A leading Israeli human rights group has begun describing both Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single “apartheid” regime, using an explosive term that the country’s leaders and their supporters vehemently reject.
In a report released yesterday, B’Tselem says that while Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, blockaded Gaza, annexed east Jerusalem and within Israel itself, they have fewer rights than Jews in the entire 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 ruled by one government,” B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad said. “This is not democracy plus occupation. This is apartheid between the river and the sea.”
Photo: AP
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 half-century occupation of war-won lands drags on and hopes for a two-state solution fade.
Peter Beinart, a prominent Jewish-American critic of Israel, caused a similar stir last year when he came out 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 state or two.
Israel has long presented itself as a thriving democracy in which Palestinian citizens, who make up about 20 percent of its population of 9.2 million, have equal rights.
Israel seized east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war — lands that are home to nearly 5 million Palestinians and which the Palestinians want for a future state. Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but imposed a blockade after the militant group Hamas seized power there two years later.
It considers the West Bank “disputed” territory whose fate should be determined in peace talks.
Israel annexed east Jerusalem in 1967 in a move not recognized internationally and considers the entire city its unified capital.
Most Palestinians in east Jerusalem are Israeli “residents,” but not citizens with voting rights.
B’Tselem argues that by dividing up the 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 vastly unequal rights.
“We are not saying that the degree of discrimination that a Palestinian has to endure is the same if one is a citizen of the state of Israel or if one is besieged in Gaza,” El-Ad said. “The point is that there isn’t a single square inch 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.
“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 aimed at confiscating land, expelling indigenous people, demolishing homes and establishing settlements.”
In recent years, as Israel has further entrenched its rule over the West Bank, Israeli writers, former generals and politicians opposed to its right-wing government have increasingly adopted the term.
However, until now B’Tselem, which was established in 1989, had only used it in specific contexts.
Israel adamantly rejects the term, saying the restrictions it imposes in Gaza and the West Bank are temporary measures needed for security.
Itay Milner, a spokesman for Israel’s consulate general in New York, dismissed the B’Tselem report as “another tool for them to promote their political agenda,” which he said was based on a “distorted ideological view.”
He said that Arab citizens of Israel are represented across the government, including the diplomatic corps.
Eugene Kontorovich, director of international law at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum, says the fact that the Palestinians have their own government makes any talk of apartheid “inapplicable,” calling the B’Tselem report “shockingly weak, dishonest and misleading.”
Kontorovich said the use of the word “apartheid” was aimed at demonizing Israel in a way that “resonates with racial sensitivities and debates in America and the West.”
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, which estimates its reach at more than 1.5 million people in 850 congregations across North America, said the situation in the West Bank and Gaza is a “moral blight” and an “occupation,” but not apartheid.
“What goes along with saying that, to many in the international community, is that therefore Israel has no right to exist,” Jacobs said. “If the accusation is apartheid, that is not simply a strong critique, it’s an existential critique.”
“Fifty years plus, that’s not enough to understand the permanence of 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.”
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