B’Tselem was created in February 1989 by a large group of Israeli lawyers, intellectuals and academics in the middle of the Intifada and aims to document the human rights violations that their state is committing in the occupied territories, under the name of the Bible Genesis section: “God made man like him (“b’tselem Elohim,” in Hebraico).” All human beings.

The B’Tselems have not been the first to say that Israel is a state of apartheid, but their declaration can be a real milestone in the perception that the world has of the Middle East conflict, since after 31 years of works and reflections Israel has claimed aloud that it manages its entire controlled area under the name of apartheid according to a single model: “We can imagine different paths to reach a future of justice in this region of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, but to begin with we all have to say no to apartheid.” B’Tselemen’s document describes in detail the reasons for the use of the word apartheid. Here are a few drops of these details.

14 million people live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, half Jewish and the other half Palestinian. Public, political, legal and media discourses say that they live in two different regimes, on each side of the Green Line marked in the Armistice of 1949. On the one hand, 9 million people in the sovereign state of Israel, all with Israeli citizenship, although
not all of them are Jewish (almost 2 million are Palestinians, also called Israeli Arabs). On the other side of the Green Line, in the territory occupied by Israel in 1967, 5 million Palestinians are still waiting for a statute that will supposedly have to materialize the negotiations of the future, in a ‘probisional’ military occupation that has lasted for 51 years.

However, for more than five decades, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have settled in the stable colonies of the West Bank and live de facto as west of the Green Line, as has Israel. In addition, Israel has officially conquered East Jerusalem and assumed in practice the West Bank. Therefore, this belief in having two different regimes confuses the correct interpretation of the real situation: that the whole region lives in the same regime.

B’Tseleme set out in 1989 to denounce the rights violations committed by Israel in the West Bank, including Eki-Jerusalem, and Gaza, refusing to enter the internal situation of the State of Israel. But then, in addition to the de facto changes imposed by Israel in practice, in 2018 he introduced a fundamental change in his Constitution, declaring by law Israel as “state of the Jewish people”. And to finish, Parliament has formally embraced the whole of the West Bank in 2020.

“All this means that what is happening in the occupied territories cannot be understood outside the entire space controlled by Israel. The concepts such as “prolonged occupation” that we have discussed in recent years to describe the situation are no longer appropriate. In order to combat human rights violations effectively, it is necessary to define a regime that governs the entire region. And the reality is that in the whole region of the Mediterranean to Jordan, laws, practices and state violence are being organised using the Israeli regime
for one group – Jews – to build on the other – Palestinians – supremacy.”

XXI. SUBORDINATE APARTHEID

Jewish citizens live in the whole region as a single space, for them it is not a Green Line, they have all their
rights in any corner. On the contrary, the Palestinians are the only ones living in the division of areas, for them the region is a mosaic.
Some Palestinians, living west of the Green Line within the 1949 borders, are Israeli citizens and have
many rights, although not all Jews. The occupied West Bank, as assumed by the 2020 law, everything else, is used by
Israel and the 2.6 million Palestinians living here are concentrated in dozens of small, closed camps, under strict Jewish military authority and without political rights. The 40% of the West Bank, which controls the Palestinian Authority, and the small Gaza that Israel brought out settlers like its military, with its 2 million Palestinian
citizens, are also heavily controlled by Israel.

In each of the areas mentioned, Israel recognizes the Palestinians with a different set of rights, which is always more limited than the one declared to the Jews. And Israeli apartheid uses four main methods to promote Jewish supremacy. It has two of them in the whole region: to prevent the arrival of non-Jewish immigrants in Israel and to withdraw land to the Palestinians in order to build new colonies exclusively for the Jews. It uses only two more methods in the occupied territories: measures
to prevent Palestinian movements and deny them political rights.

Is it possible to compare Israel with the famous apartheid of South Africa? They say yes from B’Tselemd. In South Africa, the
difference between citizens was determined by the colour of the skin; in Israel, nationality and ethnicity. As pointed out by Hagai El-Ad, CEO of the organization, Israel is an apartheid 2.0, as supremacist as that of South Africa, but more sophisticated in methods and techniques. “The reform introduced in the Constitution in 2018 establishes the self-determination of the Jewish people by excluding everyone else. The Constitution states that the distinction between Jews and non-Jews in Israel (and anywhere else in the
world) is basic and legal. From there, it institutionalizes discrimination in favour of Jews in the
right to residence, land ownership, citizenship, language and culture. Now Jewish supremacy is laid down in the Constitution.”

Seen thus, another irreverent feat of apartheid is what Israel has done with the COVID-19 vaccines, turning the elected part of its citizens into a model for the integration of the world and leaving the citizens rejected, the Palestinians, unjustly subjected to the pandemic.

As was the case with apartheid in South Africa, no one should negotiate with such a country. And even less if, as in the case of the CAF producing train in Beasain, it is the construction of an infrastructure that increases the segregation of citizens.