Israeli apartheid is a system of institutionalized segregation and discrimination in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Whether apartheid exists in Israel proper is a matter of controversy. This system is characterized by near-total physical separation between the Palestinian and the Israeli settler populations of the West Bank, as well as the judicial separation that governs both communities, which discriminates against Palestinians in a wide range of ways. Israel also discriminates against Palestinian refugees in the diaspora and against its own Palestinian citizens.Peteet, J. (2016). The work of comparison: Israel/Palestine and apartheid. Anthropological Quarterly, 89(1), 247-281.
Since the 1948 Palestine war, Israel has denied Palestinian refugees who were expelled or fled from what became its territory the right of return and right to their lost properties. Israel has been occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since the 1967 Six-Day War, which is now the longest military occupation in modern history, and, in contravention of international law, has been constructing large settlements there that separate Palestinian communities from one another and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. The settlements are mostly encircled by the Israeli West Bank barrier, which intentionally separates the Israeli and Palestinian populations, a policy called Hafrada. Jewish Israeli settlers are subject to Israeli civil law, but the Palestinian population is subject to military law. Settlers also have access to separate roads and exploit the region's natural resources at the expense of its Palestinian inhabitants.
Academic comparisons between Israel-Palestine and South African apartheid were prevalent by the mid-1990s. Since the definition of apartheid as a crime in the 2002 Rome Statute, attention has shifted to the question of international law. In December 2019, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination announced it was reviewing the Palestinian complaint that Israel's policies in the West Bank amount to apartheid. Since then, several Israeli, Palestinian, and international human rights organizations have characterized the situation as apartheid, including Yesh Din, B'Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. This view has been supported by United Nations investigators, the African National Congress (ANC), human rights groups, and many prominent Israeli political and cultural figures. The International Court of Justice in its 2024 advisory opinion found that Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories constitutes systemic discrimination and is in breach of Article 3 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid. The opinion did not specify whether it was referring to racial segregation, apartheid, or both.
Elements of Israeli apartheid include the Law of Return, the 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, the 2018 Nation-State Law, and many laws regarding security, freedom of movement, land and planning, citizenship, political representation in the Knesset (legislature), education, and culture. Israel says its policies are driven by security considerations, also argues that there is an Israeli narrative of exceptionalism which works to 'exempt' it from such comparisons. and that the accusation of apartheid is factually and morally inaccurate and intended to delegitimize Israel. It also often calls the charge antisemitic, which critics have in turn called weaponization of antisemitism. Republished from Eve Geddie was writing as the director of Amnesty International's European Institutions Office.
Historical comparisons In 1961, South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd—architect of South Africa's apartheid policies—dismissed an Israeli vote against South African apartheid at the United Nations, saying, "Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude ... they took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state." His successor John Vorster held the same view.: 'Former South African prime minister John Vorster viewed Israel's government as confronting a situation similar to South Africa's. Israel was faced with an "apartheid problem" as concerned its Arab inhabitants, he said. "We view Israel's position and problems with understanding and sympathy'.' Since then, a number of sources have used the apartheid analogy. In the early 1970s, Arabic language magazines of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) compared the Israeli proposals for Palestinian autonomy to the Bantustan strategy of South Africa. In 1970, an anti-apartheid activist in the UK's Liberal Party, Louis Eaks, referred to the situation in Israel as "apartheid" and was threatened with expulsion as a result.
In 1979, the Palestinian sociologist Elia Zureik said that while not de jure an apartheid state, Israeli society was characterized by a latent form of apartheid. quoted in The concept emerged with some frequency in both academic and activist writings in the 1980s–90s, when Uri Davis, Meron Benvenisti, Richard Locke, and A. T. Q. Stewart used the term apartheid to describe Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
In the 1990s, the term "Israeli apartheid" gained prominence after Israel, as a result of the Oslo Accords, granted the Palestinians limited self-government in the form of the Palestinian Authority and established a system of permits and checkpoints in the Palestinian Territories. The apartheid analogy gained additional traction after Israel constructed the West Bank Barrier.
In 2001, an NGO Forum ran separately from the World Conference against Racism in the nearby Kingsmead Stadium in Durban, from 28 August to 1 September. It consisted of 3,000 NGOs and was attended by 8,000 representatives. The declaration the NGO Forum adopted was not an official document of the conference. The final NGO document called "for the reinstitution of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism" and "the complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state".
Former US President Jimmy Carter wrote the 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. His use of the term "apartheid" was calibrated to avoid specific accusations of racism against the government of Israel, and carefully limited to the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. In a letter to the Board of Rabbis of Greater Phoenix, Carter made clear that he was not discussing the circumstances within Israel but exclusively within Gaza and the West Bank. In a 2007 interview, he said: "Apartheid is a word that is an accurate description of what has been going on in the West Bank, and it's based on the desire or avarice of a minority of Israelis for Palestinian land. It's not based on racism...This is a word that's a very accurate description of the forced separation within the West Bank of Israelis from Palestinians and the total domination and oppression of Palestinians by the dominant Israeli military."
By 2013, the analogy between the West Bank and Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa was widely drawn in international circles. In the US, where the notion had previously been taboo, Israel's rule over the occupied territories was increasingly compared to apartheid.
West Bank and Gaza Strip Hafrada–apartheid comparison
Hafrada ( literally 'separation') is the Israeli government's official term for the policy of separating the Palestinian population in Palestinian territories from the Israeli population.According to the Milon and Masada dictionaries, translates into English as "separation", "segregation", "division", "severance", "disassociation" or "divorce". ; The term refers to the general policy of separation the Israeli government has adopted and implemented over the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Scholars and commentators have compared the word to apartheid, with some claiming the two words are equivalent.
The Israeli West Bank barrier ( , "separation fence"), the associated controls on Palestinians' movements posed by West Bank Closures, and Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza have been cited as examples of hafrada. Aaron Klieman has distinguished between partition plans based on , which he translates as "detachment", and , translated as "disengagement".
Since its first public introductions, the concept-turned-policy or paradigm of hafrada has dominated Israeli political and cultural discourse. In 2009, Israeli historian Benny Morris said those who equate Israeli efforts to separate the two populations with apartheid are effectively trying to undermine the legitimacy of any peace agreement based on a two-state solution.Morris, Benny: One State, Two States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 203–4, n. 1. In 2023, former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth said his organization had long refrained from interpreting the reality on the ground in terms of apartheid as long as there was a chance the peace process would succeed. Since, in his view, the process is going nowhere and the Israeli government is undermining a two-state solution, Roth has concluded Israel's policies in the West Bank have "all the elements of the oppressive discrimination that constitute apartheid". Former Foreign Policy editor David Rothkopf has called Israel an apartheid state.
Under Israeli military occupation Leila Farsakh, associate professor of political science at University of Massachusetts Boston, has said that after 1977, "the military government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) expropriated and enclosed Palestinian land and allowed the transfer of Israeli settlers to the occupied territories." She notes that settlers continued to be governed by Israeli laws, and that a different system of military law was enacted "to regulate the civilian, economic and legal affairs of Palestinian inhabitants". She says, "[m]any view these Israeli policies of territorial integration and societal separation as apartheid, even if they were never given such a name."
Under Palestinian Authority Most Arabs living in the West Bank, an area occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and deemed to be occupied territory under international law, are under the civil control of the Palestinian National Authority and are not Israeli citizens. In some areas of the West Bank, they are under Israeli security control.
In 2007, in advance of a report from the United Nations Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteur John Dugard said that "Israel's laws and practices in the OPT [occupied Palestinian territories] certainly resemble aspects of apartheid." Dugard asked: "Can it seriously be denied that the purpose [...] is to establish and maintain domination by one racial group (Jews) over another racial group (Palestinians) and systematically oppressing them?"John Dugard, (Advance Edited Version), United Nations Human Rights Council, 29 January 2007. In October 2010, Richard A. Falk reported to the General Assembly Third Committee that "the nature of the occupation as of 2010 substantiates earlier allegations of colonialism and apartheid in evidence and law to a greater extent than was the case even three years ago." Falk called it a "cumulative process" and said "the longer it continues...the more serious is the abridgment of fundamental Palestinian rights."
Israeli Defense Minister and former prime minister Ehud Barak said in 2010: "As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."