Created in 2004 as End Israeli Apartheid and Segregation Week, this awareness and advocacy campaign has become a worldwide phenomenon with events throughout the globe in most major cities. The event transitioned to Israeli Apartheid Week in 2017, with global events planned over two months. Each nation organizes according to its schedule.

The goal is to end the practice of apartheid worldwide, with the state of Israel as its most notable and brutal practitioner. The ultimate goal of the event is to ensure people living within the State of Israel and its Occupied Territories, regardless of race, origin, or faith, have equal rights as human beings, opportunity, equal access to resources, and respect as agreed by representatives of the state of Israel in 1947 at the United Nations. The state agreed to these standards as a condition of its creation, though it has yet to fulfill them. It has also agreed to international law and treaties as a signatory, many of which it continues to violate.

What is Apartheid?

Apartheid uses politics, the military, and law to create a system where one group is preferred over another based on ethnicity, faith, politics, or some other arbitrary segregator. The preferred people are endowed with privilege, above-equal, and have preferential access to resources and services. They often have segregated housing, schools, roads, courts, and employment opportunities. Segregation is based solely upon the identifying segregator. Apartheid is enforced via the military, political office, industry, and a two-tiered legal system. In Israel, the government and military work together to normalize segregation.

How Israel Practices Apartheid

In Israel, the primary selector is faith, and the second is race, as experienced by the non-white Jewish communities within the state. Those identified as Jewish are preferred and live in a republic based upon democratic principles. Those identified as not Jewish (Christian, Muslim, Druze, Buddhist, etc.) live in a fascist state, with nominal or no rights depending upon where they live in the region (occupied or within the Green Line). Israel has over 70 laws guaranteeing this unequal treatment by faith, including the Nation-State Law of 2018.

Though it claims democracy, Israel has no constitution. Jewish persons can argue their rights in civil courts. Non-Jewish persons are tried in military courts and can be held indefinitely without charges in indefinite detention, which is often renewed every six months. Israel's Jewish residents can only be held with charges and under the law. No Jewish person in Israel can be held without charges or indefinitely. Non-Jewish residents and those in lands controlled by the Israeli military can be arrested without charge and held indefinitely. This example is a textbook illustration of a two-tiered legal system, a key component of apartheid.

Israel is a nuclear superpower with one of the ten most powerful militaries in the world. It uses this military power to enforce apartheid on those it occupies and disenfranchise those who are not Jewish. The people it oppresses have no army, navy, or air force. They can be attacked, and are attacked, with impunity by the military and by the settler movement, often killed or permanently maimed at any time. Rarely (less than 2% according to Israeli public records) are any members of the settler movement or military held accountable for murder, executions, maiming, kidnappings, torture, vandalism, and other crimes against non-Jewish persons.

Israeli apartheid is more brutal than that experienced in South Africa. Using the military to bomb, raze homes, limit access to natural resources, conduct sieges, and blockades elevated Israeli apartheid to a new level far above apartheid-era South Africa. The construction of its wall, ten times the size of the Berlin Wall, Jewish-only roads, Jewish-only housing (enforced and protected by the military), hundreds of checkpoints, and the collective punishment of millions of people simply because they are not Jewish, further illustrates the aggressive nature of Israeli style apartheid.

What you can do:

There is so much you can do. Start by speaking to Palestinians. They're everywhere in the diaspora. Get to know the people in Jewish Voices for Peace, If Not Now, and other anti-apartheid Jewish groups. Then, question the narrative media feeds you. Get educated and extricate yourself from the echo chamber. Read publications including The Intercept, Mondoweiss, Ha'aretz, +972 Magazine, Palestine Monitor, The Electronic Intifada, and Foreign Policy Magazine. Watch independent news programs that don't go through Israeli censors, including Breaking Points, Judging Freedom, Democracy Now, and Al Jazeera. Follow excellent journalists and academics covering this, including Jonathan Cook, Jonathan M Katz, John Mearsheimer, and Caitlin Johnstone, to name a few.

Then, take part in actions that focus on non-violence, like End Israeli Apartheid Week, which raises awareness and educates and advocates for the exposure of this practice. A nation-state cannot be democratic and practice apartheid, period. Like South Africa, Israel's apartheid policies will only end when the international community says 'enough!' Nobody is looking to erase the state of Israel, despite the propaganda. Like South Africa, Israel will continue to exist as a better version of itself, with apartheid finally relegated to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Check the Israeli Apartheid Week site for opportunities to help in your city and country or to register an event of your own.