of the West Bank whose fate should be determined in peace talks with the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, the autonomous government of its Palestinian residents.
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.
Israel flatly rejects the term apartheid, saying the restrictions it imposes on Gaza and the West Bank are temporary security measures. Most Palestinians in the West Bank live in areas governed 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.
B’Tselem argues that by dividing territories and using different means of control, Israel masks an underlying reality that approximately seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians live under the same system with very unequal rights.