Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: Israel, the un-apartheid state – a comparison with Australia [View all]shaayecanaan
(6,068 posts)but it is a bit more profound than that. There is discrimination everywhere, but it is unusual, as I have said previously, to have people tried for the same crime in the same territory in completely different court systems.
It is not identical to South African apartheid. The system there was much more unsubtle, set up along simplistic skin colour lines. I agree that Israel has endeavoured to make its system as palatable to Western observers as possible, while maintaining its core functions.
The essential similarity is this:- apartheid was established to preserve white hegemony in South Africa, and Zionism was established to preserve Jewish hegemony in Israel. Israel must remain a Jewish state. It may be a democratic state for as long as there is a Jewish majority, but were that ever threatened then I imagine Israel will cease to be a democratic state long before it ceases to be a Jewish state.
The red line is that 50%+ of the electorate in Israel must be Jewish, in order for Israel to remain a democracy. If that line were ever threatened, I imagine that Israel would devise some kind of consociationalist model along Lebanese lines, with an entrenched Jewish majority in the Knesset.
Israel could afford to give some rights to the Israeli Arabs, as they were few in number, and to the Golani Druze, and to East Jerusalem residents even, as long as their numbers were insufficient to threaten a Jewish supermajority. But they could never give rights to the West Bankers, who were too many in number.
In contrast, the South African whites were always dwarfed in number by the Black population by so large a degree that it was impossible for them to preserve their status even by some act of partition. The apartheid system was as bad as it was because Whites were as outnumbered as they were. They could not moderate their system even slightly without completely losing their grip on power. If Israel wants to remain a Zionist state, then the more the Arab population rises relative to the Jewish population, the more it must become like South Africa.
Already there are legal impediments to try and restrain the growth of the Arab population, the restrictions on family reunion visas for Arabs, for instance. Now, there are no rules restraining Arabs from swimming in Jewish swimming pools, at least at the moment, although some swimming pools in Israel turn them away anyway. At the moment those rules are not necessary because most towns in Israel are nearly exclusively Jewish or Arab in any event.
However, if Arab Israelis rise to become 35% of the population (which seems likely) then they will have to migrate out of the traditionally Arab areas, because Israel has allowed virtually no construction there, and into the Jewish towns and cities. Then things may change. You may start to see "peace walls" through cities, and segregated areas.
One final point: African-Americans amount to 14% of the American overall population. Notwithstanding their relatively small number, white society was eventually forced to come to terms with them, despite their longstanding dislike of Blacks, particularly in the South. The Arab Israeli population, by contrast, is 20% and rising.