TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) – Israel’s education minister says he is banning groups that call Israel the “apartheid state” from giving lectures in schools – a move that targets one of the country’s main human rights groups after it started to describe Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single apartheid system.
The term explosive, seen for a long time as a taboo and used mainly by the country’s most severe critics, is vehemently rejected by Israel’s leaders and many ordinary Israelis.
Education Minister Yoav Galant tweeted on Sunday night that he instructed the director general of the ministry to “prevent the entry of organizations that call Israel ‘an apartheid state’ or demote Israeli soldiers from giving lectures at schools.”
“The Ministry of Education under my leadership has raised the banner of advancing Jewish, democratic and Zionist values and is acting accordingly,” he said. It was not clear whether he had the authority to ban speakers from schools.
In a report released last week, the rights group B’Tselem said 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 area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
B’Tselem said it was not intimidated by the minister’s announcement and that the group nevertheless gave a talk on the subject via video call to a school in the city of Haifa on Monday.
“B’Tselem is determined to maintain its mission of documenting reality, analyzing it and making our findings publicly known to the Israeli and worldwide public,” the agency said in a statement.
Adalah, an Arab legal rights group, said he had appealed to the country’s attorney general to cancel Galant’s directive, saying it was done without the proper authority and that it was designed to “silence legitimate voices”.
Israel passed a law in 2018 that prevents lectures or activities at schools by groups that support legal action against Israeli soldiers abroad. The law was apparently drafted in response to the work of Breaking the Silence, a whistleblower group of former Israeli soldiers who oppose policies in the occupied West Bank. It was not clear whether Galant’s decree was rooted in the 2018 law.
Israel has long been a prosperous democracy. Its own Arab citizens, who represent about 20% of its population of 9.3 million, have citizenship rights, but are often discriminated against in housing and elsewhere. Arab citizens of Israel have representatives in parliament, work in government bureaucracy and work in various fields alongside Israeli Jews.
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.
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.
Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but imposed a blockade after the Palestinian militant group Hamas took power two years later. He considers the West Bank’s “disputed” territory, whose fate must be determined in peace negotiations with the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, the government of autonomy for its Palestinian residents.
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 voting citizens.
Israel strongly rejects the term apartheid, 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.
B’Tselem argues that by dividing territories and using different means of control, Israel masks an underlying reality that about 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians live under a single system with immensely unequal rights.