So Is it Apartheid?

 The answer is no, but if we're being honest with ourselves, it's not much better...

On the one hand, there is a huge Israeli Arab population, roughly two million, who live in Israel with unimpeded freedom of movement, rights to vote and work, and, in principle, full freedom of opportunity and equality before the law. To call what happens in Israel itself apartheid is a scandal.

On the other hand, the difference between apartheid states and what happens in 'the territories' is not particularly large. It is ideologically very different from apartheid, but it is not particularly different in effect.

On still another hand, blame for that effect should be shared between the Israeli and Palestinian governments together.

On the one hand, Palestinians have the inability to move, that's the fault of Israel, on the other hand, Palestinians have the inability to vote, and that's the fault of Hamas and Fatah.

On the one hand, Israel pulled out of Gaza 20 years ago and has no hand in running it, so at this point what goes on there is mostly the fault of Hamas, including most of what happened in this war. On the other hand, Israel is directly responsible for the West Bank, continually claiming new territory within it and pushing the Palestinian residents into ever smaller areas: that is Israel's fault, and little different from apartheid in effect.

On both hands: the most effective way to solve this issue is through economics. Palestinian economic rights are limited everywhere outside of 'Israel proper', and that's both countries' fault.

It is very different from apartheid in that Israel's policy in the West Bank is not based on principles of racial superiority (which is not to say that millions of Israelis aren't racist - anybody who's lived in Israel knows), it is based on nationalist expansion. It is based on the idea that the Palestinian peoplehood is an impediment to the Israeli nation's security, particularly inconvenient to those Israelis who believe it necessary to have a state stretching from the river to the sea - as though any demarcation can secure the world's most disputed real estate.

For some Israelis, it is based on more than national security. For many religious Israelis, it is also based on the premise that God promised the land of Israel to the Jews. While for many secular Israelis, it is based on the premise that Israel simply should have the entirety of the land and that the claims of Israel matter more than an indigenous population whose presence they dispute. "Arabs admit themselves that the borders of their countries are arbitrary." they always retort. "They have 99.9 percent of the Middle East", so they reason, "let us have our portion."

When the settlement project began, it wasn't necessarily the correct action, but it was morally defensible, and an extremely small experimental project.

1970 was a different world. Jordan was the most negotiable of Israel's mortal enemies, but it was still an enemy next door in wars that put Israel in mortal peril - such existential wars happened in 1948, 1967 and 1973. It was very easy to imagine enemies invading Israeli territory due to unimpeded access across the Jordan river over and over again until Israel fell. But Israel made peace with Jordan in 1994, that peace has lasted and will last for the foreseeable future. The main necessity for the settlement project is thirty years out of date.

However, to single Israel out for expansionism, doing what dozens of other countries continue to do, countries without democracy for even its favored classes: that is something that smells. No country has the right to imperial expansion, but the world pressures its only Jewish state to stop far more than anybody else. Many people believe Israel's conduct is uniquely important to stop because of the US's complicity in it, but ask yourselves, is the United States not more complicit in the misdeeds in still more flagrant human rights violators like China and Saudi Arabia? And is there any way to articulate that point of view without indulging in half-a-dozen antisemitic tropes about invisible Jewish money and power? If it smells like a duck...

It's worth repeating that it's obviously not antisemitic to criticize Israel or resent its actions, but when the focus your animus is against Israel when there are far greater human rights offenders, including among Israel's neighbors, that disproportion should give you pause. The Lebanese Civil War killed 300,000, the Iran-Iraq War 500,000, the Syrian Civil War killed 600,000 and created 12 million refugees, yet none of them got a small percentage the ink or demonstrations of Israel.

A relatively small percentage of people in the West are consciously antisemitic (let's say: 15%?), but a similarly small percentage are consciously racist, yet the vast majority commit all sorts of unconscious bigotries that are residue of the world's previous attitudes.

On the other hand, Israel has violated human rights far more in the last year than it ever has before. In less than a year, the Gaza Health Ministry tabulates Israel killed approximately 40,000 Gazans and displaced nearly the entire population. Leaving aside that the organization is Hamas run, this war is unquestionably highest kill toll of any Israeli war by exponential magnitude. If that total becomes 50,000 by October, then continues for another ten years, it will be easily comparable to any other Middle East war and potentially then some. Before 2024, the highest total was roughly 17,000 in the occupation of South Lebanon, and the first Lebanon war took eighteen years. But then again, Israel was far more provoked in the last year than it's ever been. Realistically, maybe an invasion of Gaza could have been a little less bloody, but it was never going to be remarkably less bloody than it is now.

Brutal as it is, the war in Gaza is a military necessity, at least it was until recently. This war is the fault of Hamas, not Israel. But there is no Hamas-like entity on which you can blame the situation in the West Bank. Fatah, the West Bank's governing party, is a kleptocratic dictatorship who derives its power through corruption and patronage, but it is not a totalitarian death cult trying to get its own citizens killed as a way to alienate Israel from potential allies. What goes on in Gaza is a horror show directed by a government that wants its own people dead. What's going on in the West Bank is, and has been, Israel's responsibility: a drip-by-drip ethnic cleansing. The bulk of it has not been carried out yet, and yet may never be, but the end plan of Israel's powerful right wing is clearly to throw out the Palestinian population from the West Bank to a place to be determined later - to doubt that is to doubt your face has a nose.

On the other hand again, there are plenty of Hamas sympathizers among the West Bank population whom if unchecked could easily elevate Hamas or a similarly extreme organization to a credibly powerful force in the West Bank. You can't blame Israelis for not wanting to take the chance of living among them. As the liberal Israeli historian Benny Morris says: 'there are circumstances in history which justify ethnic cleansing... when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide--the annihilation of your people--I prefer ethnic cleansing."

The reason the 'apartheid' argument has so much power is because South Africa seems like such a success story. The reality of South Africa isn't great, but it's 100x better than a couple dozen African and Asian states where white occupiers conducted similar policies, and modern progressives find it inconvenient to remember the anticolonial dictatorships which followed imperial occupation, dictatorships that sometimes resulted in the murder of millions within a single generation: Nigeria, Ethiopia, Cambodia, many others whose deaths numbered merely in the hundred thousands. The 'Apartheid' accusation assumes that there's a solution by which Palestine would do better under self-determination, while the overwhelming evidence shows Palestine won't. Both Yassir Arafat and Hamas had golden opportunities to prove themselves - literal tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid, but they were not interested in peace, they were not interested in justice, they were interested in pursuing precisely the expansionist, eliminationist wars which they accuse Israel of partaking. There was plenty of death when the world was controlled by the imperial powers, but, generally speaking, not that quickly, and not that deliberately - though with many exceptions. The amount of freedom and security imperialism provided was insultingly small, but humiliation is better than death. There are still worse fates out there than apartheid, and one of them is Hamas.