B’Tselem is an internationally recognized human rights organization located in Israel. Its original mission was monitoring the mistreatment of Palestinians by
the Israeli army in both Gaza and the West Bank.
The organization has won several international awards, including the 2014 Stockholm Human Rights Award and the 2018 Human Rights Award of the French Republic.
In January 2021, B’Tselem announced that its mission was expanding. The announcement came in the form of a public declaration describing both the Israeli nation-state and the Palestinian Occupied Territories as a single territory uniformly governed by a system of Jewish Supremacy.
The declaration is titled, “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid.”
Apartheid is defined as systemic discrimination based on race and/or ethnicity that is endorsed by state authorities and embedded in the nation’s legal system.
In Israel and the rest of Palestine, this means that all Palestinians are always second class “citizens” (though many can never attain citizenship), while Jews enjoy first class citizenship within a society created exclusively by and for Jews alone.
I have posted an excerpt from B’Tselem’s announcement below. Encourage your pro-Israel friends to read it and to investigate B’Tselem’s website. They will find a wealth of information documenting their claims.
To learn about the details explaining how and why Israel imposes Jewish supremacy upon the Palestinians, I encourage you to read the entire proclamation by clicking on the title above:
The Israeli regime, which controls all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, seeks to advance and cement Jewish supremacy throughout the entire area. To that end, it has divided the area into several units, each with a different set of rights for Palestinians – always inferior to the rights of Jews. As part of this policy, Palestinians are denied many rights, including the right to self-determination.
This policy is advanced in several ways. Israel demographically engineers the space through laws and orders that allow any Jew in the world or their relatives to obtain Israeli citizenship, but almost completely deny Palestinians this possibility. It has physically engineered the entire area by taking over of millions of dunams of land and establishing Jewish-only communities, while driving Palestinians into small enclaves. Movement is engineered through restrictions on Palestinian subjects, and political engineering excludes millions of Palestinians from participating in the processes that determine their lives and futures while holding them under military occupation.
A regime that uses laws, practices and organized violence to cement the supremacy of one group over another is an apartheid regime. Israeli apartheid, which promotes the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians, was not born in one day or of a single speech. It is a process that has gradually grown more institutionalized and explicit, with mechanisms introduced over time in law and practice to promote Jewish supremacy. These accumulated measures, their pervasiveness in legislation and political practice, and the public and judicial support they receive – all form the basis for our conclusion that the bar for labeling the Israeli regime as apartheid has been met.
If this regime has developed over many years, why release this paper in 2021? What has changed? Recent years have seen a rise in the motivation and willingness of Israeli officials and institutions to enshrine Jewish supremacy in law and openly state their intentions. The enactment of Basic Law: Israel – the Nation State of the Jewish People and the declared plan to formally annex parts of the West Bank have shattered the façade Israel worked for years to maintain. . .
The Israeli regime’s rationale, and the measures used to implement it, are reminiscent of the South African regime that sought to preserve the supremacy of white citizens, in part through partitioning the population into classes and sub-classes and ascribing different rights to each. . .
As painful as it may be to look reality in the eye, it is more painful to live under a boot. The harsh reality described here may deteriorate further if new practices are introduced – with or without accompanying legislation. Nevertheless, people created this regime and people can make it worse – or work to replace it. That hope is the driving force behind this position paper. How can people fight injustice if it is unnamed? Apartheid is the organizing principle, yet recognizing this does not mean giving up. On the contrary: it is a call for change.
Fighting for a future based on human rights, liberty and justice is especially crucial now. There are various political paths to a just future here, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but all of us must first choose to say no to apartheid.
