Associating Israel with the label of Apartheid has become ubiquitous as of late; annual events all over the globe such as Israeli Apartheid Week have done much to normalize this coupling. Naturally, advocates for Israel insist that it is all nonsense, indeed how could Israel practice Apartheid when there are “Arab” judges, or members of Knesset? How could anyone accuse Israel of such practices when every citizen is allowed to vote?
Let us delve a little bit deeper into this question and try to come up with an answer.
Firstly, it is important to establish what we mean with Apartheid. There is a widespread misconception that Apartheid refers solely to the case of South Africa. While it’s understandable that people think of South Africa when Apartheid is mentioned, it is critical to recognize that it was merely one manifestation of it, and that there were different regimes with different configurations which upheld the same system.
According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the crime of Apartheid is defined as follows:
“The crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;”
There are many inhumane acts listed under paragraph 1, but the most relevant to our case are:
Deportation or forcible transfer of population.
Imprisonment and severe deprivation of liberty.
Persecution based on ethnic, religious or national origins.
Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
It is indisputable that Israel practices these acts against Palestinians, inside and outside of the green line. It is also indisputable that as a state built on a colonial ideology that privileges one ethnic group over the rest, its actions are ultimately committed to maintain this system of supremacy.
You will notice that nowhere in this description does it say that if you have a judge from the oppressed minority then it ceases being an Apartheid system. As a matter of fact, Nelson Mandela was a successful lawyer. The counter-argument that there are “Arab” judges or policemen ceases to be convincing when you realize that the system doesn’t need to be a complete carbon copy of South Africa to be counted as Apartheid.
Mentioning that there are “Arab” members of Knesset is also not as powerful a gotcha moment as Israeli advocates believe it to be, simply because there is a precedent of an Apartheid state having parliament members of the oppressed indigenous group. That precedent is Southern Rhodesia. Despite allowing a certain number of black parliamentarians, it was still a racist entity ruled by a white minority, with the very honest declared goal of maintaining itself as a white state.
As you have surely noticed I have been referring to “Arabs” in parenthesis, this is because most Palestinians living within the green line prefer to call themselves Palestinians, not merely Arab. Naturally, this is a threat to the Israeli narrative of the non-existence of Palestinians as a people, so even as they tokenize them in an attempt to prove their egalitarianism, they seek to simultaneously erase their actual identity.
So now that we have established the meaning of Apartheid, and that having a few members of the oppressed group in high profile positions is irrelevant to the definition, we can move onto the next part of the answer.
The argument that Israel does not practice apartheid hinges on one very crucial caveat: that we are distinguishing between Israel and the areas Israel rules. In practice, however, this distinction is functionally meaningless. (Even following this caveat, Israel itself is definitelynot a democracy, at best it could be described as an ethnocracy.)
In practice, Israel rules everything from the river to the sea, it is the only sovereign power that runs the lives ofall who inhabit this area. I know some of you will point to the Palestinian Authority, but in reality, the Palestinian Authority is relegated to the realm of administering occupied territories, without any real power, sovereignty or influence.
For example, the Palestinian Authority can’t even determine who a Palestinian citizen is. The citizen registry for Palestinians is under de facto Israeli control. Meaning that if a Palestinian marries a non-Palestinian, their spouse will never be able to gain Palestinian citizenship as Israel’s demographic obsessions would not allow for any preventable increase in the Palestinian population. Even Abbas needs to coordinate with the Israeli military to be able to visit other Palestinian cities, cities of a “country” he is supposedly president of.
In a watershed moment, B’Tselem, Israel’s largest human rights group recently (January 2021) released a report officially calling Israeli practicesApartheid, it argues that:
“Although there is demographic parity between the two peoples living here, life is managed so that only one half enjoy the vast majority of political power, land resources, rights, freedoms and protections. It is quite a feat to maintain such disfranchisement. Even more so, to successfully market it as a democracy (inside the “green line” – the 1949 armistice line), one to which a temporary occupation is attached. In fact, one government rules everyone and everything between the river and the sea, following the same organising principle everywhere under its control, working to advance and perpetuate the supremacy of one group of people – Jews – over another – Palestinians. This is apartheid.”
They continued:
“There is not a single square inch in the territory Israel controls where a Palestinian and a Jew are equal. The only first-class people here are Jewish citizens such as myself, and we enjoy this status both inside the 1967 lines and beyond them, in the West Bank. Separated by the different personal statuses allotted to them, and by the many variations of inferiority Israel subjects them to, Palestinians living under Israel’s rule are united by all being unequal.”
Indeed, the green line has long been invisible to Israelis, and Israel treats the settlements as parts of its own state. Why should we pretend otherwise? Why pretend that we’re talking about two governing bodies when the Palestinian Authority is a glorified bantustan administrator with no say about anything?
This is by design, not by chance. Israel has been very conscious with how it approached its colonization project in the West Bank, in 1972 Ariel Sharon proclaimed that:
“We’ll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty five years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”
In July 2020, before Bt’selem designated Israel as an apartheid state, another Israeli human rights organization, Yesh Din, described the Israeli regime as apartheid one.
Adalah, a human rights law group in Israel, has composed a database of at least 65 discriminatory laws in Israel that disfavor non-Jewish Israelis. For example, the Law of Return and Absentees’ Property Law are but two examples of flagrant racism and discrimination in the Israeli legal system.
Even more recently, Human Rights Watch also officially designated Israeli behavior as constituting Apartheid. I promise it won’t be the last human rights organization to do so.
It is about time we stopped pretending that there ever was a hope for two states, or that we aren’t already living under a de facto one state from the river to the sea, with varying tiers of rights and privileges bestowed upon you based on where you come from and your ethnicity.
When a Jewish settler attacks a Palestinian and is tried in a civil court, while those protesting the attack are tried in a military court, that practice is Apartheid, and no appeals to the contrary can change that. Pretending that this occupation is temporary has long been delusional, but has now crossed the line into intellectual dishonesty. If we are to have any hope for a way forward then we must call things as they are. We Palestinians do not have the privilege of wasting another 25 years pretending to live in an alternate reality.
Finally, it should be stressed that calling Israeli policy Apartheid does not mean that the Palestinian question is not a settler-colonial context, nor does it imply that the solution lies in a civil rights movement for equality or the mere incorporation of the West Bank or Gaza Strip into the Israeli state. The Palestinian cause is a cause for decolonization and freedom, not for acquiring privileges in a colonial state. Consequently, it could be more useful to look into Apartheid as a crime committed by Israel, rather than a general descriptor as it is too inadequate a designation to account for every manifestation of Israeli settler colonialism. After all, even if Israel stopped practicing Apartheid, without true decolonization and the right of return, the Palestinian struggle for liberation would be incomplete.
UPDATE:
In February 2022, Amnesty International designated Israel as an apartheid state.
In March 2022, Michael Lynk, a Canadian law professor appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council, said that the situation met the legal definition of apartheid, the first time that a U.N.-appointed rapporteur has made the accusation so unequivocally. He said the two-tier legal system Israel enforces:
"enshrined a system of domination by Israelis over Palestinians that could no longer be explained as the unintended consequence of a temporary occupation."
His successor, Francesca Albanese, in her report of October 2022, called for the UN General Assembly to
"develop a plan to end the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and apartheid regime".
Following the release of its second report in October 2022, Permanent United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Israel Palestine conflict chair Navi Pillay told the Times of Israel in an interview that apartheid was
"a manifestation of the occupation" and "We’re focusing on the root cause, which is the occupation, and part of it lies in apartheid".
The International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 found that Israel was in breach of Article 3 of International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, including "racial segregation and apartheid".