Over the years, a charge that has repeatedly been levelled at the state of Israel is that is operates an “apartheid state”. And it’s easy to see why Israel’s opponents return to this argument.
The country’s regime of institutionalised separation and discrimination in occupied Palestine appears to meet the definition of apartheid under international law as set out by the United Nations in 1976. The international convention on the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid defines the system as “similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa”.
This, it says, amounts to “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”.
