JERUSALEM (AP) – A leading Israeli human rights group has begun to describe Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single “apartheid” regime, using an explosive term that the country’s leaders and supporters vehemently reject.
In a report released on Tuesday, B’Tselem says that although Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, it blocked Gaza, annexed East Jerusalem and within Israel, they have less rights than Jews across the country. area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
“One of the key points in our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area governed by a government,” said B’Tselem director, Hagai El-Ad. “This is not democracy but occupation. This is the apartheid between the river and the sea. “
The fact that a respected Israeli organization is adopting a term long seen as taboo even by many critics of Israel points to a broader shift in the debate, as its occupation of half a century of land conquered by the war drags on and hopes for a two-state solution fade.
Peter Beinart, a leading Jewish-American critic of Israel, caused a similar stir in the past year when he spoke in favor of 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 a prosperous democracy in which Palestinian citizens, who represent about 20% of its population of 9.2 million, have equal rights. Israel took East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war – lands that are home to 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 came to power there two years later. He considers the West Bank’s “disputed” territory, whose fate must be determined in the peace negotiations. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, in a movement not recognized internationally and considers the whole city to be its unified capital. The majority of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are Israeli “residents”, but not citizens with voting rights.
B’Tselem argues that by dividing 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 immensely unequal rights.
“We are not saying that the degree of discrimination that a Palestinian must endure is the same if he is a citizen of the State of Israel or if he is besieged in Gaza,” said El-Ad. “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 rule and racial segregation in South Africa that ended in 1994. The International Criminal Court defines apartheid as an “institutionalized regime of oppression and domination systematic by a racial group. ”
“There is no country in the world that is clearer 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 that aim to confiscate land, expel indigenous peoples, demolish houses and establish settlements.”
In recent years, as Israel has further strengthened its hold on the West Bank, Israeli writers have disillusioned former generals and politicians who opposed their right-wing government. increasingly adopted the term.
But so far, B’Tselem, which was created in 1989, had used it only in specific contexts.
Israel vehemently 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 governed by the Palestinian Authority, but these areas are surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and Israeli soldiers can enter at any time. Israel has full control over 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 advance their political agenda”, which he said was based on a “distorted ideological view”. He stressed that the Arab citizens of Israel are represented throughout the government, including the diplomatic corps.
Eugene Kontorovich, director of international law at the Kohelet Policy Forum, based in Jerusalem, says that the fact that the Palestinians have their own government makes any conversation about apartheid “inapplicable”, calling the B’Tselem report “shockingly weak, dishonest and misleading. ”
Palestinian leaders agreed with the current territorial divisions in the Oslo agreements in the 1990s, and the Palestinian Authority is recognized as a state by dozens of nations. This, says Kontorovich, is a far cry from the territories assigned to black South Africans under apartheid – known as Bantustans – to which many Palestinians compare the areas governed by the PA.
Kontorovich said the use of the word “apartheid” was aimed, instead, at demonizing Israel in a way that “resonates with racial sensitivities and debates in America and the West”.
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York, rejects the term. “Occupation, yes. Apartheid, absolutely not. “
But he acknowledged that Israel’s critics who refrained from using the term, or who used it and were attacked, “will now conveniently say, ‘Hey, you know, the Israelis themselves are saying that.'”
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, which estimates its reach in 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”, but not apartheid.
“What it means to say this, for many in the international community, is that, therefore, Israel has no right to exist,” he said. “If the charge is apartheid, this is not simply a strong criticism, it is an existential criticism.”
El-Ad points to two recent developments that have altered B’Tselem’s thinking.
The first was a contentious 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. Defenders say they have only recognized Israel’s Jewish character and similar laws can be found in many western countries.
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 some 500,000 Israelis. These plans were suspended as part of a normalization agreement reached with the United Arab Emirates last year, but Israel said the break was only temporary.
B’Tselem and other human rights groups argue that the borders separating Israel from the West Bank have long since disappeared – at least for Israeli settlers, who can travel freely from side to side, while their Palestinian neighbors demand permission to enter in Israel.
There have been no substantive peace negotiations in more than a decade. The occupation, which critics have long warned to be unsustainable, lasts 53 years.
“Isn’t more than fifty years old enough to understand the continued Israeli control of the occupied territories?” El-Ad said. “We think that people need to wake up to reality and stop talking in future terms about something that has already happened.”