Israel inching toward apartheid, ex-UN chief says

TEL AVIV — Israel is inching toward apartheid and drifting further away from the hopes of creating a Palestinian state alongside it, former United Nations secretary general Ban Kimoon said in an interview Thursday on a visit to the region.

Ban said that throughout his three-day visit, which coincided with a spike in deadly violence in the West Bank, he encountered a bleaker reality than the one he faced while head of the world body from 2007 to 2016. He said he had seen signs, through expanding West Bank Jewish settlements and tighter restrictions against Palestinians, that an apartheid system was taking root.

“I think the situation has worsened,” Ban said. “I’m just thinking that, as many people are saying, that this may constitute apartheid.” He said he was concerned that a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was “fading away.”

Ban was in the region on behalf of The Elders, a group of statespeople that engages in peacemaking and human rights initiatives around the world. Along with the group’s chair, former Irish president Mary Robinson, he met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and civil society. It was from local rights groups that he said he heard that Israel was committing the crime of apartheid.

Leading rights groups in Israel and abroad have accused Israel and its 56-year occupation of the West Bank of morphing into an apartheid system that they say gives Palestinians secondclass status and is designed to maintain Jewish hegemony from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

In apartheid South Africa, a system based on white supremacy and racial segregation was in place from 1948 until 1994. The rights groups have based their conclusions on international conventions like the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.”