Israel is not a democracy, but an “apartheid regime” that imposes Jewish supremacy over all the lands it controls, an important domestic rights group claimed in a position paper that it should provoke a fierce controversy.
“An organizing principle underlies a wide range of Israeli policies: to advance and perpetuate the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians,” said B’Tselem, an organization that documents human rights violations.
Ohad Zemet, a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in the United Kingdom, called the report “a propaganda tool”. He added: “Israel rejects the false claims of the so-called report, as it is not based on reality, but on a distorted ideological view.”
B’Tselem said it rejected the dominant assumption that Israel operates two separate systems of government simultaneously – a democracy within its sovereign territory, while maintaining half a century of military control over Palestinians in the occupied territories.
“Israel is not a democracy with an associated temporary occupation,” said the agency’s executive director, Hagai El-Ad. “It is a regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and we must look at the whole picture and see what it looks like: apartheid”.
These areas include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel captured from Jordanian forces in a 1967 war, and the Gaza Strip, which it took from Egypt in the same conflict and where its military remained until 2005.
The shift in perception of apartheid claims is part of an activist-led movement that gained momentum after Israeli threats of annexation that claim to prove that the occupation is permanent, as well as recent laws that enshrine extra political rights for Jews over Arabs.
Another Israeli copyright group, Yesh Din, issued a legal opinion last summer in which it argued that apartheid was being committed in the West Bank.
However, B’Tselem’s report goes further, claiming that Israel has created a system across the territory in which Jewish citizens have full rights. Meanwhile, he argues that Palestinians are divided into four layers with varying levels of rights, depending on where they live, but always below the Jewish people.
At the bottom end, says the report, are the nearly 2 million Palestinians in the impoverished Gaza Strip, ruled by the militant group Hamas, but which Israel is blocking in a policy that B’Tselem says gives it “effective control”.
Above them, said B’Tselem, are the approximately 2.7 million Palestinian “subjects” in the West Bank, who live in “dozens of disconnected enclaves, under strict military rule and without political rights”.
Under agreements signed in the 1990s, Palestinians in the West Bank limited self-government, although B’Tselem said the Palestinian Authority “is still subordinate to Israel and can only exercise its limited powers with Israel’s consent”.
Next in the hierarchy are the approximately 350,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem. Israel has offered citizenship to these residents, although many have refused on principle and for those who try, the process has a high rate of rejection.
At the highest level of B’Tselem are Palestinian citizens of Israel, also called Israeli Arabs, who have full citizenship and represent about a fifth of Israelis. Still, B’Tselem said they are also kept below Jewish citizens, pointing to land discrimination, immigration laws that favor Jews and a law that grants Jews extra political rights.
In response, Zemet, the Israeli diplomat, said that all Israeli citizens have full rights, with Arabs “represented in all branches of government – in the Israeli parliament, in the courts (including the supreme court), in the public service and even not the diplomatic corps where they represent the State of Israel around the world ”.
In 2017, the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia became the first UN body to accuse Israel of apartheid, a crime under international law, a measure that the former Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman compared to Nazi propaganda.
Last year, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he intended to annex parts of the West Bank, 47 UN experts warned that “it would be the crystallization of an already unfair reality: two peoples living in the same space, governed by the same state , but with profoundly unequal rights ”.
They added: “This is a vision of 21st century apartheid”.
Netanyahu has suspended his ambitions for annexation. However, several Israeli and Palestinian rights groups, including B’Tselem, argue that Israel already imposes a “de facto” annexation of the West Bank, with more than 400,000 Jewish settlers living there and enjoying the same rights, and many of the same services, like other Israelis.