Myth: Israel is an apartheid state

Myth

Israel has established an apartheid regime against Arabs.

Putting it in Context

By Alessandro Verdoliva

Fact:

Firstly, it is necessary to clarify from which perspective we intend to analyze this matter. If we consider apartheid as applied to citizens outside of Israel, then we cannot fundamentally speak of apartheid because it presupposes targeting the internal population. Under this external perspective, the specific situation of non-Israeli Palestinians falls under Israeli foreign policy and more specifically under military administration.

If, on the other hand, we want to consider Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as citizens of the State of Israel, then the reasoning would be applicable to domestic policy, and thus a condition of apartheid could be examined. However, this does not occur because, since apartheid is a legal policy based on the distinction of four specific and genealogically traced races, it is unclear to which “race” Palestinians

 

should belong to in virtue of which they would see their rights infringed. It is also unclear how 2 million Arab Israelis could peacefully live their lives if this distinction were racial. In the same Israeli Supreme Court, there are Arab jurists who are native Arabic speakers. Therefore, it seems clear that the racial distinction, underlying the specific internal policy called “apartheid” (historically specific to South Africa and partly Rhodesia), is not applicable to Israel. We are clearly talking about political fantasy. The situation being denounced is not due to the presence of apartheid since it objectively does not exist as it conflicts with both the Israeli legal framework and the observation of 2 million facts, but rather to the stalemate that arose after the Oslo Accords, repeatedly failed in the 2000s following a long series of rejections by Arafat first and Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) later. This stalemate has necessitated the prolongation of military occupation beyond any reasonable term, with all the consequent difficulties for the daily civilian life of Palestinians. The existence of two million ethnic and Muslim Palestinians within the borders of Israel, holding public offices of any magnitude, is by definition incompatible with the definition of apartheid. Apartheid is not a generic term; it denotes a very specific legal condition. Apartheid governed South Africa from 1948, at the hands of the National Party of the Boers, and it involved a dense legal framework based on the distinction of four races. The races under apartheid were whites, including English and Boers, coloreds, Bantu, and Asians. All of this was governed by a dense series of laws, such as the Population Registration Act, Immorality Act, Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, or the Group Areas Act. Conditions like these, needless to say, do not exist in Israel.