Is Israel an apartheid state?
By The Zionism-Lite Project, 2024-09-08
Welcome to the first piece in our series called "simple questions, simple answers" where we take hot-button claims and answer them as simple as we can.
Question: Is Israel an apartheid state?
Short answer: No and yes.
Longer answer: Israel's governing system has two separate systems in place depending on the region of Israel you are in, some regions are widely considered to have apartheid characteristics, while regions others do not.
In Israel, within the 1967 armistice lines, both Jews and Arabs are citizens of Israel with arguably equal rights and freedoms. While there is discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel, it generally isn't argued that this meets the threshold of an apartheid system.
The situation is dramatically different in the occupied territories consisting of the West Bank and Gaza (called Judea and Samaria by Israel). In this region of Israel, only Jewish residents are citizens of Israel, and thus have full rights, while the majority demographic of non-Jews (e.g., Palestinians) are not citizens of Israel, nor of any country, and they have considerably fewer rights.
Palestinians in the occupied territories are not offered Israeli citizenship because it would shift the percentage of non-Jewish Arab citizens in Israel from 20% to near 50%, thus threatening Israel as a Jewish state.
The plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories is widely documented to consist of considerable discrimination and hardship in most aspects of their lives. This is best documented in two reports from prominent human rights groups:
If the occupation were to end, and thus allow for a two-state solution to arise, Israel would cease to have regions of its country exhibiting the characteristics of apartheid.
Really good deep background on West Bank Israeli settlements can be found here at the Israel Policy Forum.