Israel is not an apartheid state.

Apartheid is not a slogan. It is a crime against humanity defined under international law as an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, maintained through inhumane acts with the intent to maintain that regime. Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people wherever they live meets this legal definition.

Apartheid systems rely on the same logic: divide, discriminate, and repress. Israel is no exception. Israel's discriminatory laws control everything from land and movement to political rights. Palestinians are deliberately fragmented and governed by different rules depending on where they live, while any resistance to that system is met with systematic repression.

Apartheid is inscribed into Israeli law. Since 1948, Israel has built a legal infrastructure to sustain its settler-colonial regime. Laws from the 1950s, such as the Law of Return and the Absentee Property Law, grant any Jewish person the right to nationality and settlement while denying Palestinians the right to return and enabling the confiscation of their land and property. Today, more than 65 laws discriminate against Palestinians in land access, housing, and political life. The 2018 Nation-State Law constitutionally states that "the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people."

Israel's apartheid depends on keeping the Palestinian people divided. In the West Bank, they live under military occupation, surrounded by settlements and checkpoints. In Gaza, they are confined under occupation and blockade. In Jerusalem, Palestinians endure precarious residency status that can be arbitrarily revoked. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship face systemic discrimination. Meanwhile, millions of refugees remain in exile, denied the right of return. Each group is governed differently, but all are denied the collective right to self-determination.

Israel enforces separate legal systems based on ethnicity. In the West Bank, for example, Palestinians live under military law, facing daily military raids, home demolitions, arbitrary detention, and denial of basic services, while Jewish settlers live under Israeli civil law and terrorize Palestinians and steal their land with full state protection. What word describes this, if not apartheid?

Palestinians have long analyzed Israel's apartheid as a tool of the broader Zionist settler-colonial regime. In recent years, countries such as Namibia and South Africa have recognized Israel's policies as apartheid. At the UN level, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and UN Special Rapporteurs have concluded that Israel maintains a system of apartheid. Major international and Israeli human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem, have reached similar conclusions.

Veterans of South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle, including Desmond Tutu and Ronnie Kasrils, have repeatedly said that Israel's apartheid system of segregation and control resembles, and in some respects exceeds, the apartheid they fought against. If anyone knows what apartheid looks like, it is those who spent their lives fighting it.