Palestinians are wondering why, after seven weeks, the New York Times never published reports of a leading, well-respected Israeli human rights organization’s January publication, “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid.”
As papers of record, the Times’ readers deserve to learn of B’tselem’s report, its argument, and the conversation it has stirred.
B’tselem contends that “in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group—Jews—over another—Palestinians.”
The report precedes Nathan Thrall’s January article in The London Review of Books, “The Separate Regimes Delusion.” Thrall, former Director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, strongly counters the argument made by supporters of the Zionist ideology, including progressive Jewish organizations opposed to Israel’s occupation, that “one can separate the pre-1967 state from the rest of the territory under its control.” Thrall exposes a “conceptual wall” which, he writes, “must be maintained between the two regimes: (good) democratic Israel and its (bad) provisional occupation.”
In 2009, leaders of the historic churches in Jerusalem endorsed a document created by a broadly representative group of lay and clergy Christians in Palestine, “A Moment of Truth.” It was our word to the world about what is happening in Palestine. In the authors’ message accompanying the document, we called on the international community to stand by the Palestinian people who have faced “clear apartheid for more than six decades.”
We have been vilified for using the word and dismissed as antisemites, in spite of the fact that in our document we clearly condemn “all forms of racism, whether religious or ethnic, including antisemitism and Islamophobia, and we call on [the Churches of the world] to condemn it and oppose it in all its manifestations.”
Increasingly, respected Israeli human rights organizations are boldly using the word “apartheid”: Yesh Din, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and Breaking the Silence described daily life in the West Bank as “apartheid,” in a report published last year. B’tselem’s label extends the term to characterize both the experience of Israel’s Arab citizens and the four million Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory.
In “A Moment of Truth,” we wrote to our Jewish neighbors, “Even though we have fought one another in the recent past and still struggle today, we are able to love and live together. We can organize our political life, with all its complexity, according to the logic of love and its power, after ending the occupation and establishing justice.”
Comprehensive reporting is essential to a just, peaceful and lasting resolution—for Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine and all those around the globe whose dignity and human rights are not recognized.
