They cry ‘apartheid’ while expelling every Jew

The accusation of “apartheid” is not about policy. It is about erasing Israel’s right to exist.

Apartheid South Africa was a single government enforcing a racial caste system under one regime. Black South Africans were stripped of citizenship, voting rights, and basic freedoms—all under a single legal code.

Israel is not remotely comparable. It is one of three rival governments in a region with overlapping claims and disputed borders. Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas each govern different populations with separate legal systems, leadership, and borders.

Roughly one-third of Arabs in the region are Israeli citizens. There are no laws restricting their rights. Arab Israelis vote, serve in the police and military, attend universities, run for office, and sit on the Supreme Court. They participate in every level of public life.

Israel is the last country in the region where mosques, churches, and synagogues all function side by side — and grow in number. Arab citizens in Israel own more real estate today than at any point in history.

However, the other two thirds of the Arab population are citizens of the PA or Hamas. The PA governs five major towns: Nablus, Jericho, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. Gaza was once under PA control — until Hamas took over and launched a war that continues to this day. Both the PA and Hamas have their own legal systems, police forces, and security forces.

Inequality does not come from one state imposing unequal laws — it comes from a long-standing conflict between a multiethnic democracy that invests in all its citizens, and two authoritarian regimes that do not even protect their own.

The PA and Hamas attempt to manufacture inequality — not equality, not coexistence, not a viable state — to increase pressure on Israel. They do this with a sleight of hand, by only allowing Arab families to claim citizenship, and then ordering its citizens to not cooperate with Israel. The PA and Hamas have never even granted citizenship to a single Jewish family.

Israel is not imposing one regime with unequal laws for Arabs. It is not apartheid. Millions of people are held back by two Arab dictatorships, weaponizing their dysfunction and extremism to attack the only Jewish state. And once that context is clear, the “apartheid” accusation starts to fall apart.

Nowhere is that fragility clearer than in three small populations — Jerusalem, Area C, and Hebron — which exist in limbo because of Arab rejectionism, while Israel is left to manage the consequences. The PA and Hamas turn the predictable consequences of their policies — every compromise, every checkpoint, every gridlock — into supposed evidence of anti-Arab racism, ignoring the fact that Israel is a multiethnic democracy.

Roughly three percent of the Arab population lives in Jerusalem, where many are not Israeli citizens. Israel is blamed for not granting them all Israeli citizenship automatically, but the PA itself rejected that proposal. Instead, the Palestinian Authority gives these families citizenship, and Israel compromises by granting them  permanent residency — with local voting rights, public welfare, and other benefits akin to citizenship. Also, Israel allows them to apply for Israeli citizenship, as hundreds do each year, voluntarily forfeiting their PA papers.

Another four percent of the Arab population lives in Area C, the sparsely populated desert of Judea and Samaria. This is where both Arabs and Jews compete by establishing new villages on state-owned lands left over from the Ottoman Empire. The Palestinian Authority demands Arabs in Area C have PA citizenship, but the PA refuses to annex the territory unless it also gains control of Jerusalem — a demand designed to stall any resolution. As a result, Israel is left administering Area C by default. It manages security and basic services for a population that is not its own — and then is accused of apartheid for doing so.

Making matters worse, the PA orders its citizens in Area C to resist Israeli bureaucracy, sabotaging routine processes such as recognizing outposts as legal villages or obtaining routine building permits, leading to inevitable power struggles.

Arab leadership created these nightmarish legal and political scenarios — yet Israel is the one blamed for them.

Perhaps the most nightmarish scenario of all, though, is Hebron. It is one of the four holy cities in Judaism, and it had continuous, documented Jewish life since ancient times — up until the years leading up to World War II, when Arab extremists massacred Hebron’s Jews and expelled the survivors. Today, the Palestinian Authority insists that it must remain free of any Jews.

There is no global outcry. There are no UN resolutions. In fact, nobody seems to care — except for Israel, which treats Hebron as a red line. The state rightfully created enclaves in the historic Jewish Quarter and on the city’s outskirts, anchored around properties legally owned by Jews before the expulsion. In some cases, one end of a modern building is under Israeli administration, while the other end is governed by the Palestinian Authority.

It should not require a soldier to protect each Jewish family living in Hebron, or anywhere — but that is what Arab leadership has made necessary. And for defending a sliver of Jewish history in such a historically Jewish city, it is Israel that the world condemns.

But what about the viral accusations, such as Jewish-only roads, racist checkpoints, and banning Arabs from citizenship?

Israel includes both Jews and Arabs as citizens, governed by the same laws, living in the same cities, and attending the same schools. There is no road, town, or checkpoint that bans Arabs anywhere in Israel.

There is a border between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (and Hamas). Like any border in the world, it has checkpoints to go across. These checkpoints are thorough based on threats, not race. Israel is at war with multiple regimes and carefully checks everyone who enters.

When there is violence, then yes, arrests happen. Israeli citizens — both Jewish and Arab — go through the same court systems. Those arrested during combat, or who are citizens of the Palestinian Authority, are processed under military law, as is standard in any conflict zone. These arrests include legal review and due process. The system is not arbitrary. Data shows that arrest rates are comparable to — and in some cases lower than — those in neighboring countries.

Some point to the Law of Return — which allows Jews worldwide to claim Israeli citizenship — as proof of apartheid. But the accusation does not hold up. It is an immigration law that takes no rights away from Arab citizens. And as long as Jews are expelled for being Jews, there must be one country that guarantees a Jewish refuge. That is not apartheid. It is survival.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, apartheid conditions are systematically ignored. Saudi Arabia forbids non-Muslims from citizenship, ensuring that ancient Jewish communities that remained there until a few decades ago can never return. The Navajo Nation fights for clean water and recognition. As an indigenous Ryukyuan, three generations of my family have seen almost half of Okinawa closed off by the United States military.

Accusing Israel of “apartheid” is a double standard against the Jewish people. It takes the language of justice and twists it into a weapon against the only Jewish state on earth.

The apartheid comparison collapses under its own weight. Jews are one of the oldest living civilizations, indigenous to Eretz Yisrael, where we have lived for over three thousand years. Half the world’s Jews live in Israel — in our ancestral homeland. None of this can be said about White settlers in South Africa. Their racial categories were colonial inventions. Ours is a nation with roots deeper than their empires.

We arrived in Israel fleeing from our lives, torn out of Africa, Europe, and Asia. We fled from Addis Ababa. We fled from Tunis. We fled from Warsaw. We fled from Paris. We fled from Cairo. We fled from Tehran. We came to Israel with nothing — not as colonizers, but as survivors, gathering back together in the homeland we have been intertwined with for millennia.

And now, once again, they want us isolated. Once again, they want us stateless. They are not leveling a genuine critique of Israeli policies, they are trying to wage a campaign against Israeli existence. They want to return Jews to the place history assigned us — powerless, scattered, disposable.

To achieve that, they do not care about what is true. It is about what can be repeated until no one dares to question it.