Apartheid

Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 7), apartheid is a crime against humanity defined as inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, committed with the intention of maintaining that regime. The term originates with South Africa's 1948–1994 system of racial segregation and classification.

Human Rights Watch (2021), Amnesty International (2022), and B'Tselem (2021) have applied the apartheid framework to Israel's policies, arguing that Israeli Jews and Palestinians are governed under separate and unequal legal systems — Israeli civil law in Israel and settlements vs. military law for Palestinians in the West Bank — and that this constitutes systematic domination meeting the legal threshold.

Israel and its supporters reject the apartheid characterization, arguing that Israeli Arab citizens have full civil and political rights (voting, serving in the Knesset and Supreme Court, etc.), that Palestinian non-citizens in the West Bank are governed under military administration as a security measure in disputed territory — not as a racial system — and that the comparison to South African apartheid is a political accusation designed to delegitimize Israel rather than an accurate legal or descriptive analysis. They note that the West Bank situation arises from a conflict and ongoing negotiations, not a deliberate system of racial subjugation.