What is an apartheid state? And why do I think Israel is a country where the crime of apartheid is being committed? More importantly, why do I think that an apartheid state is necessarily doomed to extinction?

The United Nations had convened an international meeting to define the crime of apartheid and draft a treaty to be signed by the member nations in 1973; its work resulted in an international law on July 18, 1976, which defines that crime in 386 words. In addition to the "Apartheid Convention,” the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court created an international mechanism to go after the genociders like those in Rwanda, Darfur-Sudan, Central Africa, Mali, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Simply put, "apartheid” is a native South African language (Afrikaans) word meaning "apartness,” and it was used to apply to the system of racial segregation in place in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. It was derived from the French term "mettre à part” (literally, setting apart). The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (ICSPCA) based its definition of the crime of racial segregation for political purposes on that term because, by then, it had become the symbolic word in the South Africans’ historic struggle to overcome the white supremacist regime. Amid growing fears of racial civil war, white President F. W. de Klerk released South African leader Nelson Mandela and negotiated a peaceful end to apartheid, which resulted in the 1994 multiracial general election in which Mandela led the African National Congress to victory and became president.

Case of Israeli apartheid

Since the apartheid regime in South Africa had multiracial elections, Israel denies (in a website adorned with an image of an Arab woman casting her vote in an apparently Israeli election) being an apartheid state, stating some constitutional and legal documents that declare all Israeli citizens are equal regardless of religion, race or sex. However, apartheid does not only mean denial of voting rights. International law also prohibits segregation, discrimination, racism/racialism, separatism and prejudice. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) published a document titled "Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem” on July 19, 2024, which delineates all the reasons to consider Israel an apartheid state. We don’t have to enumerate all the actions mentioned in ICSPCA’s 386-word definition. We only have to keep in mind that, "Apartheid is a policy that is founded on the idea of separating people based on racial, ethnic or religious criteria.”

It is the case that some Muslims and Christians vote in some Israeli elections, but Israel’s Zionist founders and almost all the governments since then have committed each and every item in the Apartheid Convention. The crime of apartheid includes the denial to a member or members of a group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person; the infliction upon them serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment; deliberate imposition on them of living conditions calculated to cause physical destruction; any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of people, by denying basic human rights and freedoms, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

The world’s top war crimes court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), issued warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for several crimes they committed against humanity. For instance, Netanyahu and his government’s intentional depriving Gazans of food and directing attacks against civilians is a new act of apartheid that the ICJ is about to add in its arrest warrant for Netanyahu and several other members of his Cabinet.

Why genocide is happening

Dan Steinbock, an internationally renowned expert on the multipolar world economy and the founder of the global consultancy Difference Group, and served in the India China America Institute, the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies and the EU Center in Singapore, in his new book titled "The Fall of Israel-The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy and Military," explains that Israel’s response to several Palestinian militant groups’ coordinated offensive against the Israeli towns and settlements, Gaza border crossings and adjacent military installations on Oct. 7, 2023, and it war since then on the civilian Palestinians is an act of apartheid according to the ICSPCA’s definition.

"Why would tens of thousands of women, children and the elderly have to die ... Why would the United States, Israel’s powerful military ally, not intervene to ensure at least a semblance of proportionality? Why would the European Union, so proud of upholding 'human rights' elsewhere, tacitly permit the carnage? And why would the international community proclaim, 'the whole world is watching,' while looking the other way?”, Steinbock asks.

"Because,” professor John Mearsheimer says, "Israel is in deep trouble at home and abroad since it has become an apartheid state that is executing a genocide in Gaza.” Mearsheimer, the pioneer of "offensive realism” and co-author of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," recommends strategist and author Steinbock’s book "The Fall of Israel" to anyone who wants to understand the causes and the evolution of the disastrous path that Israel is on.

Ilan Pappe, the director of European Center for Palestine Studies at Exeter University, and author of "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," also finds Steinbock’s book as a comprehensive and incisive answer to the question of how Israel became a menace to the Palestinians, the region and, no less important, to itself. Pappe says Israel’s downfall is approaching, "But on the way, it wreaks havoc and destruction; this is the picture world leaders must be aware of and challenge before it is too late.”

The crime of apartheid has always brought the collapse of the criminal; since it is usually committed by governments (and supported by many in that nation), the least seems to be a regime change to a democratic society and punishment of those who took measures, including legislative actions based on membership in a racial or religious group.

South Africa, Myanmar, Soviet Union, Sudan and the United States had "apartheid” phases in their history and they had to resort to major "regime change” episodes. Despite its Civil War and its long history of legal battles in the Congress, American society is still blamed for housing discrimination, residential segregation and disproportionate incarceration of African Americans as "a form of apartheid unlike any the world has ever seen.”

But even in South Africa, where they even coined a name for their segregation, we did not see a murderous apartheid as we do today in Israel.

Institutionalized discrimination, occupation

The Zionist founders of Israel institutionalized segregation and discrimination in the settler-occupied territories and in the land that the U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine gave to Jewish migrants. They not only stole the whole process at the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), but long before the creation of UNSCOP, long before the Mandate System the British established after it defeated the Ottoman Empire and occupied Palestine, the Zionists, in particular former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, created four different plans to occupy the whole Palestine and of deprive Arabs of their homes, lands, property and other possessions. Zionists viewed the acceptance of the U.N. Partition Plan as a tactical step and a stepping stone to future territorial expansion over all of Palestine.

The implementation of their heinous strategy required an inhuman firmness not to accept indigenous people as human beings. Their Plan C (the Gimel Plan, or the Elimelech Plan) clearly spelled out these actions in 1937 (11 years before the U.N. Partition Resolution): Killing the Palestinian political leadership, officers and officials (in the Mandatory system), Palestinian activists and their financial supporters; damaging Palestinian transportation, the sources of Palestinian livelihoods: water wells, mills, etc.; attacking and destroying nearby Palestinian settlements and villages.

Zionists had all the information they needed in what they called "the village files,” which had been compiled since 1901: lists of leaders, activists, "potential human targets", the precise layout of villages and so on.

That scale of satanic evilness (in Hebrew, "shaetani") could not be possible within the boundaries of Judaism as defined in the Torah or the Talmud. One needed an ideology. It could not be simply to "establish a national home for the Jewish people secured by public law.” It should be something that all those prominent Jews, who supported the idea of Jewish Homeland, like Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Primo Levi, Marek Edelman, Isaac Asimov, Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Richard Cohen and Richard Falk vehemently opposed the way Israel was created. Among them are the former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, columnists, political scientists, novelists, and even the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw uprising and Auschwitz survivors!

That ideology has created not a "Home for the Jew” but a hell for them, and for that reason, it is going to where the other apartheid states have gone. It will be replaced by a country. Its name will not be "Israel." The reason for this is quite obvious: Palestine was the accepted geographic designation for the territory that became the British Mandate of Palestine during the 1920s. "Palestine” is easily found in British, European and Ottoman documents long predating the First Zionist Congress convened in 1897.