A central political question of our time is not so much where or how to draw the line but when. All over the world, we see regimes that are following clear trajectories away from democracy, justice, and freedom. As we watch them move inexorably along these disastrous paths, we wonder: When do we decide that the thing we feared would happen has happened already?
B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human-rights organization, has been documenting the violations of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1989. Earlier this month, it issued a position paper announcing that it has decided to draw a line. The paper is titled “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid.” The paper makes the case that what looks like apartheid—which the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as “inhumane acts” committed under a “regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups”—ought to be called apartheid. On the last day of 2020, I spent an hour on Zoom with B’Tselem’s executive director, Hagai El-Ad, and the organization’s spokesperson, Amit Gilutz, talking about why the group decided to make this statement.
The paper argues that the Israeli regime of apartheid rests on four pillars: citizenship, land, freedom of movement, and political participation. Virtually any person of Jewish ancestry anywhere in the world can claim Israeli citizenship; immigration to Israel is all but impossible for Palestinians, and 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. Israel has pursued a policy of “Judaizing” the territory it controls, the paper says, “based on the mindset that land is a resource meant almost exclusively to benefit the Jewish public.” The government uses a mix of bold and obscure legal procedures to expropriate Palestinians’ land, demolish homes, and forbid construction by Palestinians, while encouraging building and other land use by Jews. 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 who 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 word “apartheid,” which invokes the regime that existed in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, is imperfect. “Israel has learned from South Africa that announcing itself as an apartheid state is a bad idea,” El-Ad said. What El-Ad calls “petty aspects” of South African apartheid, such as signs that designate benches or beaches for use by only the ruling group, are rare in Israel. B’Tselem is focussing on what he calls “grand apartheid,” or the broad policies and laws that make the daily lives of Jews and Palestinians entirely different. Of course, other parallels are possible, and El-Ad himself has drawn them; he has also compared Israeli policies to the Jim Crow laws of the American South, which were enforced until the mid-nineteen-sixties.
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. Two things have happened in recent years to galvanize the decision. In 2018, the Knesset passed the nation-state law—one of fourteen “basic laws,” which serve as a form of constitution—that established Israel as a state of the Jewish people. In 2020, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently encouraged by the Trump Administration, announced plans to formally annex parts of the West Bank, which has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. Talk of the annexation plan has died down in the past six months, but El-Ad said that the plan was “just to take the current situation and formalize it. But, if you defeat that plan, then you are just left with what is.” An Israeli diplomat recently told The Guardian that Israel rejected “the false claims in the so-called report.”
Fighting the plan for formal annexation, and dreading it, made El-Ad realize that there are those for whom “it’s always two minutes to midnight.” The worst seems always to be in the future. In August of 2019, I was in the West Bank with a small group led by Breaking the Silence, another Jewish-Israeli human-rights organization, which gives educational tours that show the workings of the occupation. Yehuda Shaul, one of the group’s founders, was piloting a new tour that looked at such mechanisms of the occupation as a separate system of roads for use by Palestinians, connecting what Shaul pointedly referred to as Bantustans—the term used in South Africa for territories reserved for Black residents. When concluding the tour, Shaul said that if the Netanyahu government went through with the formal annexation of the West Bank, “we will no longer be able to speak of Israel as a democracy.” Shaul’s listeners—a Palestinian lawyer, an American volunteer in Palestine, and I—wondered how it was possible to refer to Israel as a democracy at all, when more than a third of its de-facto subjects had no political rights. Such had been the thought habit of even the most progressive Israeli Jews: to see two regimes, one of democracy and one of extreme repression, as distinct and existing side by side.
Thought habits can stand in the way of effective action. “The international community has been working to prevent formalization, not on stopping the unacceptable de-facto reality, and it silently communicated that permanent subjugation of Palestinians was O.K. as long as it wasn’t spelled out in law,” El-Ad said. “We want to change the discourse on what is happening between the river and the sea,” meaning the territory controlled by Israel as a whole. “The discourse has been untethered from reality, and this undermines the possibility of change.”
There is, of course, no guarantee that B’Tselem’s statement will enable change, although it has infuriated the government and opened the organization up to attacks from the powerful Israeli right. But, after a year of discussions, B’Tselem concluded that “we have a moral obligation to say it, whether we think it’s effective or not,” El-Ad said. There comes a time to say that a line has been crossed, even if the breach occurred long ago.
