Why Is Israel’s Treatment of Palestinians Called Apartheid? Reading the Treaty Definition, the Dated Determinations and Israel’s Own Records

Three organizations published determinations that Israel’s policies meet the legal definition of apartheid inside a 13-month window: B’Tselem on 12 January 2021, Human Rights Watch on 27 April 2021, and Amnesty International on 1 February 2022, each a monitoring organization’s own finding on its own reading of a treaty test. That test comes from the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and from Article 7 of the 1998 Rome Statute, which describe 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. Israel’s own institutions answer from a different set of records: its Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, dismissed fifteen petitions against Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People on 8 July 2021 while holding that the Knesset may not deny the state’s core character as Jewish and democratic. The word is a legal term with a written definition, and the argument is over whether the definition and the record meet.

Key Findings

• The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and Article 7 of the 1998 Rome Statute define the crime as inhumane acts committed within an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with intent to maintain that regime. Both are treaty texts, and both are general in form rather than tied to one country.
• Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, enacted by the Knesset in 2018, states at clause 1(c) that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” The enacted text contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause.
• Israel’s Supreme Court dismissed the petitions against that Basic Law in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, delivered 8 July 2021 before an eleven-justice panel, holding at the same time that the Knesset as constituent authority has no power, even by Basic Law, to deny the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic.
• The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics recorded a population of about 10.148 million in September 2025, of whom 2.130 million were counted as Arabs and 7.758 million as Jews and Others, 21.5% and 78.5% of the 9.888 million in those two groups. Those are the Bureau’s own figures for Israel’s resident population.
• Gallup’s February 2025 reading found 46% of US adults sympathizing more with the Israelis, the lowest in 25 years of that trend, against 33% sympathizing more with the Palestinians (n = 1,004, ±4 percentage points).

What reasoning do the published apartheid findings give?

Human Rights Watch’s report A Threshold Crossed, published 27 April 2021, runs 213 pages and states a three-part chain: an intent to maintain domination by one group over another, systematic oppression carried out to that end, and enumerated inhumane acts. Amnesty International’s report of 1 February 2022 and B’Tselem’s paper of 12 January 2021 state the same chain, each as that organization’s own determination.

Each document names a set of practices as the material it reads against the definition. The practices recur across the three: the sorting of Palestinians into separate legal and residency categories depending on where they live, land and planning policy, the permit and checkpoint system governing movement, and residency and family unification rules. Amnesty International’s 2022 report describes the result as a system of oppression and domination. B’Tselem’s January 2021 paper, titled A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, states the conclusion for all territory under Israeli control rather than for the occupied territories alone, which is the feature that distinguishes it from earlier arguments confined to the West Bank.

Human Rights Watch states its own reasoning in terms of a policy objective: that Israeli authorities have sought to maximize land for Jewish communities while minimizing the number of Palestinians living on it. That formulation matters to the legal argument, because the treaty test requires intent, and a stated objective is what the report offers in place of it.

Two things follow for a reader weighing these documents. Each is a determination by a monitoring organization applying a legal test to a body of evidence it assembled itself, not a court judgment and not an official statistic. And each is cumulative in construction: the argument in all three rests on a pattern assembled from many practices, so no single named policy carries it, and removing any one of them leaves the argument standing as its authors wrote it. That structure is what makes the claim difficult to answer point by point, and it is also what makes the treaty definition, rather than any individual measure, the place where the dispute actually turns.

Is the label applied to a pattern, not one policy?

Yes, and the structure is explicit in the documents. Amnesty International’s February 2022 report groups its case into four claimed domains of control: Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, residents of East Jerusalem, residents of the West Bank and Gaza, and refugees outside the territory. It then organizes its findings under four headings of practice rather than under named statutes.

Those headings are territorial fragmentation, dispossession of land and property, segregation and control, and deprivation of economic and social rights. The domains and the headings cross each other, so that a single practice, a residency rule or a planning decision, appears in the argument with a different effect in each domain. That is the sense in which the report is describing a system rather than a law.

Human Rights Watch’s April 2021 report is built the same way, around a stated objective pursued across many instruments rather than around one instrument. B’Tselem’s January 2021 paper extends the geographic scope of the claim to all territory under Israeli control, which again is an argument about arrangement rather than about any single enactment.

The consequence for anyone testing the claim is arithmetical. A cumulative argument is not refuted by a counterexample and is not established by an example, so the weight falls entirely on whether the assembled pattern satisfies the three elements the treaty text sets out. This is also why the disagreement rarely resolves into a factual dispute over any one measure: the parties frequently agree that a checkpoint exists, a permit is required, or a demolition order was issued, and disagree over what the assembled set of them constitutes in law. Whether the assembled record meets the written test is examined in more detail in our reading of the treaty standard and the published determinations.

Does the term point to South Africa or a treaty?

To a treaty, in each of the three determinations. The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and Article 7 of the 1998 Rome Statute both define the crime as inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention of maintaining that regime. Both instruments are general in form, and neither names a country.

Human Rights Watch in 2021 and Amnesty International in 2022 each state that they are applying that written definition rather than drawing a comparison to South Africa, and both distinguish the two routes in their own text. The distinction is load-bearing. A comparison argument can be answered by listing differences between two countries. A treaty argument can only be answered on the three elements the text specifies: the institutionalized regime, the systematic oppression and domination, and the intent to maintain it.

The other route exists and has a dated record. The UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia published a report in March 2017 that argued from the South African precedent and reached the same conclusion. That report was withdrawn from the United Nations website at the Secretary-General’s request in the same month it appeared. It continues to circulate, and its provenance is worth knowing when it does: it is a withdrawn commission report, not a standing United Nations finding.

One further feature of the treaty text shapes the argument on both sides. The definition speaks of a “racial group,” while the dispute at issue concerns groups more usually described in national, ethnic, or religious terms. Each of the determinations addresses that gap in its own text and reads the treaty term as reaching ethnic and national groups; those who reject the characterization contest that reading. The gap is in the instrument, not in the reporting of it, and it is one of the few points where the disagreement is genuinely about the words of the definition rather than about the record it is applied to.

When did each organization adopt this characterization?

The characterization concentrated in a 13-month window between January 2021 and February 2022, after a single earlier and short-lived instance. Before 2021, the term appeared in argument about a possible future rather than as a published institutional finding about the present.

The sequence, by date of publication:

Source: publication dates as printed on each document.

Two features of that sequence are worth stating plainly. The clustering is tight: the three determinations most often cited appeared within thirteen months of one another, and the two later United Nations mandate and thematic reports follow rather than precede them. And the earliest entry in the list did not survive publication in its original venue, which is a fact about the record rather than about its contents.

The compression also means the body of published determination is young. The oldest of the three standing documents dates to January 2021, so the characterization as an institutional finding is measured in years, not decades, whatever the age of the underlying argument.

Which Israeli figures have used the term themselves?

Human Rights Watch’s April 2021 report and the question-and-answer document it published alongside it record statements from within Israeli public life, by people who had previously held Israeli legal and security offices, describing the situation as apartheid or as meeting the legal definition. Those statements reach the record as one organization’s compilation of individual views, and none of them is an institutional Israeli position.

No compiled, dated list of such statements with a count appears in the sources available here, so no total is given. What can be stated is the form the statements take and the distinction that runs through them.

That distinction is between the conditional and the declarative. Warnings that Israel could become an apartheid state if a particular course continued are a claim about a possible future and have circulated in Israeli political argument for many years. A statement that the situation already meets the legal definition is a claim about the present and is the one the 2021 and 2022 determinations make. The two are frequently quoted interchangeably, and they are not the same assertion: the first concedes the definition is not currently met, and the second holds that it is.

The Institute reports these as aggregate features of a compiled record rather than as attributed positions of named individuals. What the record does not contain is any Israeli statutory text, court ruling, or official publication adopting the characterization. Where Israeli institutions have addressed the underlying statutes, they have done so on their own terms, which the next section sets out.

How does Israel’s government answer the characterization?

Israel’s Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, dismissed fifteen petitions against Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, heard before an eleven-justice panel on 22 December 2020 and delivered 8 July 2021. The Basic Law was upheld. The Court held at the same time that the Knesset, as constituent authority, is not all powerful and may not deny the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic.

The judgment cuts in both directions and should be read whole. The law stands, and the Court set a constitutional limit that a future enactment could violate, derived from what it called the elements of the constitution developed since the founding: the Declaration of Independence, the Basic Laws, Knesset legislation, and Supreme Court case law.

The enacted text is short and is the document most of the argument runs through. In the Knesset’s own published English translation, which the Knesset labels unofficial, clause 1(b) states that Israel “is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination,” and clause 1(c) that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” Clause 4 makes Hebrew “the language of the State” and gives Arabic “a special status.” Clause 7 states that the State “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.” The text contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause, a fact about the document rather than a finding about administration. The wider set of statutes cited in this argument is examined in our reading of the laws called Jewish supremacist.

Against that sits the founding instrument. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read 14 May 1948, pledges that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex” and appeals to “the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel” to participate “on the basis of full and equal citizenship.”

On the current operations, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in its September 2025 position statement frames the measures at issue as security measures within an armed conflict. That is a party’s own characterization of its own conduct.

How many people outside these organizations hold the view?

Gallup’s February 2025 reading found 46% of US adults sympathizing more with the Israelis, the lowest figure in 25 years of that trend, with 33% sympathizing more with the Palestinians, the highest by two points (n = 1,004, fielded 3 to 16 February 2025, ±4 percentage points). The question is a forced choice between two named parties and measures relative sympathy only.

The movement across the series is large. Gallup recorded 63% sympathizing more with the Israelis in February 2010 (n = 1,025, ±4 points), the highest since 1991. In February 2023 Democrats sympathized more with the Palestinians (49%) than with the Israelis (38%) for the first time in the trend, and by 2025 Republicans stood at 75% with the Israelis while Democrats stood at 59% with the Palestinians. In 2025, 55% of US adults told Gallup they favor establishing an independent Palestinian state, in line with readings since 2020. Gallup’s own methodology work documents that placement of the question within a survey changes the shares it produces, which bears on comparison across readings.

Age is the sharpest split in the adjacent survey work. The Yale Youth Poll’s Fall 2025 national survey of registered voters found two-thirds of voters rejecting all three antisemitic statements it tested, while 10% of voters aged 18 to 34 agreed with all three, against 2% of voters 65 and older, and about one in five young respondents supported boycotting Jewish American-owned businesses over the war in Gaza. The American Jewish Committee’s 2025 survey reports the receiving end of the same period: about 31% of American Jews said they were personally targeted by antisemitism in 2025, rising to 47% among those aged 18 to 29.

None of these instruments asks respondents about the word itself. No named survey series in the record here publishes a share of any population endorsing the apartheid characterization by name, so the base rates above are the nearest measured proxies and should be read as such.

Which attitudes are measured alongside this framing?

Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026, peer-reviewed, three preregistered studies) report that their Conspiracies Mediated Model of New Antisemitism accounted for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, with conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists mediating the association between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes. Conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel did not mediate it, and a general conspiratorial mindset did not explain the results.

The design is correlational across a longitudinal study (N = 373), a cross-sectional study (N = 243) and a three-wave longitudinal study (N = 493), so the finding is an association and its direction is not established by the model. The same paper reports that Democrats, compared with Republicans, expressed less antisemitism but stronger anti-Israel attitudes and greater endorsement of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist conspiracy beliefs, a split that maps onto the partisan gap Gallup measures on sympathies.

Enstad (2026, peer-reviewed) measured one specific framing across two nationally representative Norwegian surveys, Study 1 (N = 1,575) and a preregistered replication, Study 2 (N = 1,653). Endorsement of Holocaust inversion, the belief that Israel treats Palestinians as badly as Jews were treated during the Second World War, was associated in both studies with justification of harassment and violence against Jews and with refusal to take a stance against such aggression, and also with refusal to answer questions measuring blatant antisemitic prejudice. The replication confirmed the first study.

Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025, peer-reviewed) ran two experiments with British samples (Study 1 N = 354, Study 2 N = 490) priming participants with war-in-Gaza material. They report two separate pathways to anti-Jewish hostility: one running through social dominance orientation, and a second running through out-group identity fusion with the Palestinian people, in which attitudes toward Israel are conflated with prejudice toward Jews.

These are measured associations among attitude scales, carrying each study’s own stated bounds. None of them measures the apartheid characterization by name, and none establishes that holding one attitude produces another. The wider measurement literature on that boundary is set out in our review of what the evidence measures on anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

Methodology and limitations

This report measures the record around the characterization: the treaty texts it invokes, the dates and stated reasoning of the determinations that advance it, the statutes, court rulings and population statistics Israel publishes, and the survey and attitude research that measures related views. The underlying legal question is decided in forums that publish their own rulings, and none of those rulings is reported here as a finding of this report.

Sources are labelled by type throughout. Treaty texts (the 1973 Apartheid Convention, Article 7 of the 1998 Rome Statute), the Knesset’s enacted Basic Law, the Provisional Government of Israel’s 1948 Declaration, and the Supreme Court judgment in HCJ 5555/18 are primary records. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics figures are that agency’s own official statistics for Israel’s resident population, and the Bureau counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside that total, a scope choice that differs from the convention used by international monitors. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement is a party’s own account of its own conduct. Gallup, the Yale Youth Poll and the American Jewish Committee survey are named survey instruments with the sample sizes and fielding dates given inline. Harber and colleagues (2026), Enstad (2026) and Ozer and colleagues (2025) are peer-reviewed and correlational; their associations are reported as associations.

The determinations by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, and the reports of United Nations mandate holders, are each named and dated as that body’s own published finding on its own definitions. Their internal counts are not carried here as measured quantities.

Three absences in the record are material. No compiled, dated list with a count of statements by Israeli public figures using the term appears in these sources, so no total is given. No named survey series publishes a share of any population endorsing the apartheid characterization by name, so the opinion figures above are proxies on adjacent questions rather than measures of the term. And the Supreme Court’s judgment in HCJ 5555/18 is reported here by outcome and reasoning; the panel numbered eleven justices and the vote split is not stated in the record used.

Conclusion

So why is Israel’s treatment of Palestinians called apartheid? Because a treaty adopted in 1973 and restated in Article 7 of the Rome Statute in 1998 sets out a three-part test, and three organizations published, between 12 January 2021 and 1 February 2022, their own findings that the test is met.

Everything else in the record follows from how that test is built. It requires an institutionalized regime, systematic oppression and domination, and intent, which is why the determinations are cumulative arguments across four claimed domains and four categories of practice rather than objections to a single law. It is why the treaty route and the South African analogy are different arguments, and why the one prominent analogy-based report, issued in March 2017, was withdrawn from the United Nations website the same month. Israel’s own instruments answer on their own record: a 2018 Basic Law whose clause 1(c) reserves national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish People and which contains no equality clause, a 1948 Declaration pledging complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens, a Supreme Court that on 8 July 2021 upheld the first while ruling that the Knesset may not deny the state’s democratic core, and a statistical agency that counted 2.130 million Arab residents in September 2025, 21.5% of the 9.888 million in the Bureau’s two population groups. Alongside all of it, American sympathy toward the Israelis fell from 63% in 2010 to 46% in 2025, and no survey series publishes how many people use the word at all.

That last gap is where the Institute’s interest sits. A term with a written legal definition has become a term of ordinary argument, and the attitude research measures what travels with it: Harber and colleagues found that conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists carried over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, and Enstad found across two Norwegian national surveys that endorsement of Holocaust inversion tracked justification of aggression against Jews. When a legal test moves into everyday speech, does it carry its three elements with it, or does it arrive carrying something the treaty never wrote down? The record says what each body published. It does not say which of those two things is happening in the sentence a reader last heard the word in.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which treaty instruments make apartheid a crime?

The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and Article 7 of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court both define it, in each case as inhumane acts committed within an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with intent to maintain that regime. Both texts are general in form and neither names a country.

What did Israel’s Supreme Court say the Knesset cannot do?

In HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, delivered 8 July 2021, the Court held that the Knesset as constituent authority is not all powerful and has no authority, even by Basic Law, to deny or facially contradict the core character of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. It derived that limit from the Declaration of Independence, the Basic Laws, Knesset legislation and its own case law, and it dismissed the fifteen petitions before it.

Does Israel’s founding declaration mention non-Jewish inhabitants?

Yes. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read 14 May 1948, pledges that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex,” and appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel” to participate in the state’s institutions “on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation.” The Knesset’s published English text reads “citizens” in the equality sentence; other widely used translations render the word as “inhabitants.”

How does Israel’s statistical agency count its Christian and Druze populations?

The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics reported approximately 184,200 Christians in Israel in its December 2025 preliminary estimate, about 1.9% of the population, of whom 78.7% were Arab Christians at the end of 2024. Its February 2024 release put the Druze population at approximately 152,000. Both are the Bureau’s own counts, and the Christian figure excludes people absent from the Population Register.

What share of Jerusalem’s residents does Israel count as Arab?

The Bureau’s Jerusalem Day release for 2024 recorded the city passing one million residents at the end of 2023, of whom 39.5% were counted as Arabs and 60.5% as Jews and Others. The Bureau counts the East Jerusalem neighbourhoods annexed after 1967 inside that single municipal population, which is why the share sits inside Israel’s national total.

Which research measures a link between anti-Israel attitudes and antisemitism?

Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026, peer-reviewed) report their model accounting for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes across three preregistered studies. Allington, Hirsh and Katz (2023, peer-reviewed) surveyed 1,790 UK adults in December 2021 and found coronavirus conspiracy suspicion correlated positively with generalised, Judeophobic and anti-Zionist antisemitism, the correlation being notably stronger with Judeophobic antisemitism. Both are correlational.

Do younger American voters differ on Israel-related attitudes?

The Yale Youth Poll’s Fall 2025 survey of registered voters found 10% of those aged 18 to 34 agreeing with all three antisemitic statements it tested, against 2% of voters 65 and older, with about one in five young respondents supporting boycotts of Jewish American-owned businesses over the war in Gaza. Two-thirds of all voters rejected all three statements.

Sources

• Allington, D., Hirsh, D., and Katz, L., 2023. Correlation Between Coronavirus Conspiracism and Antisemitism: A Cross-Sectional Study in the United Kingdom. Scientific Reports. DOI 10.1038/s41598-023-41794-y. Peer-reviewed.
• American Jewish Committee, 2025. The State of Antisemitism in America 2025. ajc.org/AntisemitismReport2025. Monitoring organization survey (advocacy mission).
• Enstad, J., 2026. Holocaust Inversion and Justification of Anti-Jewish Aggression: Evidence from Two National Surveys in Norway. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001704. Peer-reviewed.
• Gallup, 2010 to 2025. Middle East sympathies trend series. news.gallup.com/poll/1639. Named survey organization.
• Harber, K., Bulska, D., Malloy, T., and Vila, J., 2026. Antisemitism, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Anti-Israel Attitudes. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001635. Peer-reviewed.
• International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, 1973. Treaty text. Primary record.
• Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. Selected Data on the Occasion of Jerusalem Day, 2024. Media Release 165/2024. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
• Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. The Druze Population of Israel on the Occasion of the Nabi Shu’ayb Festival 2024. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
• Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Christmas 2025: Christians in Israel. Media Release 413/2025. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
• Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
• Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, 2025. Israel’s Objectives and Current Operation. embassies.gov.il. Official record, a party’s own statement.
• Israeli Supreme Court sitting as High Court of Justice, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, judgment of 8 July 2021. Official record, court judgment.
• Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, 5778-2018, official English translation. main.knesset.gov.il. Official record, enacted legislation.
• Ozer, S., Obaidi, M., and Bergh, R., 2025. The Impact of Globalized Conflicts: Examining Attitudes Toward Jews Among Britons in the Political Context of the War in Gaza. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 107. DOI 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102184. Peer-reviewed.
• Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, Tel Aviv, 14 May 1948. Primary record, founding instrument.
• Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998, Article 7. Treaty text. Primary record.
• Yale Youth Poll, 2025. Fall 2025 Poll on Antisemitic Attitudes and Israel-Palestine. youthpoll.yale.edu. Academic poll.