This is a good short
thread of links to articles about the situation.
The
first article is about the leading Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, who issued a
position paper in January of this year claiming that Israel is an apartheid regime.
B’Tselem appears to be the first Jewish-Israeli human-rights organization to use the term “apartheid” to refer to the Israeli regime in its entirety, though Palestinian activists have been using it for years. The paper also marks the first time the organization has taken a position on the Israeli regime as a whole rather than focussing on the occupied territories.
I had no idea about much of this:
only a minority of Palestinians—about 1.6 million, out of seven million—who live on land controlled by Israel are citizens of Israel, and even then their rights are limited compared with their nearly seven million Jewish counterparts...Although Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel can travel freely in and out of the country and through the Israeli-controlled territories, with the exception of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian non-citizens face extreme restrictions on movement. (There is also a formal ban on Israeli citizens’ entry to land governed by the Palestinian Authority, but this ban is not enforced.) Many Palestinians cannot enter Israel proper, and travel between towns and villages in the occupied West Bank is onerous, extremely time-consuming, and often impossible. Finally, the five million disenfranchised Palestinians cannot vote in Israeli elections. (Most of them can potentially vote in P.A. elections, but the P.A.’s influence over their lives is relatively minor—they are governed by Israelis.) Palestinians in the occupied territories are also forbidden to protest without a permit.
The second link is to the
AP reporting on the position paper, which includes this quote:
“One of the key points in our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area ruled by one government,” said B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad. “This is not democracy plus occupation. This is apartheid between the river and the sea.”
At the end of April of this year
Human Rights Watch was the first major international rights body to call the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians apartheid.
Human Rights Watch compared policies and practices towards nearly 7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories and within Israel with those concerning roughly the same number of Jewish Israelis living in the same areas.
It concluded there was a “present-day reality of a single authority, the Israeli government … methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory.”