No, Israel is not a democracy

US politicians like to say that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”. But Israel is not a democracy. Not by a long shot. In fact, it functions as one of the most undemocratic countries in the world.

Israel exercises total control over the West Bank and Gaza. These territories have no actual sovereignty. The West Bank (with 3 million people) is subjected to military occupation, which is illegal under international law. As for Gaza (2.1 million people), it is also under military occupation, according to international law, as Israel maintains direct control over its airspace, its coast, and its land borders, controlling everything that goes in and out.

The 5.1 million people living in these territories do not have the right to vote over the government that determines virtually everything about their lives. And their basic human rights under international law are unenforced and regularly violated with impunity.

On top of this, there are another 6 million Palestinians who have been forcibly removed from Palestine and who exist as stateless refugees with no rights within their homeland whatsoever.

So what’s going on here? Well, apartheid.

Many people get hung up on the apartheid analogy because when they think of apartheid in South Africa, they think of segregation and unequal rights among citizens, and they say this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Israel (it does). But this is known as “petty apartheid”, and it was only a minor part of the apartheid system in South Africa. The real action — “grand apartheid” — had much bigger designs, and this is where the analogy is strongest.

Grand apartheid was the process of reshaping territorial boundaries and citizenship. The idea was to forcibly remove the African population from the majority of the country’s territory — literally bulldozing their houses and loading them into trucks — and dump them onto tiny, fragmented chunks of land called Bantustans. Then you put a border around each Bantustan, give people “citizenship” there, give it a flag and a coat of arms, and set up a “parliament”.

Taking this approach — ethnic cleansing — the apartheid regime shoved most of the African population into enclaves comprising just 13% of the land and denied them any rights of citizenship within the “white” territory. White people justified this by saying Africans had rights in their own “countries”, the Bantustans. But, of course, the Bantustans