Mondoweiss: Are comparisons of South African apartheid and Israel useful?

[Little Tich]

12. The OP doesn't accuse Israel of Apartheid against Israeli Arabs.

It describes some of the legal discrimination against Israeli Arabs and points out that Israeli Arabs have at the same basic civil rights. The OP doesn't follow through with a conclusion whether it's actually Apartheid or not:

In response, apologists for Israel’s policies have attempted to relocate the comparison. When measured against the civil rights records of other Middle Eastern countries, they respond, the Palestinian minority within Israel enjoys significant rights. Palestinian Israelis vote, participate in national elections through legal political parties, and sit in the Knesset—all things that would have been unthinkable for Black South Africans under apartheid.

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Second, it is true that Palestinians currently living in Israel (that is, those who were not expelled in 1948) possess civil rights. This fact is often cited as a refutation of the claim that Israel is an apartheid state. These claims are deceptive. Israeli law institutionalizes the distinction between the Jewish population and other groups. As codified in its Basic Laws, Israel is the state of the Jewish people: non-Jewish Israeli citizens do not enjoy the same status under civil law. (It is, in fact, illegal for a political party to run for the Knesset if it questions this principle.) In contrast to Israel’s equal rights legislation regarding women and the disabled, more than fifty laws discriminate directly or indirectly against the Palestinian minority of Israel.

If I thought that the OP was inciting baseless hatred, I wouldn't have posted it. It does explain the grounds for the Apartheid analogy, and the reason why there's a lot of criticism of Israel. If it can be proven that Israeli Arabs and Palestinians living in the occupied territories aren't discriminated against in any way, then the Apartheid analogy is bogus. However, as there are numerous laws discriminating against Israeli Arabs, and the Palestinians in the occupied territories have no civil rights whatsoever, it could be difficult to prove that there's no discrimination going on...