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?
[1] http://www.hsrc.ac.za/en/media-briefs/democracy-goverance-an...
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.
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.