Israel moves to rein in rights group over ‘apartheid state’ terminology

Israel’s education minister says he is banning groups that call Israel an “apartheid state” from lecturing at schools — a move that targets one of the country’s leading human rights groups after it began describing both Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single apartheid system.

The explosive term, long seen as taboo and mostly used by the country’s harshest critics, is vehemently rejected by Israel’s leaders and many ordinary Israelis.

Education Minister Yoav Galant tweeted late Sunday that he had instructed the ministry’s director general to “prevent the entry of organizations calling Israel ‘an apartheid state’ or demeaning Israeli soldiers from lecturing at schools.”

“The Education Ministry under my leadership raised the banner of advancing Jewish, democratic and Zionist values and it is acting accordingly,” he said. It was not immediately clear whether he had the authority to ban speakers from schools.

In a report released last week, the rights group B’Tselem said that while Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, blockaded Gaza, annexed east Jerusalem and within Israel itself, they have fewer rights than

Jews in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River.

B’Tselem said it would not be deterred by the minister’s announcement and that despite it, the group gave a lecture on the subject via videocall to a school in the northern city of Haifa on Monday.

Adalah, an Arab legal rights group, said it had appealed to the country’s attorney general to cancel Galant’s directive, saying it was made without the proper authority and that it was intended to “silence legitimate voices.”