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Most Palestinians in the occupied West Bank live in areas governed by the Palestinian Authority, however, those areas are surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and Israeli soldiers can enter at any time. The UN has dubbed such barriers as “a permanent system of control”. Pictured is Hawara checkpoint, in the occupied West Bank.
(Credit: Magne Hagesæter/WikiCommons)
Hamed Chapman
Israel’s largest human rights organisation has labelled Israel an “apartheid regime,” for the first time in an explosive report spelling out that the country cannot be a democracy while occupying Palestinian land.
“In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians,” B’Tselem said.
Adding that it was a vital method in pursuing this goal is engineering space differently for each group. The damning report said it was “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.” It was a “key method in pursuing this goal is engineering space differently for each group.”
Accusations of apartheid have been levelled at Israel, at varying degrees of intensity, since the establishment of a Jewish state over 70 years ago. However, this is the first time it has been charged with the crime of apartheid by the influential human rights group inside the country.
“It is one regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and we must look at the full picture and see it for what it is: apartheid,” the Executive Director of B’Tselem, Hagai El-Ad, said in a statement.
“There is not a single square inch in the territory Israel controls where a Palestinian and a Jew are equal. The only first-class people here are Jewish citizens such as myself, and we enjoy this status both inside the 1967 lines and beyond them, in the West Bank,” El-Ad also wrote in the Guardian.
A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in the UK, Ohad Zemet, was quoted saying that the finding of the report was nothing more than a “propaganda tool.”
“Israel rejects the false claims in the so-called report as it is not based on reality but a distorted ideological view,” he claimed. “Israel is a strong and vibrant democracy that gives full rights to all of its citizens regardless of religion, race or gender.”
The report analyses how the Israeli regime works to advance its goals in areas under its control. It also compares the apartheid system in South Africa, based on race and skin colour that was ended in the 1990s, with the way it is based in Israel on nationality and ethnicity.