Israel both is and is not an apartheid state.

There seems to be a deep-rooted problem with calling something what it is, of giving it a label, a description. We can’t call something a war it has to be called a conflict. Squabbles over whether something is a massacre, or a genocide, or a holocaust arise and inevitably we get bogged down in a semantic debate.

Israel is an apartheid state. The issue with giving it this label is that the immediate comparison that comes up is South Africa. Unfortunately, this is a poor comparison and again allows us to bypass the description as detractors can rightly say ‘Israel is nothing like Apartheid South Africa’.

The situation in Israel is not like South Africa, nor is it like any other country in the world. The comparisons to other countries and to other historical regimes fall flat. Israel is not a Nazi state, there is no Holocaust happening. These comparisons both diminish the scope of the Holocaust and paint a very poor picture of the current plight of the Palestinians. The situation in Israel has no useful comparison.

Yet, Israel remains an apartheid state. The 2002 Rome Statute defined apartheid as ‘an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime’.

note: the term "racial discrimination" in this context was further defined as any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

As such, apartheid was declared to be a crime against humanity, with a scope that went far beyond South Africa. While the crime of apartheid is most often associated with the racist policies of South Africa after 1948, the term more generally refers to broad discrimination based policies in any state.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, there are Jewish-only settlements (Israeli Arab citizens are not allowed), separate roads for Israeli and Palestinian citizens, military checkpoints, discriminatory marriage law, use of Palestinians as cheap labour, Palestinian West Bank enclaves, inequities in infrastructure, legal rights, and access to land and resources between Palestinians and Israeli residents in the Israeli-occupied territories.

Some of this is for security reasons and Israel does have a right to ensure the safety of its citizens.

Still, at what point do we call something what it is?

Labeling Israel as an apartheid state does not delegitimize the Israeli state, it delegitimizes the status quo. It does not lessen Israeli claims to land, nor to its existence, nor does this label advocate a single state solution. It just says that 4.5 million people cannot be left out of the discussion.