Could annexing Palestinian towns minus citizenship be apartheid?
There certainly cannot be any comparison to classic apartheid in South Africa where there was one country and the minority systematically suppressed the majority because of a racist ideology.
If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has his way, sometime in July, Israel will annex portions of the West Bank. The plan appears to include Palestinian enclaves, while avoiding applying Israeli law to those areas.
Under the Trump administration's peace plan as rolled out in January, all Palestinians will become citizens of a future Palestinian state that, it is hoped, will emerge from negotiations between the parties within four years.
But what happens to those Palestinians if the negotiations break down? And what is the status of those Palestinians during the period they wait for their new state to be established?
Could such a situation constitute apartheid?
First, the term apartheid must be defined.
There certainly cannot be any comparison to classic apartheid in South Africa where there was one country and the minority whites systematically suppressed the majority blacks out of a racist ideology.
Israelis and Palestinians are two different peoples who were never part of one country. They have been in a multi-sided political-land-religious conflict for around 100 years that is also part of the broader Israeli-Arab conflict.
Israel has proposed peace deals to the Palestinians (perfect or not) and Arab citizens of Israel have full citizenship rights, even if there is criticism that their sectors and some other minority Jewish sectors are neglected in comparative terms when it comes to state funding.
Apartheid has at least two meanings: one as a social phenomenon and one as a war crime under the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute.
As a social phenomenon, countries like Saudi Arabia and Myanmar are sometimes accused of apartheid due to allegations of institutionalizing discrimination against certain minorities on racist grounds.
Some critics have long accused Israel of the same, but these critics have often ignored the rights granted to Israeli-Arabs and the significant threats to Israeli security posed by Hamas rockets and Palestinian terrorism in general.
In addition, as long as the Oslo peace process of the mid-1990s was not completely dead, there has been an idea that the Palestinian Authority was responsible for Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel was responsible for Jews there and the fate of mixed areas would eventually be resolved in negotiations.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/could-annexing-palestinian-towns-minus-citizenship-be-apartheid-630209