Architecture of Dispossession

Liberal Zionists often portray Israel as a fundamentally democratic state marred by a far-right government, downplaying the structural features of the state that privilege Jewish identity. This framing obscures the extent to which Israeli law and policy have institutionalized ethnonational hierarchy, prompting comparisons to apartheid-era South Africa.

In 1948, the creation of the state of Israel was accompanied by the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians, many at the hands of Zionist paramilitary groups. This mass expulsion is known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Following the expulsions, a systematic campaign began to demolish depopulated Palestinian villages, often replacing them with forests or new settlements. In 1950, the Israeli parliament passed the Absentee Property Law, which allowed the state to confiscate the land of the Palestinians who fled during the Nakba. That same year in South Africa, the National Party passed the Group Areas Act, which designated land ownership by race.

Both laws served to redistribute land along ethno-racial lines: in each case, the settler minority acquired the vast majority of territory, while indigenous populations were confined to fragmented enclaves. In the Palestinian case — both inside Israel’s 1948 borders and in the occupied territories (OPTs) — those enclaves have continued to shrink, a process many observers likened to the Bantustanization seen in apartheid South Africa.

Bantustans were racially exclusive enclaves that were created under the pretense of bestowing self-determination to black South Africans and Namibians. In reality, they served to divorce the black populations from their ancestral lands and political rights. In 1970, the National Party enacted the Black Homeland Citizenship Act, a denaturalization law that stripped black South Africans of their South African citizenship, reclassifying them as citizens of their respective Bantustans.

Steve Biko has described the Bantustans as cacoons that “dampened the enthusiasm” of black liberation movements and weakened its collective power. This is because the true motive behind the demarcated boundaries of the Bantustans was to divide the black majority by ethnic group into isolated regions to diminish their capacity to resist the apartheid establishment. Israel’s governance of the OPTs reflects similar strategies of fragmentation and control.

The existence of OPTs as separate legal and political regimes in the West Bank and Gaza is one of the mechanisms through which Palestinian cohesion is undermined, making collective demands — such as calls for land restitution of the right of return — more difficult to organize. This, as succinctly put by a 2017 UN report, lies at the heart of the Israeli apartheid regime.

Like the South African Bantustans, the overarching goal of fragmented Palestinian enclaves is to preserve settler demographic dominance and deny indigenous populations full political and citizenship rights.

From Bantustans to the OPTs

At least in apartheid South Africa, the government designated some Bantustans as independent, granting them — in theory, though not in practice — self-rule, complete with their own flags, police forces, and parliaments. In contrast, Palestinians in the OPTs are stateless, denied both sovereignty and full political or legal rights by the Israeli state.

Unlike the South African Bantustans, which offered a facade of self-determination, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are offered no such political fiction. Under a maximalist vision of Israeli annexation, the threat of further mass expulsion looms — affecting communities already shattered by decades of occupation and, in many cases, internally displaced since the Nakba.

This points to a crucial difference between South African and Israeli apartheid. As Noam Chomsky once put it, “The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce. . . . The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the occupied territories is totally different. They just don’t want them.”

In South Africa, white capital accumulation depended on access to cheap black labor. This logic shaped the geography of the Bantustans, which were conveniently located near urban and industrial centers where labor was needed.

In contrast, Israel’s current strategy in the OPTs does not depend on exploiting Palestinian labor at scale. Palestinians are often treated less as an economic resource than as an existential threat to the Jewish ethnostate.

A common counterargument to the apartheid label is that Palestinian citizens of Israel enjoy full political rights and civil liberties. But this framing excludes the roughly five million living in the OPTs. Israel’s own supreme court has affirmed that the West Bank is under belligerent occupation by the state of Israel, and thus under its military control.

In 2022, Michael Lynk, then UN special rapporteur for human rights in the OPTs, concluded in a report that Israel was practicing apartheid. In his report, Lynk states that Palestinians’ human rights in the OPTs are marked by a “significant deterioration,” as they face ongoing state-sanctioned violence with high rates of arbitrary use of force — physical and administrative.

In the West Bank, Jewish settlers are tried in civil courts, while Palestinians — including children — are persecuted under military law, with conviction rates of over 99 percent. Hundreds of Palestinians are held at any given time in administrative detention, a practice that allows imprisonment without charge or trial. While South Africa employed a similar tactic under the General Law Amendment Act (which allowed ninety-day detentions), Israel’s version allows detention orders to be renewed indefinitely without formal charges being filed.

Stateless and Under Siege

In the West Bank, political organizing is sharply restricted. Political parties are banned and military orders prohibit most forms of protest, including peaceful demonstrations. Violators can face significant prison sentences.

Meanwhile, Jewish Israeli settlers in the same territory retain the full rights and legal protections of Israeli citizenship, including the ability to assemble and organize politically. As Lynk concluded, this dual legal regime systematically allocates political and civil rights based on ethnicity.

Gaza is often described as no longer under Israeli control following the 2005 disengagement, even though it enforces what a UN report describes as a “medieval military blockade,” which controls Gaza’s imports, exports, territorial waters, airspace, electricity lines, and telecommunications. Because of this control, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and leading Israeli legal scholars such as Professor Yoram Dinstein, have all concluded that Israel’s blockade on Gaza is tantamount to occupation in the eyes of international law. Under this framework, Israel bears responsibility for the human rights of Gaza’s population — a responsibility it has repeatedly failed to uphold.

Even the South African apartheid regime didn’t routinely bomb their Bantustans. The difference is not necessarily one of principle but of strategy and context: South African leaders were more sensitive to global opinion and the diplomatic consequences of overt violence.

Israel, by contrast, has maintained strong diplomatic backing, particularly from Western powers, allowing it to operate with impunity when it comes to the use of force. Its public relations efforts, coordinated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson’s unit, have shaped international media narratives, enabling its “mask-off” approach.

Nonetheless, public opinion is shifting. Before October 7, 2023, Israel enjoyed broadly favorable standing in many Western countries. Now, 53 percent of Americans and 61 percent of Britons hold an unfavorable view of Israel.

This collapse in public support reflects earlier patterns seen in the decline of apartheid South Africa’s international reputation. While resistance to apartheid existed from the beginning, it was the stark images of state violence — particularly against children — and growing grassroots mobilization that helped galvanize global opposition.

When Public Opinion Turns

Israel is now experiencing a PR disaster reminiscent of apartheid South Africa’s final years — amplified by viral footage on social media showing soldiers destroying homes, looting belongings, and wearing clothes and undergarments in an effort to humiliate civilians.

For many, the reckoning has come far too late. It has taken nearly two years of real-time footage of devastation and civilian death to provoke widespread public outrage. Some estimates of the death toll, factoring in famine and health system collapse, have placed the figure in the hundreds of thousands.

Yet despite this shift in global sentiment, those in the Israeli government continue to advocate plans for the complete annexation of the West Bank — plans that will likely be met with diplomatic acquiescence from Western leaders, even as their populations grow more critical.

South Africa’s denaturalization laws lasted for about two decades before the Bantustans were dissolved and reintegrated. Israel, by contrast, has maintained occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 and continues to withhold political and citizenship rights from millions of Palestinians in territories under its control.

As Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza face the threat of mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing, growing global awareness must be met with action. Just as international pressure was instrumental in the dismantling of apartheid South Africa, a similar response is warranted now. The boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement retains a clear message: maintaining a system of ethnonational dominance carries political and economic costs. If Israel is becoming a pariah in the eyes of the world, that status should come with consequences.