Politics
Is Israel's treatment of Palestinians a form of apartheid?
The era of apartheid in South Africa is one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century.
The word itself has become shorthand for systems of oppressive rule around the world — and even before the current war in Gaza unleashed a massive wave of demonstrations, it was an increasingly popular refrain of pro-Palestinian activists.
But does the term apartheid accurately describe how Israel has treated Palestinians?
Here’s a look at the issue, a long-running debate among human rights experts.
What is the origin of the word apartheid?
In 1948, the newly empowered National Party in South Africa instituted a racial hierarchy to ensure dominance of the white descendants of Dutch colonizers. The party named the system apartheid, which in the Afrikaans language means “the state of being separate.”
A litany of laws and regulations enforced rigid divisions among whites, Blacks, Indians and mixed-race “coloreds,” dictating where people could live, work, go to school and even whether they could interact.
At the bottom of the hierarchy was the Black majority, which was relegated to geographically small “townships” away from city centers. Black South Africans were banned from owning property, voting and attending certain schools.
The government did not hesitate to use force to brutally and sometimes lethally repress opposition to the system, which became entrenched as much of the rest of the world was moving away from formal segregation laws and colonialism.
How did the term come to be used outside South Africa?
In 1973, the United Nations established the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.
In doing so, the U.N. broadened the definition of apartheid. No longer just an oppressive system in a single country, it now referred to “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”
Separately, another U.N. convention, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, was used to broaden the word “race,” as contained in the original definition of apartheid, to include ethnicity, descent and national origin.
In 1993, the International Criminal Court reaffirmed apartheid as a crime against humanity and established the possibility of individuals being held responsible.
The United States was among a handful of countries that did not ratify the 1973 convention or other efforts to crack down on apartheid. U.S. officials argued the definitions were weak, and the U.S. has been generally reluctant to join international justice missions for fear its own people would be prosecuted.
How did apartheid come to be associated with Israel?
Israel sided with the United States in not ratifying the convention, in part because it began facing accusations that it was becoming an apartheid state.
Most of the criticism came from Palestinians and others in the Arab world, but some originated from Israel’s own leaders. In 1976, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said the then-nascent right-wing movement that pushed Jewish settlers into what was supposed to be Palestinian land was a “cancer” and an “acute danger” to Israel’s democracy.
He warned that it would lead to apartheid, a specter raised in later years by his successors Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert.
In the last several years, as the Israeli government has moved further to the right, the apartheid label has gained currency among activists, including progressive Jews.
“There can be no democracy with occupation,” Sharon Brous, a prominent Los Angeles rabbi, said in her Yom Kippur sermon last September, addressing the question of whether Israel could fairly be called “an apartheid state.”
If the right-wing Israeli government succeeds in its attempts to strip the judiciary of its power, she said, “it will become increasingly difficult if not impossible to defend Israel from that characterization.”
So is Israel an apartheid state?
After more than two years of research and arduous debate on the question, experts at Human Rights Watch released a 200-plus-page report with an answer to that question.
Citing Israeli officials who stated that they were determined to maintain Jewish Israeli control “over demographics, political power and land,” the organization found that “authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity.”
It concluded that in Gaza and the West Bank — which together are home to 5 million Palestinians — “these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
It did not include Israel proper, where 2 million or so Palestinians are Israeli citizens and make up about a quarter of the country’s population.
Why do rights groups make a distinction for Palestinian citizens of Israel?
In Israel proper, Palestinians are a vast underclass, with higher rates of unemployment and a lower overall standard of living than Jewish Israelis. But they have served in the Israeli parliament and on the Supreme Court and officially have the same legal rights as any citizen.
That is a crucial difference from apartheid, which refers to a codified system of subjugation that goes far beyond other forms of discrimination.
How does that compare to the West Bank?
The situation is much different in the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967. Troops are deployed throughout the territory, where Palestinian officials have only nominal authority.
The hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers who have constructed and occupied villages — in violation of international law — receive protection from the army, move about freely and are subject to an Israeli civilian legal system.
Palestinians, on the other hand, face restrictions on where they can go, lose their land to settlers and routinely fight what they describe as onerous bureaucracy to secure the building permits granted easily to settlers. There are even separate roads for Israelis traveling through the West Bank.
Moreover, a Jewish settler who breaks the law goes to a civilian court and often receives minimal punishment while a Palestinian is sent to a military court often without due process, international and Israeli human rights groups say.
Supporters of Israel resist the apartheid label, arguing that the system is necessary for security reasons.
“The South African system of apartheid was driven by unambiguous racism where people were separated in every aspect of their daily lives on the basis of their skin color,” said Jonathan Harounoff, communications director for the Jewish Institute for National Security in America, a Washington advocacy group.
“In the West Bank, on the other hand, any restrictive policies there in place toward Palestinians are not race- or religion-based. They are purely driven by security concerns as a result of past acts of terrorism that led to loss of Israeli life.”
What about Gaza?
Defenders of Israel say the case against using the apartheid label is even easier to make in the Gaza Strip, because Israel pulled out of the coastal enclave in 2005.
There were too few Jewish settlers in Gaza to justify Israeli occupation, officials said at the time. The withdrawal, which soon left Gaza under the control of the militant group Hamas, freed up more Israel forces to patrol the West Bank.
Rather than occupy Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade on it. With help from Egypt — which usually blocks its sole border crossing with the enclave — Israel uses its military to control land, air and sea access.
But Human Rights Watch and others argue that the blockade itself is a form of apartheid, because it maintains the domination of one ethnic group over another.
What does all of this have to do with the war?
For some pro-Palestinian activists, the word provides context — if not justification — for the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that started the war and killed about 1,200 Israelis. After all, Black South Africans and their supporters used violence on occasion to fight for their freedom.
Israel, however, maintains that the Hamas violence was so extreme, including the rape or sexual abuse of a number of women, along with its taking of more than 200 hostages, that it does nothing to further the cause of Palestinian statehood.
With no clear end in sight, the war is one of the deadliest chapters in a conflict that began eight decades ago. Israel has vowed to continue its retaliatory invasion of Gaza until it destroys Hamas — a campaign that Gaza health authorities say has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians.
When the fighting eventually subsides, the United States wants Palestinians to take the lead in postwar Gaza administration, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will continue its renewed occupation of the impoverished territory for the foreseeable future.
That would be likely to strengthen the argument of those who accuse Israel of being an apartheid state.
What are the long-term prospects for an end to the debate over apartheid?
Kenneth Roth, who was executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022 and oversaw production of the report on apartheid, said that Israeli authorities have long insisted that ending discriminatory policies depended on peace negotiations.
But three decades on, with no real peace process in motion, that explanation “lacked credibility,” Roth said.
Israel has continued to support Jewish settlements in the West Bank, constructing “bypass roads” accessible only to the settlers and expanding military checkpoints — moves that Roth and others say all but eliminated the possibility that the West Bank could someday become an independent, contiguous Palestinian state.
“What’s left is Swiss cheese,” he said.
Experts said Israel will be left with only two ways to shed the apartheid label: allowing the creation of a Palestinian state or granting equal rights to all Palestinians under its control.
Politics
Mamdani blasts ICE agents, Elon Musk and ‘supremacy’ in America 250 speech ahead of July 4 weekend
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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani took aim at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, Elon Musk and what he described as the “arena of supremacy” in the United States during an immigration-themed America 250 speech on Friday ahead of Fourth of July weekend.
Flanked by eight recently naturalized U.S. citizens, Mamdani invoked the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and America’s history of immigration before turning his rhetoric on elements of today’s U.S. Mamdani also blasted the “world’s first trillionaire” — a milestone Musk achieved with the long-awaited Initial Public Offering (IPO) of SpaceX last month.
“We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more,” Mamdani said, without naming Musk. “We see monopolies that dominate every industry, and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.”
“We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands, those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone. And we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few,” he added.
Mamdani, who was sitting at George Washington’s desk during the remarks, also praised the legacy of immigrants, claiming that they have overcome riots “aimed at their very existence,” to create lives in New York.
FETTERMAN WARNS MAMDANI RISKS ‘CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS’ BY VOWING TO DEFY SCOTUS IMMIGRATION RULING
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States of America at City Hall on July 3, 2026. (Anna Connors/Pool via REUTERS)
“Over the years that followed, despite laws enacted by the federal government to bar their entry, despite sweatshop fires that killed hundreds of women, despite riots aimed at their very existence, immigrants made homes here in New York City, and they helped to make New York City,” the mayor said.
“That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness extends to them, too, is no relic of the past. It carried millions of Black Americans north during the Great Migration. It drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the Second World War. It invited countless others from the West Indies and South Asia and West Africa and across the world. And it is what brought my family to this city when I was seven years old,” he continued.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI PRAISED FOR ‘FANTASTIC’ QUESTION-DODGING ON PRESIDENTIAL ELIGIBILITY
Mamdani did not mention his own family’s wealth in the speech. His father was an elite Harvard academic, and his mother and acclaimed film director.
“My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane. Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America, the promise of the beautiful patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals,” he said.
The Statue of Liberty stands in the foreground as Lower Manhattan is viewed at dusk, Sept. 8, 2016, in New York City. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
In his speech, Mamdani blasted those with “power and influence,” who he lamented have written American history.
“There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it. American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free. It is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West. Is why children in faraway lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here. And yet, the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth, that they were anything but exceptional,” Mamdani said. “For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best.”
“It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshiping the wrong gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shuttles, who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants from whom power was something someone else had,” he continued. “We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States of America at City Hall on July 3, 2026. (Anna Connors/Pool via REUTERS)
Mamdani referenced how he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018. Mamdani was born in Uganda in 1991 and moved to New York when he was 7. The mayor is a dual U.S.-Ugandan citizen.
“Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too. You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means,” the mayor said, speaking to the recently naturalized citizens by his side.
“The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy where only a select few are allowed freedom,” Mamdani said. “Where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States of America at City Hall in New York on July 3, 2026. (Anna Connors/Pool via REUTERS)
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Mamdani also claimed ICE were invading New York neighborhoods.
“We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they have lived here or what papers they have as ICE invades our neighborhoods,” he added. “We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling heat to cast their ballots. We see America each time working people demand more not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans.”
“There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain. ‘Love it or leave it,’ they say. But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent,” Mamdani said. “It is every March led under the heavy sun. It is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it.”
Mamdani ended his speech with a rousing call to America’s greatness.
“What power each of us holds to bring America ever closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores. The greatness that for 250 years has been America. Thank you. God bless America. God bless New York City. And happy Fourth of July,” he concluded.
WASHINGTON — Small towns across America had big plans to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial this weekend. Local historical societies scheduled town square readings of the Declaration of Independence, hired bands to play patriotic tunes, organized parades and set up themed baking contests.
But many of their most ambitious plans were scrapped after the Trump administration cut $100 million in federal funding for humanities nonprofits and state councils at the start of its term. The decision severely hampered local planning for America’s 250th anniversary, disrupting history projects, museums and educational programs nationwide.
Instead, the Trump administration funneled tens of millions in federal dollars to Event Strategies, the firm behind Trump’s infamous rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, to organize anniversary events throughout the nation’s capital centered on President Trump.
The result, historians say, has become a centralized, more politicized spectacle, marking the national milestone as a celebration of an imperial presidency rather than a revolution from kingly rule.
The spectacular show that Americans will see features Trump at its center, culminating a year of concerted efforts by the president to put his face on passports and currency, national park passes and government buildings.
Members of the Dance4Life studio in Claymont, Del., prepares to march ahead of the Red, White, & Blue To-Do Pomp & Parade on July 2, 2026, in Philadelphia.
(Al Drago / Getty Images)
Yet, beyond the noise of the nation’s capital, historians and teachers, docents and curators, archivists, tour guides and reenactors have sustained the messy, organic discourse of the American story, less funded but no less vocal in their patriotism.
“The way history has been argued since Trump returned to office has been a reminder that governments and political figures have remarkable power to shape a society’s historical memory,” said David Ekbladh, a history professor at Tufts University and author of “Look at the World: The Rise of an American Globalism in the 1930s.”
Trump’s effort to control the anniversary narrative has reminded Ekbladh of one of George Orwell’s most famous quotes: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
“The administration’s clear signals that it can and will restrict funding to institutions seems to have muted the way many institutions, like museums and universities, have approached the anniversary,” Ekbladh added. “With this said, Trump’s own direct, personal use of the 250th has been less about articulating a clear view of the nation’s history than using the moment itself to keep attention on him.”
The White House has taken a more active role in the festivities than initially planned, setting up its own Freedom 250 project to supplement America250, a bipartisan congressional effort to celebrate the occasion.
Fencing is seen around the Great American State Fair on the National Mall on Thursday.
(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
The Trump administration has directed funding to events centered on the president’s attendance, primarily around Washington, and partnered with conservative organizations such as PragerU and Hillsdale College to present the country’s founding story through a conservative Christian lens.
Historians are in broad agreement that this year’s celebration has garnered far less attention than the bicentennial, marked in 1976, which generated blanket media coverage and widespread national excitement.
Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College and author of “The New Imperial Presidency,” attributed the lack of enthusiasm this time in part due to a more fragmented media landscape than existed 50 years ago, denying the country a “core curriculum” and a shared story.
“I don’t think it’s a lack of patriotism, so much as a determination that no presidential administration should be able to center itself as the focus of that patriotism,” Rudalevige said.
“There’s a lot to celebrate in the text of the declaration. But that’s not where the focus of the Freedom 250 efforts has been,” Rudalevige said. “It would have been interesting to see what the bipartisan America250 initiative could have come up with if its funding and energies had not been diverted.”
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is fenced off in preparation for Fourth of July fireworks.
(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
Trump has scheduled little national travel around the anniversary, visiting North Dakota this week for an event that allowed him to debut a new version of Air Force One, donated by Qatar and outfitted to the president’s tastes. Trump intends to keep the plane after leaving office for his personal use.
The jet will fly over the National Mall alongside the Defense Department’s most impressive equipment on Saturday, before the president delivers a speech in what is forecast to be a blistering heat wave. The evening will end, according to administration officials, with the largest fireworks display in U.S. history.
“The fundamental challenge that we face now is the fight between the historians — people who have been studying the past and who have been thinking about how to tell that story to the public — and government leaders over who gets to control that story,” said Peter Kastor, chair of the history department at Washington University in St. Louis.
“The people who are really on the front lines are museum professionals, the operators of historic sites and schoolteachers,” he said. “They face the responsibility for explaining the past to a general audience on a day-to-day basis, and they are the ones who most often face the backlash from people who want the story to be told differently.”
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Lawmakers on Capitol Hill had split reactions to the Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down President Donald Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship, further allowing children born in the United States to be recognized as U.S. citizens.
“It’s a terrible decision,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital.
“Regulate folks before they come in — in terms of not coming here just to have a baby and leave,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said.
“In terms of the immigration process coming in, there should be regulation. Not that once you’re born here that we’re going to denaturalize you,” he continued.
REPUBLICAN ACCUSES SCOTUS OF BETRAYING US, PUSHES BILL RESTRICTING BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, PREGNANT VISITORS
Rep. Ro Khanna, the U.S. Supreme Court and Rep. Byron Donalds weighed in after the high court rejected President Donald Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship. (Shannon Finney/NBC via Getty Images; Li Rui/Xinhua via Getty Images; Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The case, which left many Republicans and Democrats divided, challenged Trump’s executive order to detach birthright citizenship from the 14th Amendment. Most Democrats who Fox News Digital spoke to argued that if the ruling had gone the other way, it would have been considered unconstitutional.
“I think they got it right,” Rep. Christian Menefee, D-Texas said. “The Supreme Court said that the Constitution says what it says. That if anybody even has a question about what the 14th Amendment says, I think it’s a little embarrassing. So I’m glad they got it right.”
TRUMP SUFFERS MAJOR SUPREME COURT DEFEAT AS JUSTICES UPHOLD BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP
Rep. Christian Menefee (D-TX) speaks onstage during DJ Michael 5000 Watts King’s Day at The Bell Tower on 34th on February 16, 2026 in Houston, Texas. Watts passed away on January 30, 2026 at the age of 52. (Marcus Ingram/Getty Images)
“I believe in the Constitution,” Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said when asked about the ruling.
“The Constitution is the Constitution. If you don’t like the Constitution, you can try to change it,” Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., said. “But honestly, I think we’ve got much bigger problems as a country than Americans trying to live their lives as birthright citizens.”
The 6-3 decision highlights a significant loss for Trump’s immigration agenda as he has criticized birthright citizenship as a “magnet for illegal immigration.”
ICE SURGES ENFORCEMENT, MAKES 10,000 ARRESTS IN FIVE DAYS AMID SUPREME COURT BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP DECISION
“I think the president has an obsession with immigrants in this country,” Rep. Sarah Elfreth, D-Md., said. “He’s hell bent on making it as uncomfortable as possible. We’ve seen that time and again with ICE, we’ve seen this with an attack on the 14th Amendment .”
Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Samuel Alito were the three to dissent — arguing the 14th Amendment does not guarantee birthright citizenship to all children born to parents who are unlawfully and temporarily in the country. Alito cited that the ruling fails to recognize the rise of “birth tourism,” the concept that foreigners come to America just to give birth, potentially opening the door to national security threats.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., declined to comment on the ruling to Fox News Digital.
“Americans should be happy, because the Constitution means more than one guy’s opinion,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said.
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