US politicians like to say that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”. But Israel is not a democracy. Not by a long shot. In fact, it functions as one of the most undemocratic countries in the world.

Israel exercises total control over the West Bank and Gaza. These territories have no actual sovereignty. The West Bank (with 3 million people) is subjected to military occupation, which is illegal under international law. As for Gaza (2.1 million people), it is also under military occupation, according to international law, as Israel maintains direct control over its airspace, its coast, and its land borders, controlling everything that goes in and out.

The 5.1 million people living in these territories do not have the right to vote over the government that determines virtually everything about their lives. And their basic human rights under international law are unenforced and regularly violated with impunity.

On top of this, there are another 6 million Palestinians who have been forcibly removed from Palestine and who exist as stateless refugees with no rights within their homeland whatsoever.

So what’s going on here? Well, apartheid.

Many people get hung up on the apartheid analogy because when they think of apartheid in South Africa, they think of segregation and unequal rights among citizens, and they say this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Israel (it does). But this is known as “petty apartheid”, and it was only a minor part of the apartheid system in South Africa. The real action — “grand apartheid” — had much bigger designs, and this is where the analogy is strongest.

Grand apartheid was the process of reshaping territorial boundaries and citizenship. The idea was to forcibly remove the African population from the majority of the country’s territory — literally bulldozing their houses and loading them into trucks — and dump them onto tiny, fragmented chunks of land called Bantustans. Then you put a border around each Bantustan, give people “citizenship” there, give it a flag and a coat of arms, and set up a “parliament”.

Taking this approach — ethnic cleansing — the apartheid regime shoved most of the African population into enclaves comprising just 13% of the land and denied them any rights of citizenship within the “white” territory. White people justified this by saying Africans had rights in their own “countries”, the Bantustans. But, of course, the Bantustans were fake. They had no real power, no economic sovereignty, no independent militaries, etc. The apartheid regime controlled their borders and trade.

Israel was founded in 1948, the very same year the apartheid regime was established in South Africa, and has followed the grand apartheid playbook, chapter, and verse.

The Nakba began the process of shoving Palestinians off their land, out of their homes, and either:

(a) into the enclaves that today form Gaza and the West Bank, where 5.1 million people live within borders Israel controls, or
(b) into neighbouring countries, where 6 million Palestinians live as stateless refugees. The process of ethnic cleansing continues today.

The result?

More than 11 million people are hived off from the realm of rights within their own territory and denied the right to vote for the government that controls it.

Minority rule by Zionists is declared “democratic” only because it excludes the majority of the population. Calling this democracy is an extraordinary farce. There is no democracy within apartheid. Apartheid must be abolished. The 11 million must be free to return to their land and homes and must enjoy the full rights of citizenship within a fully democratic polity, including the right to vote for the people who govern them.

It also bears noting that, while US liberal discourse implies that they want to see democracy in the Middle East, nothing could be further from the truth. For the past 60 years, the US has propped up authoritarian regimes in the region in order to maintain its interests and has sought to crush liberation movements struggling for democracy. As Samir Amin pointed out, the US and Israel actively reject genuine democracies in the region because democratic Arab countries would quickly tip the balance of power in favour of the Palestinian cause.

The claim that Israel is an apartheid state is not a fringe opinion. Every major human rights organisation has taken this position, from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch. And in 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an opinion stating that Israel is in violation of Article 3 of CERD, which condemns and prohibits “racial segregation and apartheid”.

Israel is an apartheid regime. Apartheid is recognized as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and it must be abolished.

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