The drumbeat continues, inside and outside Israel. Adam Horowitz reports:
An important report was released yesterday by the the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), an established and widely-respected Israeli NGO, founded in 1972. Each year, ACRI publishes
a "State of Human Rights Report" describing the condition of human
rights inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
In
introducing this year's report ACRI notes that "It is disturbing to
note that not only have the troubling trends that we cited a decade ago
not diminished, they have in fact grown worse." [my emphasis] The introduction
continues:
twenty-first century, some citizens, not coincidentally, all of them
Arab, still live in third-world conditions – especially in the
unrecognized villages of the Negev. Eight years ago in October 2000, thirteen people were killed by the Israel Police – all Arabs and all but one citizens of Israel. Since then, despite unequivocal pronouncements by the Or Commission,
institutionalized discrimination continues toward the Arab population
of Israel. Very little was done to advance them and improve their
status; gaps between Jews and Arabs have only widened; and
discrimination grows worse.
Hovering above all this is the dark shadow of occupation and the separation regime ever more entrenched in the Occupied Territories. For forty-one years, Israel has denied fundamental rights to four million Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Even the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the mid-1990s
and Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005 did
not change the fundamental imbalance of power in which Israel controls
the lives of the Palestinians, and is responsible for the daily,
severe, and ongoing violations of their rights. Under the domination of
Israel, which defines itself as a democracy, live several million
people who are denied their rights under military occupation in which no rights are guaranteed: not the right to life, personal security, or freedom of movement,
not the right to earn a livelihood, to freedom of expression, or to
health. [Weiss: Let these truths be trumpeted from every altar, minaret and synagogue!!] In the reality of the Occupied Territories, particularly since
the second Intifada in late 2000, most rights have long lost their meaning.
Later in the report, ACRI describes the occupied territories:
state of affairs in which all the services, budgets, and the access to
natural resources are granted along discriminatory and separatist lines
according to ethnic-national criteria is a blatant violation of the principle of equality, and is in many ways reminiscent of the Apartheid regime in South Africa
(even if in South Africa it was a case of a racist separation criterion
as against the ethnic-national one applied in the Occupied Territories).
This is a big step for ACRI who have declined to use the term apartheid before. From a good article in The Independent:
The group decided to drop its previous reluctance to use the South Africa
comparison, often invoked by those pressing for an international boycott of
Israel, because "things are getting worse rather than better" according to
spokeswoman Melanie Takefman.
In particular, Ms. Takefman cited what ACRI views as the Israeli supreme
court's endorsement of the idea of separate road systems for Israelis and
Palestinians in the West Bank. Last March, the court ignored an ACRI
petition that it rule on the legality of the continued barring of
Palestinians from Highway 443, an alternate route between Jerusalem and Tel
Aviv that slices through expropriated Palestinian West Bank land. To justify
the expropriations, the state had said during the 1990's the road would be
for Palestinian benefit. But the road is now entirely an Israeli commuter
route, with Palestinian villagers who formerly used it to access health,
education and jobs in Ramallah barred since 2002 when it was closed to them
after attacks on Israeli motorists. Instead, authorities are building a
separate road for Palestinians. "The judges's turning a blind eye and
approving a separate road system was a very depressing and ominous sign,"
Ms. Takefman said.
The report has been covered in the Israeli press in YNET and Ha'aretz. Ha'aretz also ran an editorial about it. They said:
report is worrying, and it raises hard questions regarding the future
of Israel as a democratic, egalitarian society. The candidates for
prime minister, and the heads of all political parties, cannot ignore
the serious significance of the report, and the public must demand a
response as well as a commitment to take action, all the more so
because any infringement on human rights is for all intents and
purposes an infringement on the rationale for the state's existence.
