WEST BANK (Dispatches) – The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem has accused the occupying regime of running a ‘democratic system’ in name only in a report ahead of the regime’s elections on Tuesday.
B’tselem said that while the elections are being touted as a “celebration of democracy”, in reality the regime breaches minimum requirements. “This is not a democracy. This is apartheid,” it said.
The report warned that, while “Jewish citizens who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea can fully participate in Israel’s general elections”, the regime’s “apartheid system” gives no route for representation for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, illegally annexed East Al-Quds or besieged Gaza.
As Zionists head to the polls on Tuesday, around 10 percent of voters live beyond the Green Line - the demarcation line set out in the 1949 so-called Armistice Agreements between the armies of the Zionist regime and those of its neighbors after the 1948 Arab-Zionist War.
Living in more than 200 illegal settlements dotted throughout the West Bank, “their right to political participation remains untouched despite living outside Israel’s territory, and they can vote and run for office like all Jewish citizens living west of the Green Line”, said B’tselem.
Polling stations in the illegal settlements and the occupied territories are effectively regulated under the same electoral rules and regulations, with settlers not required to cross the Green Line.
While Zionists in the occupied Palestinian territories are allowed to exercise their right to vote, B’tselem said, none of their Palestinian counterparts “are allowed to vote or run for Knesset, and they have no representation in the political institutions that dictate their lives”.
The lack of Palestinian representation from the occupied territories in the occupying regime’s elections is despite the “fact that Israel has been the sole power controlling and managing these millions of lives for more than 55 years,” said B’tselem.
Its report highlights a system that has often been called apartheid by international human rights organizations.
B’tselem described the Zionist regime’s claims that Palestinians in the occupied territories can influence their future through other political systems as being “detached from reality”.
While Israel is no longer directly present in Gaza, B’tselem highlighted the fact the Zionist regime “still holds almost all powers pertaining to Gaza residents and determines what their daily lives look like, in no small part due to its near-complete control over the movement of people and goods in and out of the Gaza Strip”.
The Zionist regime has maintained a crippling blockade of the Gaza Strip since 2007, which critics say amounts to collective punishment of the impoverished enclave’s two million residents.