the israeli incorporation regime99 of one “ethnic” or “racial” group over another. Resulting from the apartheid structure of the Israeli legal and political regime is a dynamic where, in principle, Israel enables its Palestinian citizens to engage in public economic, political, cultural and social life, but it does not offer equality. Instead, through apartheid policies and practices the state ensures Jewish ascendancy in all areas, actively elevating their symbolic, structural, and political presence. Israel permits its Palestinian-Arab citizens to exercise basic rights, however limited, yet these rights are funnelled through apartheid policies of domination and control that guarantee continued Arab marginality in all social, political and legal spheres (Ghanem 2001). The discourse of Israeli crimes of apartheid is far from novel. Surfacing most acutely in the 1980s and 1990s, a range of academic and activist publications put forth the argument that the political regime both inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is one of apartheid.118 Heavily popularized since the 1940s, the Afrikaans word “apartheid” means to “separate,” “detach” or “keep apart,” and is historically and politically associated with the practices and policies of the South African Apartheid regime from 1948–1994.119 Now, it is important to note that both conceptually and practically, apartheid functions differently from racism. In a sequel to his seminal book Israel: An Apartheid State (1987), Palestinian-Hebrew scholar Uri Davis’s Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within (2003) effectively outlines this distinction: 118 Pre-Oslo comparisons include, but are not limited to: Benvenisti (1984) who states that the Gaza Strip “was quickly becoming the Soweto of the State of Israel”; and prominently, Davis (1987). In 1961, South African Prime Minister Henrik Verwoerd said that the Zionists “… took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state” (see Kovel, 2007, 211); and finally, Goodman writes that in an interview on Israeli radio after the 1967 war, David Ben-Gurion acknowledged that Israel would develop into an apartheid state should it fail to “rid itself of the territories and their Arab population as soon as possible” (see 2005, 77–79). After the 1990s when Israel introduced a multifaceted regime of control through permits, checkpoints, ID cards, military orders, closures and road blocks, the literature on Israel and the apartheid analogy has increased. This comparison has since intensified with the building of the apartheid wall in the West Bank in 2002. See, among others, Carey (2001); Bishara (2002); Farsakh (2005); Tilley (2005); Abunimah (2006); Carter (2006); and Lentin (2008). 119 Throughout this book, and in tune with other scholarly contributions on this topic, the term apartheid as legally enshrined policies and practices of racial discrimination will be written with a lower-case ‘a’, whereas the historical experience of the Apartheid regime in South Africa will be written with a capital ‘A’. This will allow us to distinguish between apartheid as an international crime that can be committed by any state, and its historical realization in South Africa between the years 1948–1994.