Yes, Israel is an Apartheid state

US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aka AOC hit a nerve from a couple of two days ago when she tweeted that “Apartheid states are not democracies” hinting out to Israel without naming it.

Apartheid states aren’t democracies.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 15, 2021

The tweet went viral, and the US media did not like that much and the crazy woman screaming online card was pulled for the young Congresswoman from New York, but it did not intimidate her.

So are the extensively researched, painstaking conclusions from the UN, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem (among the largest human rights orgs in the world and in Israel) considered “outbursts” too?

Or is that just a descriptor MSN reserves for the women legislators quoting them? https://t.co/i0c0M3OjGe

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 16, 2021

And yes, Israel is an apartheid state whether you support it or not, it is an apartheid state.

For decades Israel positioned itself as the oasis of democracy in the Middle East full of Arab dictatorships. What helped this perception to be enforced two facts: The Middle East has been ruled so far by dictatorships and Israel has a democracy that enjoyed and is limited to its Jewish citizens only.

This Israeli democracy is too flawed by another fact that has been hidden too long from the world but Arabs especially Palestinians know very well: It is an apartheid occupation state.

Palestinians and Israeli activists protest a plan by the Israeli government
to annex parts of the West Bank, at the Almog Junction
near Jericho in the West Bank on June 27, 2020 "UPI"

Before Human Rights Watch publishes its report on Israel as an apartheid state, Palestinians knew that fact too long especially the Palestinians living in the Greenline aka the 1948 borders and there is a lot of damning evidence that supports this.

By facts and by numbers in 2019 according to Palestinian activists, there are 6.6 million Jewish Israelis who are free to live through Israel and most of the West Bank.

On the other hand, there are 1.6 million Palestinians who are officially citizens of Israel “Living in the 1948 borders” and can vote but barred by the Israeli government and its committees from living in 68% of the towns in Israel!!

There are 0.3 million Palestinians living in East Jerusalem which is according to international law and UN security council resolutions an occupied territory since 1967 that Israel must withdraw from immediately.

Those Palestinians have residency permit from Israel which occupied their land. They do not vote, and Israel may revoke their residency if living outside of Jerusalem. In other words, those Jerusalemites are stateless.

It may also revoke their residency and kick them out of their houses legally to give it to the Jewish settlers as in the case of Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood.

Sheikh Jarrah houses owned by Palestinians legally are already confiscated and given to Jewish settlers according to discriminatory law by the admission of Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum who told the New York Times from ten days ago that Laws favour Jews because it is a Jewish state and “it is here to protect the Jewish people” !!

"Visualizing Palestine project"

There are 2.9 million Palestinians living in West Bank which was also occupied by Israel in 1967. Currently, it is under the control of the very weak superficial Palestinian authority aka PLO after the Oslo agreement, but it is superficial weak control.

Those 2.9 million Palestinians are barred by Israel from all but only 38% of the West Bank.

Despite international laws, agreements UN Security Council resolutions, Israel continue to build illegal settlements for Jewish settlers.

During the Trump administration, the annexation of the West Bank to Israel once again was brought up. It was adjourned reportedly after the Abraham accords with UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan in 2020.

There are 1.9 million Palestinians living in the Gaza sector which has been under a complete besiege from Israel since 2007.

Officially the Palestinians in Gaza can live anywhere in Palestine. Their only exists are the Karm Abu Salem crossing with Israel which is inhuman and the Rafah crossing with Egypt.

Due to the political issues in Egypt especially the terrorist attacks in North Sinai after 2013, the Rafah crossing was closed and was only opened for humanitarian conditions from time to time but last February it was reopened as a gesture from the Egyptian administrations to the Palestinian factions in Gaza after reaching a deal for reconciliation and elections with other factions in the West Bank.

Now as Israel currently controls officially 90% of Historical Palestine, Palestinians only control 10% of it “West Bank and Gaza” and it is also limited control.

Israel controls all Palestinian border crossings. Israel also controls all the Palestinian airspace and telecommunications.

Israel controls the Palestinian natural resources as well.

Let’s take, for example, the Water supplies in Gaza and West Bank.

West Bank has got the mountain aquifer and despite the agreements with the Palestinian authority officially in the 1990s, Israel takes over 80% of the aquifer water leaving the rest to the Palestinians according to Palestinian activists and human rights organizations.

The Israeli government denies this of course but reality begs to differ as water theft there is increasing with the increase of the illegal Jewish settlements.

You must know that Israel also controls the major water supply companies in the region.

Also, since 1967, Palestinians are not allowed to dig wells in the West Bank since the year 1967.

Israel does not allow water to be transferred from the West Bank to Gaza.

Visualizing Palestine Project

Gaza has got one freshwater resource, the coastal aquifer which can’t meet the needs and demands of the Population and is contaminated by sewage and sea infiltration according to Amnesty International.

Now water is essential for life and for development especially for agriculture and you measure how the Palestinian economic losses due to those discriminatory policies. 

The segregated road system
by Visualizing Palestine

Even the roads are segregated, yes segregated based on the colour of the license plate of your car whether you are Israeli or Palestinians and there are certain roads for Israelis alone while they are not accessible to Palestinians. 

Palestinians can drive freely in Gaza and West Bank “Some parts in the West Bank are restricted for Palestinians”.

Palestinians cannot drive to see and visit Al-Quds or East Jerusalem. Grandmas in the West Bank barred from seeing the Mediterranean for decades.

This map from Visualizing Palestine explains a lot.

In 2019, Israel inaugurated a highway "Route 4370" in the West Bank that officially segregates between Israelis and Palestinians using a huge wall. 

Speaking about walls, it seems that the world is okay with the Great Segregation wall built by the Israeli government allegedly to protect its people from the Palestinian in the West Bank. 

That wall isolates nearly 9% of the land and 25,000 Palestinians from the rest of the West Bank. Once again Israel violated the international laws according to the UN with that wall. 

Palestinians in the West Bank “Area C” cannot build homes except by a hard-to-get permit. Area C, which is under Israeli control is about 60% of the West Bank.

The Same thing is for Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

A photo for Segregated route 4370 in Occupied West Bank 
"AP" 

I will not speak about the freedom of expression and protests in the West Bank or Jerusalem or the arbitrary arrests and detentions.

I will not even speak about the Palestinian refugees and how they can’t even come and visit their land they are forced to leave like an American Jew who is born in the United States.

In July 2018, Israel passed its new "nation-state law" which actually officially legitimized Israel as a state of apartheid according to law. 

Can You imagine this for one second in the 21st century !? 

It is like Jim Crow laws 2.0.

Those policies and laws we know as Arabs meant to minimize the Palestinian control on the land in order to maximize the Israeli Zionist control on it.

Those systematic policies meant to make life hard for the Palestinians remaining in the land in order to leave it but they won’t because this is their land, their country and their nation.

This classification of Palestinians in their ancestral land and how they are barred from their fundamental rights related to freedom of movement and living because of their nationality or rather race as they are mostly referred to as Arabs in the Israeli society is the essence of the apartheid state’s definition.

According to the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Crime Court, the crime of apartheid is committed in the context of 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.

A protester carries a sign during a protest by Palestinian, Israeli,
&foreign protesters against Route 4370, in the West Bank in  January 2019.
"AFP"

Now I want you to read what I mentioned above and see if it fit the definition of an apartheid state or not.

Human Rights Watch and Israeli Based B'Tselem Human rights organization published a 200-pages report on how Israel is an apartheid state in details.

You must read it to know that neither AOC nor those angry Arabs who have been saying this for years are lying.

I want you to read and if you cannot then read its summary on Twitter by one of the men who participated in its research for two years, HRW Palestine and Israel director Omar Shakir

Israeli politicians and intellectuals said before that their country is an apartheid state.

In 2007, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel was on its way to becoming an apartheid state if the two-state solution failed.

In 2010, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said it and repeated it in 2017. In 2015 former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan accused Netanyahu of leading the country to an apartheid state.

It is worth mentioning that those names I recounted are not the Gandhis of the Israeli society, on the contrary, all three are followed by war crimes charges in addition to moral and financial corruption in the case of Barak and Olmert so for them to warn of this is like the bar it is low and you can’t ignore that.

In 1968, Israeli scientist and intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote a very controversial article called “The Territories” predicting then the future of Israel now realistically speaking despite the echoes of racism.

Here are excerpts of it

Our real problem is not the territory but rather the population of about a million and a half Arabs who live in it and over whom we must rule.  Inclusion of these Arabs (in addition to the half a million who are citizens of the state) in the area under our rule will affect the liquidation of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and bring about catastrophe for the Jewish people as a whole; it will undermine the social structure that we have created in the state and cause the corruption of individuals, both Jew and Arab.

Rule over the occupied territories would have social repercussions.  After a few years, there would be no Jewish workers or Jewish farmers.  The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police.

A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions.  The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel.

The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other.  There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governours, resemble their colleagues in other nations.

Out of concern for the Jewish people and their state, we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population of one and a half million Arabs.

As you can see Leibowitz believed that Israel should withdraw from the land it occupied in 1967 and yes you can see it is not really for moral reasons but rather fear on that Jewish state to the level that he even neglected that there are Arab citizens living in the Greenline aka 1948’s Israel’s borders.

By the way, a little historical fact: Israel was one of the few countries that maintained its relations with the South African apartheid regime during the international boycott it faced.

The main source of information in this long post is Visualizing Palestine Project.