To say "Israel has apartheid" really cheapens the struggle of Black South Africans.
//edit//Corrected glaring typo.
> By 1948, the population had risen to 1,900,000, of whom 68% were Arabs, and 32% were Jews (UNSCOP report, including bedouin).
> According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, as of May 2006, of Israel's 7 million people, 77% were Jews, 18.5% Arabs, and 4.3% "others".
Most people in historic Palestine, be they Jews or Arabs, can’t say their family lived there 100 hundred years a go, the population has grown twenty-fold in the last century. However, there have been Jews and Arabs in that region for thousands of years. It would be silly to deny that.
Both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to (literally) the same land. I would like to see Israel extend it's democracy and rights to the Palestinians instead of putting them in open air jail (the West Bank wall reminds me of Escape from New York).
Besides, are you saying that wanting someone out of some place but justifies violence? If so, expect me to come at your house and get you out of there with a rifle and don't complain when I do so.
Is this something a Black South African who suffered under apartheid and is intimately familiar with the current occupied Palestine told you, or are you the Black South African yourself?
Neither, I read about the apartheid from reliable sources and I know the situation but also read about statistics to make sure I'm not being unfair to either side.
But what about the people who say "Israel has apartheid"? Did you ask how they can claim that? Or do you just assume that they are/have met South Africans who lived under the Apartheid?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_analog...
I'll edit my reply to maintain the legitimacy of the question.
Israel clearly has two categories of citizens within its borders defined by tribal distinctions (race/religion). Whether this is formally 'apartheid' is an arguement worth having, since we can look at the UN definition and Israel's actions and have a meaningful discussion from an external perspective.
Comparing the subjectivities of the lives lived under the two regimes necessitates experiential knowledge that is most likely lacking in this audience. I don't find oppression olympics arguments to be fruitful. The moral calculus of today's actions does not depend on the price paid in South Africa, The Congo, The American South, or in Revolutionary China.
I'm guessing that during apartheid, South Africa didn't have black Supreme Courth judges.
"Cheapens the struggle of" is not a statement about political structures, it is a statement about personal experiences. I don't think it is fruitful to reduce the experiential quality of living in an oppressive regime to some calculus of cheapness, wherein Having Supreme Court Judges counts as +$10.
I think the experiences of Black South Africans were a lot worse than those experienced by Palestinians and Arabs within Israel. I think if people redefine "apartheid" downwards to cover any regime that people don't like then it becomes a meaningless term.
If you posit that the West Bank is effectively annexed and that the Israeli government has no plans to ever quit it, then technically the West Bank is governed by an apartheid system.
I disagree that we are redefining apartheid.
[1] http://www.hsrc.ac.za/en/media-briefs/democracy-goverance-an...