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chapter two
Racism is not apartheid and apartheid is not racism. Apartheid is a political
system where racism is regulated in law through acts of parliament. Racism
is prevalent in all states, including liberal democratic states such as the current western liberal democracies. But in liberal democratic states, those victimized by racism have legal recourse to seek the protection of the law under
a democratic constitution, namely a constitution that embodies the values
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In an apartheid state, on the
other hand, the state enforces racism through the legal system, criminalizes
expressions of humanitarian concern and obligates the citizenry through
acts of parliament to make racist choices and perform racist behaviour.120
The intellectual and political awareness that Israel is an apartheid state
and challenges to projections of the Jewish state as ‘the only democracy in
the Middle East’ have existed for many years among most post- and antiZionists in Israel and abroad. However, though numerous legal, political
and historical comparisons between the State of Israel and Apartheid
South Africa have been published, few have provided a systematic legal
account of the apartheid regime in Israel that includes the whole of
Palestinian society, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in
Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian refugee population. This point was raised by Karine Mac Allister in “The Applicability
of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel,” where she attempts to provide a legal
framework that considers the apartheid policies and practices of the
Israeli regime against the whole of the Palestinian nation on both sides of
the ‘Green Line’.
Mac Allister writes that “wherever they are and whatever their legal
status … Palestinian citizens of Israel, refugees, and those in the OPT
are victims, albeit in different ways, of Israel’s regime of apartheid.”121
That said, and Mac Allister and others have pointed to this, when discuss
ing Israeli crimes of apartheid we are not negating the fact that Israel’s
120 Davis 2003, 37. An important source for students of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict,
Davis’s 2003 follow-up to his outline of Israeli apartheid, written over a decade prior, laid
out, in great detail, Israel’s blatant violations of international law and most United Nations
General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, and goes on to challenge Israel’s popular and mainstream characterizations in Western academic and political spaces as the ‘only
democracy in the Middle East’. Indeed, Davis’s contribution here is key for any challenge to
liberal-Zionist defences of the Zionist incorporation regime. Also, as an extension of his
anti-Zionist politics, Davis identifies himself as as a ‘Palestinian-Hebrew’ national of Jewish
origin.
121 Karine Mac Allister, “Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel,” Badil Resource
Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, al-Majdal, no. 38 (Summer 2008),
http://www.badil.org/en/al-majdal/item/72-applicability-of-the-crime-of-apartheid
-to-israel.
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