Israel's new government 'racing' towards deepening apartheid policies, rights group says

Israel's incoming government is "racing" towards deepening its apartheid policies, a Palestinian legal rights group said on Wednesday, with returning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new cabinet set to be sworn in on Thursday.

Adalah, which is based in Israel and advocates for the Palestinian minority there, made its comments after the new far-right government's guiding principles were released, also on Wednesday.

The document said: "The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel."

The statement was taken by rights groups and advocates of the Palestinian struggle as further confirmation that the Israeli government is entrenching discriminatory apartheid policies.

"The guiding principles, along with the coalition agreements, and the recent legislative initiatives, leave no room for doubt as to the direction in which the next government is racing: deepening its Apartheid policies and intensifying Jewish supremacy and systemic discrimination against Palestinians," Adalah said in a statement to media.

"Adalah intends to continue to legally challenge the racist legislation and policies of the government and to call on states and international bodies to immediately act against Israel's gross human rights violations against Palestinians."

The rights group said the "explicit declaration" of an exclusive Jewish right to self-determination in the government's guiding principles "amounts to a complete denial of this right to the Palestinians, in all the territories under its control".

Adalah said this goes "even further" than Israel's highly controversial 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law, which has been decried as racist.

That quasi-constitutional law "defines self-determination as unique to the Jewish people within the 'State of Israel', rather than an exclusive right to all of the areas it considers the historic 'land of Israel'," Adalah said.

The group added that the position set out in the guiding principles therefore "serves as a clear commitment to preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state".

The principles also said the government will "advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel – in the Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria".

It comes despite the Golan Heights being Syrian territory occupied by Israel and Judea and Samaria – referring to the West Bank – being Israeli-occupied Palestinian land.

Israel captured the West Bank in 1967 along with the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Palestinians view the West Bank as the heartland of their future independent state.

In the decades since, Israel has constructed dozens of Jewish settlements there in breach of international law.

The settlements in the West Bank, an area home to about 2.5 million Palestinians, now contain around 500,000 illegal Israeli settlers.

Agencies contributed to this report.