Groups calling Israel an “apartheid state” will be banned from teaching in schools, Israel’s education minister has said.
The move focuses on one of the major human rights groups B’Tselem after it began to describe Israel and its control over the Palestinian territories as one apartheid system.
Late on Sunday, Israeli Education Minister Yoav Galant tweeted that he had instructed the ministry’s chief executive to “prevent groups from calling Israel a ‘apartheid state’ or disparaging Israeli soldiers from making a speech at schools “.
In a report published last week, B’Tselem said that while Palestinians live under various forms of Israeli control in the illegally owned West Bank, it is hampered. Gaza, taking over East Jerusalem and Israel itself, have fewer rights than arguments in the entire Mediterranean area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
On Monday, the group said that would not be deterred by the news and gave a meaningful speech on the subject to a school in the northern city of Haifa.
“B’Tselem is committed to adhering to its mission of recording truth, analyzing it, and making our decisions publicly to the Israeli public, and worldwide,” he said. group in a statement sent to Al Jazeera.
“Minister of education… while ordering schools to ban B’Tselem, saying it is against ‘lies’ and for Israel ‘Jewish and democratic’. But it is the Galant Minister who lies, with whom Israel cannot be regarded as a democracy, because it works to promote and maintain the supremacy of one group of people, to scrutinize, over another group, Palestinians, within a single multinational police force, ”the statement read.
“This is Israel’s apartheid system. No one can censor reality. “
‘No legal authority’
Adalah, an Arab legal rights group, said it had appealed to the country’s attorney general to rescind the directive, saying it had been done without the proper authority and was intended to “legitimate voices”. simulation.
It was not immediately clear whether Galant had the authority to ban speakers from schools.
“Israel’s education minister has no legal authority to ban human rights groups from meeting with students simply because they have criticized Israel’s definition of a Zionist Jewish state,” Adalah said in a statement sent to Al Jazeera.
“Minister Galant’s order prevents students from receiving an education that leads them to legitimate, diverse, pluralistic views and careers – especially those from civil society and human rights groups. “
In 2018, Israel introduced a law banning speeches or actions in schools by groups that support a lawsuit against Israeli soldiers abroad.
The law appears to have been drafted in response to the work to break the silence, a whistleblowing group of Israeli veterans who oppose policies in the West Bank. It was unclear whether the Galant order was rooted in the 2018 law.
Israel has presented itself as a thriving democracy and claims equal rights for its Palestinian citizens, who make up about 20 percent of the population of 9.2 million.
However, these Palestinians suffer from being treated as second- or third-class citizens at the institutional level, with about 60 actively discriminating laws in the housing, education and health care sectors among them. others.
B’Tselem and other rights groups argue that the borders separating Israel and the West Bank have long since disappeared, at least for Israeli illegal settlers, who can travel to free back and forth, while Palestinians need difficult permits to enter Israel.
Israel strongly rejects the apartheid term, saying that the restrictions it imposes in Gaza and the West Bank have been taken over as temporary measures needed for security.
Most Palestinians on the West Bank live in Palestinian Authority-controlled areas, but these areas are surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and Israeli troops can go to war. at any one time, with Israel taking full military control of 60 percent of the area.