If a state can unilaterally suspend the rights of a racialised group or dump people onto foreign soil, no citizen’s rights are secure
For decades, the United States government has stood firmly behind Israel. This protection has been rooted in political interest, lobbying pressure and a shared commitment to preserving Israel as a Jewish-majority state built through settler colonialism in Palestine. Anything that questions Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish-majority project is labelled “anti-Semitic”.
There is an organisation called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). It is the largest and most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in the United States. It has been used to strengthen the US–Israel relationship, and its ties can be traced back to the 1950s. It was originally called the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs and was renamed Aipac in 1959. The organisation supported Jewish immigration to Palestine. Today, Aipac and its political funding have spent large sums of money to influence US elections and support politicians. Aipac has donated to Republican and Democratic candidates; millions of dollars have been spent.
My analogy for Aipac is Hydra from Marvel or Lex Luthor from DC Comics: a billionaire who shapes laws and government through money, works “legally” but sets policy that serves his interests, influences elections, buys politicians and controls narratives. A hydra that is always steering but never seen. The reality is worse than this description. This is the political machinery that forces US politicians to protect Israel at all costs.
In 2017, a report was released by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (Escwa). Authored by Professor Richard Falk, emeritus professor of international law, and Professor Virginia Tilley, the report was titled Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid. It establishes, on the basis of scholarly inquiry and overwhelming evidence, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.
Apartheid is a crime under international law, and countries have legal duties when apartheid is identified anywhere: they must not recognise the regime as lawful; they must not assist it; and they must act to end it. If the US or the UN acknowledged Israeli apartheid, they would themselves become complicit by continuing to protect and support it. That is why the report was immediately suppressed. Under pressure from Israel and its allies, the UN secretary general pulled it from publication — not because the evidence was weak, but because the accusation was politically unacceptable.
The report states that Israel controls Palestinians by breaking them into separate groups and areas. By dividing Palestinians into four different domains, it weakens their ability to unite and resist, and hides how the apartheid system operates as a whole.
Domain one: Palestinians with Israeli citizenship
About 1.7 million Palestinians live inside Israel’s recognised borders, holding Israeli passports but never allowed to be equal. Yes, they can vote. But they are legally forbidden from challenging the very foundation of the state: its identity as a “Jewish and democratic state”. This means they are permitted to ask for crumbs — small reforms — but they cannot demand justice. They cannot legally demand an end to the racial hierarchy that controls their lives. Citizenship without power is not freedom; it is managed inclusion.
Domain two: Palestinians in East Jerusalem
About 300 000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem are treated as foreigners on their own land. Israel labels them “permanent residents”, a status so fragile it can be revoked if they cannot prove that Jerusalem is the “centre of their life”. Imagine having to prove your right to exist where you were born. This is not accidental; it is a policy designed to protect a “demographic balance” that favours Jewish residents. A population controlled through paperwork, surveillance and fear.
Domain three: Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza
Here live 4.6 million Palestinians under military rule. Two peoples live on the same land: one governed by military orders, checkpoints, prison raids and curfews; the other — Jewish settlers — governed by civil law. The report states that, short of genocide itself, almost every “inhuman act” listed under the Apartheid Convention occurs here: arbitrary arrests, torture, denial of work, control of movement and the stripping away of basic human rights. This is a laboratory of violence, a system designed to break both body and spirit.
Domain four: Palestinian refugees and exiles
Millions of Palestinians displaced from 1948 to the present are still banned from returning home. Israel calls their return a “demographic threat”, because their existence would end the Jewish numerical majority on which the state depends. Their absence is intentional. Their exile is policy. Their homes, villages and olive trees were taken — and the world pretends it cannot see them.
The report explicitly compares the Israeli “archipelago of Palestinian cantons” to the Bantustan model of apartheid South Africa and the Native American reservation system in the United States, which served as a historical precedent for such reserves. The American reservation system directly informed South African reserves. Two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa recalled that then Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon showed strong interest in South Africa’s Bantustan project. What Israel has done in Palestine mirrors that system: Palestinians are confined, divided and watched, while Israel holds all power.
Another example of the United States as a pioneer of settler-colonial institutions is the pass system. It was used in America to monitor movement on slave plantations and was imposed on the Apache long before it was implemented on colonised Africans. Just as South Africa’s Bantustan system shaped segregation, Professor Mahmood Mamdani shows how the US settler-colonial experience provides an even deeper model for understanding Israel’s policies towards Palestinians.
During his travels to the West Bank and Israel, Mamdani argues that settler America is a more illuminating parallel for the Israel–Palestine conflict than apartheid South Africa. Like American settlers before them, Israeli settlers care about one thing: land. Not the people who already live there, not their lives or labour — just the land. Mamdani traces how the US moved from a so-called “one-state solution”, which gave Native Americans a voice in Congress, to a “two-state solution” forcing them west of the Mississippi, and finally confining them to reservations.
Palestinians in Israel live under the same kind of “state of exception”: they can vote, but that vote does nothing to protect their rights, homes or freedom.
The Escwa report argues that Israeli policy towards Palestinians is rooted in an exclusive claim to land based on descent: those with the “right” bloodline belong; everyone else is an outsider. When examining America’s relationship with Israel, Mamdani offers a powerful place to begin. He describes the United States as the world’s first settler state and links it to the reservation system and to global technologies of control, including apartheid South Africa and Nazi concentration camps. The US continues to operate as a colonial power.
The report rejects the claim that these are security measures. Apartheid is illegal under international law, regardless of duration or justification. It concludes that apartheid is a peremptory norm (jus cogens), meaning all states are legally obligated not to recognise such a regime as lawful or assist in its maintenance.
“Israel’s right to exist” was largely invented in the 1970s through US-Israeli politics to make Palestinian recognition impossible. When someone claims that criticism “denies Israel’s right to exist”, they are converting political debate into accusation and excusing apartheid and dispossession. They conflate criticism of a state with hatred of a people.
The US protects Israel not only with money and weapons, but by controlling which truths are allowed to be spoken. Calling Israel an apartheid state threatens the political foundation of US–Israeli relations, which are built on maintaining Israel as a Jewish-dominated state in a land where Palestinians were, and remain, displaced.
Admitting apartheid would require sanctions, an arms embargo, international criminal accountability and an end to occupation. The US does not protect Israel out of love or morality; it does so because Israel is a US power asset in the Middle East. Israel functions as a military, intelligence and technological base for US interests in a region defined by oil reserves, strategic trade routes, weapons testing and geopolitical control. The US cannot afford to lose power there.
Noam Chomsky once said there are two national groups claiming self-determination. One is the indigenous population — what remains of it after expulsion and flight. The other is Jewish settlers who arrived from Europe and later from other regions. Both claim national self-determination. The moral question is simple: if we reject racism, then the indigenous population must have the same rights as the settlers who replaced them.
Palestine signals the deteriorating health of global democracy and demonstrates how colonial powers continue to use vulnerable populations as sites of experimentation for new forms of state control.
The treatment of an indigenous population reflects a society’s commitment to justice, equality and the rule of law. If a state can unilaterally suspend the rights of a racialised group or dump people onto foreign soil, no citizen’s rights are secure. The world has not moved beyond centuries of western domination. The United States and Israel remain settler societies because land theft and conquest remain unresolved. This is precisely why America cannot “fix” Israel — as a settler state itself.
Ncebakazi Makwetu is a lecturer in the department of liberation studies, faculty of social sciences and humanities, at the University of Fort Hare.