Does Israel meet the legal definition of apartheid?

“Israel is an apartheid state.”

Apartheid is a specific crime in international law: an institutionalized regime of racial domination. Israel does not fit it. Its two million Arab citizens (a fifth of the country) vote, run for office, sit in the Knesset, practice law and medicine, and serve as judges, including on the Supreme Court that overrules the government. An Arab party joined the governing coalition in 2021. That is the opposite of a racial caste system. The crime also requires distinct races: Jews and Arabs are not races, and a majority of Israeli Jews are themselves of Middle Eastern descent, so there is no “white over brown” line to draw. Veterans of the real thing, like the South African anti-apartheid journalist Benjamin Pogrund, reject the label outright. Even the UN’s own Secretary-General rejected the charge when it reached the UN system: António Guterres disavowed the 2017 ESCWA report accusing Israel of apartheid and had it pulled from the UN’s website within days. The genuinely hard case, the West Bank, is a military occupation born of an unresolved war and repeatedly rejected peace offers, where Palestinians vote in their own elections, not a race law imposed on the citizens of one state.

Origin of the claim

The word predates the modern conflict. It comes from Afrikaans for “apartness,” the name South Africa’s National Party gave its own legal system after 1948: the Population Registration Act, the Group Areas Act, and the pass laws that classified every person by race and controlled where they could live, work, and vote, or whether they could vote at all. Applying that word to Israel has a specific lineage. The Soviet-sponsored 1975 UN General Assembly resolution declaring “Zionism is a form of racism” supplied the premise, though it never used the word “apartheid” and was revoked by the UN itself in 1991 by Resolution 46/86. The label itself gained currency through Israeli academic Uri Davis’s 1987 book “Israel: An Apartheid State,” was amplified by the 2001 Durban conference and by former US President Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” and reached the UN system directly in 2017, when a report for the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, drafted by American academic Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, formally accused Israel of the crime. Then-UN Secretary-General António Guterres rejected the report outright and had it withdrawn from the UN’s website within days, a rebuke UN Watch has documented.

The claim, examined

The strongest version of the charge does not point at Tel Aviv. It points at the West Bank, where a two-tier legal system genuinely exists: Jewish settlers there are Israeli citizens tried in Israeli civilian courts, while Palestinian residents fall under military law administered by the same occupying army. Roads, checkpoints, and travel permits create real, daily friction that critics call a system of control organized around ethnicity.

The documented record complicates that reading in three specific ways. First, the legal definition itself, set out in the 1973 Apartheid Convention and in Article 7 of the Rome Statute, requires an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another,” with intent to maintain that domination permanently. Jews and Palestinian Arabs are not separate races; both are Middle Eastern peoples, and genetic studies find Jewish and neighboring Levantine populations closely related rather than divided along a colonial “white settler” line. Second, inside Israel’s own borders, the population the slogan claims is oppressed votes, holds cabinet posts, and rules on the bench: the Ra’am party sat in Naftali Bennett’s governing coalition from 2021 to 2022, something no Black South African party ever did under real apartheid. Third, the West Bank’s dual legal system tracks citizenship and the unresolved status of a decades-old war, not race. Under the Oslo Accords, Palestinians in Areas A and B are governed by their own elected Palestinian Authority, with its own police, courts, and, in Area A, full civil control; roughly 40% of West Bank Palestinians already live under a body they themselves elected, a fact the World Bank’s own 2013 review of Area C documents even while criticizing the economic limits Israeli control imposes there.

Who pushes it today

The charge now moves through three overlapping channels. Human rights organizations have formalized it in report form: Human Rights Watch’s 2021 “A Threshold Crossed” and Amnesty International’s 2022 report both apply the term to Israel’s entire system of control over Palestinians, drawing on the same Rome Statute language cited above. UN-affiliated figures carry it into diplomatic settings: Falk’s successor as UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, has repeated the charge in UN Human Rights Council submissions. South Africa itself invoked the apartheid comparison explicitly when it filed its case at the International Court of Justice in December 2023, leaning on its own history to frame the accusation. And the term is now standard vocabulary in the BDS movement, on university campuses, and in some European city councils and church divestment resolutions, usually paired with the related charge of settler colonialism.

The real asymmetries, and why they don’t add up to apartheid

Two things are real. Israel did, for years, maintain some settler-only bypass roads in parts of the West Bank, a specifically criticized practice, most of which were opened to Palestinian traffic over the 2000s though not uniformly. And the differential legal track, civilian courts for settlers, military courts for Palestinians in the same territory, is a genuine asymmetry that international lawyers debate under the separate framework of belligerent occupation law rather than apartheid law, precisely because occupation law assumes the situation is temporary and tied to an unresolved war, not a permanent racial hierarchy. Whether that distinction holds after decades of unresolved occupation is a fair question, and it is a different question from whether the state of Israel itself, inside its own recognized population, runs an apartheid system. On that narrower and more precise legal question, the record is not close.

Two million votes is not apartheid

The occupation creates real hardships and inequalities that deserve honest criticism. But hardship under a contested military occupation is not the legal crime of apartheid, and inside Israel itself, Arab citizens hold the very rights the slogan says they are denied.