Israel is not an apartheid state. It’s much worse   

By Seraj Assi

In 2004, during the second intifada, Ronnie Kasrils, a leading member of the African National Congress during the apartheid era and a former government minister, visited the Palestinian territories to assess the effects of the Israeli occupation. He observed:

“This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.”

Two decades later, other international observers agree. In April this year, Human Rights Watch became the latest international rights group to charge Israel with imposing an apartheid rule over Palestinians. In a damning report, the HRW stated:

“Throughout most of this area [historic Palestine], Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy.  In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

Today, about 6.8 million Jewish Israelis occupy over 85% of historic Palestine, while 6.8 million Palestinians are confined to the rest in apartheid-like conditions, either under siege in Gaza, or under occupation in the West Bank, or in a stateless limbo in Jerusalem, or as second-class citizens in Israel, not to mention the six million Palestinian refugees living in exile. (Israel’s Law of Return gives Jews anywhere the right to come and live in Israel and to gain Israeli citizenship, while depriving this right to millions of Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes by Israel.) For decades, Israel has created a segregationist apparatus aimed at uprooting Palestinians and erasing their national existence as a people––a multilayered apartheid system that seeks not only to segregate Palestinians from Jewish settlers, but to divide Palestinians themselves into “West Bankers,” “Gazans,” “Israeli citizens,” “Jerusalemites,” and “refugees.”

And the system has worked, so far. 

Today, about two million Palestinians, most of them refugees, live under siege Gaza, subject to a lawless blockade that has been in place for nearly fifteen years. The UN still defines Gaza as an occupied territory, because Israel still has total control over it, by land, sea, and air. This total control has rendered the tiny Strip a target of Israel’s endless attacks. In its latest campaign of brutal bombing of Gaza this month, Israel killed 219 Palestinians, including more than 60 children, and displaced thousands more, triggering ethnic cleansing and war crimes accusations.

In the West Bank, over two million continue to live in segregated cantons behind Israel’s “apartheid wall” and newly constructed “Apartheid Road,” in towns and cities penned between Jewish settlement blocks and behind a network of segregated roads, security barriers, and military installations. For Palestinians who live there, apartheid signals not merely segregation, but the inhumanity of life under occupation: the beatings, shootings, killings, assassinations, curfews, military checkpoints, house demolitions, forced evictions and deportations, uprooting of trees, mass arrests, extended imprisonments, and detentions without trial.

In Jerusalem, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, nearly 40 percent of the city’s population, live in a stateless limbo, while facing the daily prospect of forced displacement and expulsion. For decades Israel has unilaterally declared Jerusalem its “eternal and unified capital.” Israel continuous claims to exclusive rights over the city has emboldened its settlers population to new violent extremes, while allowing Israel to pursue policies aiming at displacing and dispossessing Palestinians in the city, including a recent attempt to forcibly evict Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood where they have lived for decades.

In Israel, about two million Palestinians continue to live as second class citizens, thanks to an unending series of racist Jewish-only laws, including the notorious Jewish Nation-State law, which officially degrades Palestinian citizens a status inferior to Jewish citizens. Arab disenfranchisement in Israel goes beyond the Nation-State Law. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, counts more than fifty basic laws that disenfranchise and discriminate against Arab citizens. Together, they bear a striking resemblance to the Jim Crow South, where Black political participation was treated as an existential threat. No wonder many Palestinian citizens in Israel view their citizenship as a mere political fiction.

A new chapter of ethnic violence against Palestinians in the country is taking place as we speak. For weeks, in a brutal campaign of collective ethnic retaliation masquerading as “operation law and order,” the Israeli police have been carrying out mass arrests of Palestinian citizens to “settle scores” following massive protests in the country in solidarity with fellow Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza. Meanwhile, Jewish extremists have been marching through Arab streets in Israel, spreading terror and violence, shouting “Death to Arabs,” and attempting lynching of Palestinians, and threating an ethnic civil war between Arabs and Jews. Incited by right-wing politicians, dozens Jewish supremacist groups have taken to social media to openly coordinate direct attacks on Palestinian citizens.

The ongoing violence against Palestinian citizens was not created in a political vacuum. For decades, senior Israeli politicians have portrayed Arab citizens as enemies from within, a demographic time bomb, a fifth-column population, and a legitimate transfer target. The so-called Lieberman Plan, hatched by former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, proposes transferring territory in Israel populated by Arabs to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for territory in the West Bank populated by Israeli settlers. Lieberman has also proposed imposing loyalty tests for the Arab minority, threatening to deny citizenship to those who failed.

Israel’s racist policies towards its Palestinian citizens are rapidly shifting into a system of internal apartheid, where a rapid yet steady process of Judaization in Israel’s so-called mixed cities has rendered Arab-Jewish coexistence a mere fantasy.

The brutal irony is that labelling Israel’s rule over Palestinians as an apartheid system was not invented by Palestinians and their supporters, but by Israel itself. For decades, Israeli officials have employed the Hebrew term Hafrada (“separation” or “segregation”) to describe Israel’s governing policy in the West Bank and Gaza, and even inside Israel itself, which involves keeping Palestinians apart from both the Israeli population and the Jewish settler community in the occupied Palestinian territories. The so-called West Bank Barrier, known in Hebrew as “Gader Ha-Hafrada” (which translates as the “Separation Fence,” or indeed the “Apartheid Wall”), was built in accordance with this Hafrada vision. The wall, which runs deep into Palestinian lands, displacing Palestinian communities and cutting off their towns and villages from one another, has created a two-tiered system that provides full constitutional rights and privileges to Israeli settlers while depriving Palestinians of basic human rights.

It’s no surprise, then, that Israel supported apartheid South Africa for decades. But history teaches us that apartheid regimes are untenable and unsustainable, however long they may linger. The South African anti-apartheid movement evolved over three decades, building on massive popular and grassroot resistance, international solidarity, boycott movements and sanction campaigns––perhaps an inspiring precursor of what we’re witnessing in Palestine today.

 * The original version of this article was published in May 2021. 

Seraj Assi is the author of The History and Politics of the Bedouin. He writes for Jacobin and Haaretz.