The Genesis of Israeli Ultra-apartheid
Unlike South African apartheid which backed supremacy
and exploitation, Israeli apartheid condones ethnic cleansing, even mass
atrocities – as evidenced by the obliteration of Gaza and anti-Palestinian
violence in the West Bank.
by Dan
Steinbock | Nov
21, 2025
https://original.antiwar.com/Dan_Steinbock/2025/11/20/the-genesis-of-israeli-ultra-apartheid/
On November 10, the Israeli parliament passed the
first reading of a bill to impose the death penalty on Palestinian
prisoners convicted of
killing Israeli individuals, with 39 votes in favor and 16 against out of 120
members.
The bill would make it mandatory for Israeli courts to
impose death penalty against individuals convicted of killing an Israeli
“either intentionally or recklessly” if the act is motivated by “racism or
hostility towards the public” and “committed with the objective of harming the
state of Israel or the rebirth of the Jewish people.”
The controversial and murky bill has been widely
condemned by international and Palestinian human rights organizations and
prisoners’ groups. As Amnesty International put it, “The shift towards
requiring courts to impose the death penalty against Palestinians is a
dangerous and dramatic step backwards and a product of ongoing impunity for
Israel’s system of apartheid and its genocide in Gaza.”
However, as I have argued (here and here), such shift would be consistent with the Israeli
far-right’s redemptionist dreams of Jewish supremacy and Greater Israel, which
the Netanyahu cabinet has effectively condoned. It would also codify the move
beyond classic apartheid.
Institutionalization of apartheid
In South Africa, racial discrimination against black
people began with large-scale colonization over four centuries ago. By the
early 19th century, British settlers began to colonize the
frontier regions. As takeoffs accelerated in in the late 19th century Europe,
South Africa industrialized on the back of mining and infrastructure
investment. But the Mineral Revolution was a revolution by, of and for the
white colonial settlers.
Following the European powers’ scramble for Africa,
the Anglo-Zulu War and two Boer Wars, the Boer republics were incorporated into
the British Empire. Meanwhile, South Africa began to introduce more
segregationist policies towards non-whites. The goals were reflected by the
Afrikaans term apartheid (“separateness,” or “apart-hood”).
After the 1948 all-white elections, the National Party
enforced white supremacy and racial separation. When the South African republic
was established in 1961, it withdrew from the British Commonwealth.
International counter-reaction, black resistance
A year later, the UN General Assembly passed
resolution 1761, which requested member states to break off diplomatic
relations and cease trading with South Africa and to deny passage to South
African ships and aircraft.
A special committee was set up calling for a boycott
of South Africa. Though initially ignored, it found allies in the West,
including the UK-based Anti-Apartheid Movement.
By 1973, the UN General Assembly agreed on the
International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of
Apartheid. In the process, “apartheid was declared to be a crime against
humanity, with a scope that went far beyond South Africa.”
Popular uprisings ensued in black and colored
townships in 1976 and 1985. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the last
vestiges of apartheid were abolished, and a new constitution was promulgated
into law: one person, one vote.
South Africa and Israel as “apartheid states”
The apartheid association between South Africa and
Israel is not something new. After the UN vote against the South African
apartheid in the early 1960s, the country’s prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was
particularly annoyed by Israel’s vote against South Africa’s segregation.
“Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid
attitude,” Verwoerd lamented. “They took Israel away from the Arabs after the
Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel,
like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”
In effect, martial law had been imposed on the Arab
citizens of Israel from 1948 to 1966, and it continues to be intermittently
enforced to the present.
Effectively, the Israeli government imposed various
restrictions on Palestinians, including on their mobility, with security
checkpoints set up to enforce these permits allowing entry. Meanwhile, requests
for government services for Arab Israelis were directed to military courts
instead of civil courts. These measures were subsequently adopted in the
occupied territories, particularly the West Bank.
Subsequently, the UN adopted the (non-binding)
Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, sponsored
mainly by the Arab League, the Soviet bloc and many new African states.
After the 1967 Six-Day-War and the Israeli occupation
of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian resistance intensified, domestically and
internationally.
The debate on Israeli segregation
Following the Yom Kippur War, the UN General
Assembly’s Resolution 3236 recognized the Palestinian people’s right to
self-determination, inviting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to
participate in international diplomacy.
The oil crisis in 1975 paved the way to resolution
3379, which stated that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial
discrimination.” In the UN, Israeli ambassador Chaim Herzog, the future
president of Israel, stated the decision was “devoid of any moral or legal
value.” Then, he tore the resolution in half.
At the end of the Cold War, Resolution 3379 was
revoked by the UN Resolution 46/86, introduced by U.S. President George H. W.
Bush. It contributed to Israel’s sense of impunity and the rise of its
Messianic far-right. But Bush’s UN address wasn’t just about Zionism and
racism. It was about wheeling and dealing. The revocation was Israel’s
precondition for participation in the Madrid Conference of 1991, which paved
the way to the Oslo Accords – which the Netanyahu cabinets have shunned ever
since then.
In 2021, Isaac Herzog, the son of Chaim Herzog, became
Israel’s president. When South Africa launched its genocide case against
Israel, he declared it a “blood libel” against Jews. Later he shredded the UN
Charter in protest of the UN General Assembly vote to boost the status of the
Palestinian mission.
And yet it was in 2021 that Human Rights Watch warned
that Israel had crossed the apartheid threshold. Many Israeli leaders agreed. A
year later, Israel’s former attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, said that “my
country has sunk to such political and moral depths that it is now an apartheid
regime.”
Two years later, he was seconded by the former speaker
of the Israeli parliament, Avraham Burg. A month before the October 7
offensive, Mossad’s ex-chief Tamir Pardo concurred: “There is an apartheid
state here,” since “two people are judged under two legal systems.”
In the case of South African apartheid, international
restrictions fostered domestic opposition. But in the case of Israel, those
measures proved soft. It was the ineptitude of the international community that
reinforced the marginalization of the Israeli anti-apartheid opposition and the
rise of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet in late 2022.
Apartheid and ultra-apartheid
In South Africa and Israel, apartheid rule has sought
to crush all opposition by fragmenting territories, restricting mobility,
forcing inequality and imposing segregation. Under the Likud and Netanyahu
governments, Israel has been morphing into an apartheid state and its occupied
territories into Palestinian Bantustans.
Yet, there are major differences with classic
apartheid as enforced in South Africa and its Israeli version in the occupied
territories. Apartheid policies can be formal and legal as in South African
apartheid, or informal and semi-legal as in Israel’s treatment of the
Palestinians.
In apartheid South Africa, a white minority dominated
a black majority, whereas in Israel a Jewish majority discriminates against a
Palestinian minority, keeping the Palestinians under military occupation.
Third, in South Africa, the objective of apartheid was
to sustain a system of racial segregation in which one group is deprived of
political and civil rights, and exploited as low-cost labor. During apartheid
rule, the per capita income of South African blacks relative to the whites
climbed from 8.6 to 13.5 percent. The Palestinians’ starting point relative to
the Israelis was almost twice as high in percentage terms. But even before
October 7, 2023, it had plunged to a lower level than that of South Africa’s
blacks at the end of apartheid rule.
But the ultimate difference between South African
apartheid and Israel’s ultra-apartheid is ethnic cleansing – as a prelude to
worse.
The ultimate difference
Unlike classic apartheid and its territorial
fragmentation, degree of formality and labor exploitation, Israeli apartheid
aims further. Since the UN Partition Plan, its ultimate purpose has been the
Judaization of Arab Palestine and the drastic expansion of Israeli borders.
Apartheid is an instrument to that goal.
Apartheid South Africa was willing to live with
segregated, exploited and underprivileged black people. By contrast, since the
late 1970s, the Israeli system has sought to use segregation as an interim
instrument to ethnically cleanse the occupied territories through Palestinian
displacement, dispossession and, if necessary, abject devastation.
In this sense, Israeli apartheid differs from South
African apartheid. It is ultra-apartheid. In Latin, ultra means
“beyond”, or “on the far side of.” Going beyond the norm, ultra-apartheid
officially shuns classic apartheid, yet benefits from the low-cost labor while
ultimately seeking its obliteration.
Today, ultra-apartheid is the inspiration of settler
violence in the West Bank and the “judicial reforms” by the Netanyahu cabinet,
to accelerate the transformation of the secular and democratic Jewish state
into a religious and autocratic regime.
