A leading Israeli human rights group labeled Israel for the first time as an “apartheid regime”, sparking strong controversy by using a term that Israeli leaders vehemently rejected.
B’Tselem, a prominent human rights organization, said in an explosive report on Tuesday that Israel cannot be a democracy while maintaining an occupation in the Palestinian territories.
“It is a regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and we should look at the whole picture and see what it looks like: apartheid,” said the group’s executive director, Hagai El-Ad, in a statement.
Some of Israel’s critics used the term “apartheid” to describe how Palestinians have less rights than Jews in the occupied West Bank, blocked Gaza, annexed East Jerusalem and Israel itself.
However, the term, evoking the system of white rule and racial segregation in South Africa that ended in 1994, remained taboo for many.
Ohad Zemet, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in the United Kingdom, criticized the organization’s report saying it was nothing more than a “propaganda tool”.
“Israel rejects the false claims of the so-called report, as it is not based on reality, but on a distorted ideological view,” he said. “Israel is a strong and vibrant democracy that gives full rights to all its citizens, regardless of religion, race or sex.”
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Palestinian citizens represent about 20% of Israel’s population of 9.2 million, according to the Associated Press. Israel has also exercised various levels of control over the Palestinian territories since it took East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, land that Palestinians want for a future state.
Most of the international community considers Palestinian territories occupied. However, starting in 2017, American authorities began to abandon public references to the West Bank as “occupied” and in 2019 the US reversed its decades-old position that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal.
In recent years, rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say that Israeli authorities have sought to undermine the work of rights defenders, including defaming Israeli rights defenders and arresting Palestinian activists.
In 2019, Israel expelled Omar Shakir, local director of Human Rights Watch, for allegedly supporting an international boycott movement against the country. Human Rights Watch said neither she nor Shakir had called for a direct boycott of Israel.
In its report, B’Tselem said that an organizing principle underlies a whole series of Israeli policies: “Moving forward and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians”.
The organization said Israel used land, among other tools, to implement the principle of “Jewish supremacy”, with Jews living in a space where they enjoy full rights and self-determination, while Palestinians live in fragmented territories, each with its own set of rights given or denied by Israel, but always inferior to the rights granted to the Jews.
Two recent events showed that Israel was being more explicit with its “Jewish supremacist ideology,” he added.
The first, he said, was a contentious law passed in 2018 that stated, among other provisions, that only Jews are entitled to self-determination. Critics of the laws said it would perpetuate the inferior status of Arabs in Israel.
The second, he said, was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement in 2019 that he planned to annex parts of the West Bank. The group said it testified to Israel’s long-term intentions and dismissed allegations of “temporary occupation”.
Eugene Kontorovich, director of international law at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum, a conservative think thank, said B’Tselem’s charge was “shockingly weak, dishonest and misleading”.
Israel “has no racial or ethnic separation policies,” he said in a statement.
“By creating a ‘big lie’, B’Tselem seeks not only to criticize Israel, but fundamentally to delegitimize Israel and ask for its destruction – because no one reforms an Apartheid regime, it ends it,” he added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Lawahez Jabari and Paul Goldman contributed.