The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid names the right to a nationality once, in Article II(c), as one of eight rights and freedoms whose denial can constitute an enumerated act. The three documents that carry the apartheid characterization into wide circulation, published by Human Rights Watch in April 2021, by Amnesty International in February 2022, and by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory in 2022, each name identity, nationality or status among the components of the system they describe, and each presents it as one component inside a wider system rather than as the test itself. Israel’s own enacted text addresses national identity directly: Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, passed by the Knesset in 2018, states that the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People, and Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the law in 2021. Underneath the legal argument sits a plainer question about names: whether what a person is called in a state’s records is itself a right, and what happens to the word Palestinian once the argument leaves the treaty clause.
Key Findings
- Article II(c) of the 1973 Apartheid Convention lists the right to a nationality among eight rights and freedoms it names, alongside the rights to work, to form recognized trade unions, to education, to leave and return, to movement and residence, to opinion and expression, and to peaceful assembly and association.
- Article II of the same treaty sets out six lettered categories of conduct and conditions all of them on one purpose clause: the acts must be committed “for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”
- Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, enacted by the Knesset in 2018, states in Article 1(c): “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” The Israeli Supreme Court dismissed fifteen petitions against the law in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset on 8 July 2021.
- The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics counted about 10.148 million residents in September 2025, recording them by population group as Jews and others (about 7.758 million) and Arabs (about 2.130 million), a classification the Bureau defines by religion and community, with no national-identity category.
- Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) coded 1,504 comments on leading UK media Facebook pages and found 26.9% antisemitic; within that subset, 7.7% invoked denial of Jewish self-determination and 5.2% the apartheid analogy.
Do the published apartheid findings name denial of Palestinian identity?
Three documents are where the claim originates. Human Rights Watch published its report in April 2021, Amnesty International published its report in February 2022, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory issued a statement in 2022. Each names identity, nationality or status among the components of the system it describes.
Human Rights Watch wrote in 2021 that Israeli authorities had dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated and subjugated Palestinians “by virtue of their identity as Palestinians,” and concluded that this amounted to apartheid where it read the required elements as met. Amnesty International’s 2022 report lists the “denial of nationality and status to Palestinians” among the components of the system it characterizes as apartheid, maintained, in its account, through laws, policies and practices it describes as discriminatory. The UN Special Rapporteur stated in 2022 that the evidentiary standard for apartheid was met, describing an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression carried out with the intent to maintain the domination of one group over another.
Two things about these three documents are worth stating precisely, because they govern how the rest of the question can be answered. First, each is the issuing body’s own determination under its own reading of the treaty definition. Two are reports by organizations with stated advocacy missions; the third is the position of an individual mandate holder appointed to report on one territory. None is a judgment of a court, and none is an official statistic.
Second, none of the three treats identity denial as the whole of the claim. In each document it appears as one item in a list: alongside restrictions on movement and residence, land and planning measures, the separation of populations into distinct legal categories, and the use of force. The formulation that circulates most widely, that denying Palestinian identity is part of an apartheid system, tracks what these documents say about the structure of their own argument. What the documents do not do is convert that component into the legal test, and the treaty text explains why.
Is denying a group’s identity by itself the test for apartheid?
Article II of the 1973 Apartheid Convention sets out six lettered categories of conduct, from (a) to (f), and conditions all of them on a single purpose clause: the listed inhuman acts must be “committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”
So the direction of the common claim holds and the structure does not. The 2021 and 2022 documents do name identity-based treatment as part of what they call apartheid, and Human Rights Watch put identity at the centre of its own sentence in 2021. In the instrument, identity enters twice over: once as conduct, inside the acts the treaty enumerates, and once as the purpose element, in the requirement that the conduct serve domination by one group over another. It is not a freestanding item that can be established alone.
That distinction matters for how any assessment is built, and it is why the treaty standard governs the argument rather than any single component of it. A finding under Article II requires conduct plus purpose; a finding that a group’s identity is denied recognition establishes neither on its own. Both Amnesty International in 2022 and Human Rights Watch in 2021 build their determinations this way, presenting identity and status denial as evidence bearing on a wider system, and Human Rights Watch limits its own conclusion to the areas where it reads the elements as satisfied. The stronger and weaker versions of the claim are therefore separable: that these bodies cite identity and nationality denial as a mechanism is a matter of record in their texts; that identity denial is itself the definition is not what those texts assert.
Which Convention clause mentions the right to a nationality?
Article II(c) is the only place the 1973 Convention names nationality. It covers “any measures, including legislative measures, designed to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms.”
The clause then names the rights: the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. The word “including” makes the list open rather than exhaustive, so nationality is one named instance of a broader category, not a numbered element of its own.
A second clause carries the fragmentation argument. Article II(d) covers measures “designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups,” and the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group.
Set against the treaty text, the two organizational determinations map onto different clauses. Amnesty International’s 2022 language about the denial of nationality and status to Palestinians sits on Article II(c). Human Rights Watch’s 2021 language about forcible separation sits on Article II(d), as does the broader argument about Palestinians held under separate legal statuses in different territories. The Special Rapporteur’s 2022 statement is pitched at the level of the purpose clause rather than at any single act, describing an institutionalised regime and an intent to maintain domination.
The circulating shorthand about “legal and institutional denial of nationality and status” therefore compresses two distinct clauses and one purpose test into a single phrase. The clauses are short enough to read in full, and reading them shows what each requires.
What does peer-reviewed legal scholarship say about nationality denial?
Three law-journal articles carry the nationality argument in the peer-reviewed tier. A 2023 article in the European Journal of International Law states that Israel effectively denies Palestinians their right to a nationality by obstructing Palestinian self-determination, tying the nationality question to the self-determination question rather than treating them separately.
An article in the Fordham International Law Journal examines whether the criminal offence of apartheid applies in the occupied Palestinian territory, taking the question as an open one of legal application rather than as a settled classification. A 2013 article in the European Journal of International Law, volume 24, issue 3, summarizes the 2011 finding of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine that Israel subjects the Palestinian people to an institutionalized regime amounting to apartheid; the tribunal was a citizens’ body convened for that purpose, and the 2013 article reports its finding rather than making one.
What this tier supplies, and what it does not, should be stated plainly. All three are legal argument: reasoning from treaty text and from a reading of facts to a conclusion about how a criminal definition applies. None is a measurement, so none produces a share, a rate or a count, and a reader who wants a number from this literature will not find one. The 2023 article’s claim about nationality is an assessment of legal effect, and it turns on the self-determination premise it states, which is the same premise Israel’s 2018 Basic Law addresses in its own terms.
The literature is also not unanimous, and the peer-reviewed articles here are the side that argues the characterization applies. The Fordham article’s framing, treating applicability as a question to be examined, marks the point where the disagreement lives: not usually over what the 1973 Convention says, but over whether the purpose element and the racial-group element are satisfied on the facts. That is where the published objections concentrate.
Which published analyses reject the apartheid characterization?
Three published objections are available, and each is aligned with a party or is outside the peer-reviewed tier. A working paper archived on SSRN, titled to argue that allegations Israel is an apartheid state are false under international law, is the fullest legal statement of the rejection; it is a working paper, not a peer-reviewed article.
The objections divide along the elements of Article II rather than along its list of acts. The first is the purpose element: the treaty requires that conduct be committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group over another, and the rejection reads the measures at issue as security measures adopted for a different stated purpose, which on that reading leaves the purpose clause unsatisfied whatever the effects. The second is the racial-group element: the Convention speaks throughout of racial groups, and the rejection disputes whether the categories in question answer to that term as the treaty uses it. The third is directed at method rather than at law, arguing that the determinations rest on the issuing organizations’ own selection and characterization of facts.
That last line of objection is where the two aligned research organizations sit. NGO Monitor, a monitoring organization with a stated advocacy mission, reports in its Annual Report 2024 its own mapping of what it describes as an anti-Israel network, identifying 157 groups in the United States with over 3,000 connections between them and 111 groups in Canada with over 1,800 connections. Those are NGO Monitor’s own counts on criteria the report does not set out, and the mapping is a claim about organizational relationships rather than about the treaty elements. The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, a research institute aligned with a party to the events, published a 2025 essay contesting how atrocity-crime terminology is applied in this conflict, and states on its own page that the principal figures in circulation have not been independently confirmed.
None of these three is a court judgment either. The disagreement described here runs between published positions, not between rulings.
Does Israeli law address Palestinian national identity by name?
Israel’s enacted law addresses national self-determination without naming Palestinians. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, passed by the Knesset in 2018, states in Article 1(c), in the Knesset’s own published English translation, which the Knesset labels unofficial: “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.”
Article 4 handles language. Clause 4(a) states “Hebrew is the language of the State.” Clause 4(b) states “Arabic has a special status in the State.” Clause 4(c) adds that nothing in the article “shall compromise the status given to the Arabic language in practice, before this basic-law came into force.” Article 7 states that the State “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.” The law contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause, which is a fact about the text and not a finding about how anyone is treated.
The Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice with an eleven-justice panel, ruled on the law in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset on 8 July 2021. It dismissed the fifteen petitions and upheld the Basic Law. The Court also held that the Knesset, acting as constituent authority, is not all powerful and lacks authority even by Basic Law to deny or facially contradict the core character of the state as both Jewish and democratic, setting the test narrowly: whether the amendment denies that core democratic identity or inflicts mortal harm on the minimal core characteristics of that identity. Both halves of that ruling belong to the record.
Israel’s official statistics classify residents by population group rather than by nationality. The Central Bureau of Statistics counted about 10.148 million residents in September 2025, comprising about 7.758 million Jews and others and about 2.130 million Arabs, with roughly 260,000 foreign residents counted in the total but outside both groups. The Bureau defines Arabs as Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze, and others as non-Arab Christians, other religions, and those registered as not classified by religion. No category in the series is national, so the word Palestinian does not appear in it. The Bureau also counts East Jerusalem residents inside Israel’s total, a scope choice that differs from the convention international monitors use.
What does the Palestinian leadership’s own tally record?
One concrete number circulates behind the phrase about major organizations and experts. The Negotiations Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization published a document in 2023 titled Recognizing Apartheid, which states that there had been 67 recognitions that the situation constitutes apartheid, including joint statements.
Three properties of that figure travel with it. It is the compiling body’s own count, published by a party to the events it describes, and it is not an independently verified or audited tally. Its unit is a recognition, which the document’s own counting rules define, and a recognition can be a report, a statement, a resolution or a signature on a joint statement, so the 67 counts documents and endorsements rather than states, courts or measured findings. And because joint statements are included, one document can carry many signatories, so the figure is not a count of institutions holding the position either.
What the number does establish is scale of published endorsement, and that is a different quantity from either a legal finding or a measured share. Endorsement counts answer how widely a characterization has been stated; they do not test the elements the 1973 Convention sets out, and no court judgment in the record read for this report converts any of the 67 into a ruling on the treaty’s purpose clause.
The figure is also the point at which the question shifts registers. The 1973 treaty text, the 2018 Basic Law and the 2021 Supreme Court judgment are instruments and rulings, each checkable at its source. The determinations of 2021 and 2022 are organizational positions, dated and quotable. A tally of recognitions is a measure of how far the characterization has spread through public argument. That third quantity, spread, is the one that can be measured in ordinary discourse, and the vocabulary of identity and self-determination is where it shows up.
How does self-determination denial appear in measured antisemitic content?
Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) coded 1,504 comments on the Facebook pages of leading UK media outlets reacting to the May 2021 escalation and found 26.9% antisemitic against an IHRA-based scheme. Within that antisemitic subset, 7.7% invoked denial of Jewish self-determination and 5.2% the apartheid analogy, making the self-determination category one of the smaller coded categories in the corpus.
The same peer-reviewed study reports that thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK antisemitic comments, 48.3% of the German and about 62% of the French, so in a large share of cases the coding did not turn on the comment’s own words. The shares are of comments in one keyword-bounded corpus on one platform in one month, and the categories are non-exclusive, so they may not be summed.
The attitudinal literature measures the adjacent association rather than the vocabulary. Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026), across three preregistered studies with samples of 373, 243 and 493, report that their Conspiracies Mediated Model of New Antisemitism accounted for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, and that conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists mediated the association between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes, while conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel and a general conspiratorial mindset did not. These are correlational findings from survey designs, reported as associations by the authors, and they carry no claim that any particular argument or framing causes antisemitic attitudes.
Two distinct things are therefore measured here, and they should not be run together. One is a coding share: how often a specific rhetorical move appears inside a corpus already judged antisemitic. The other is an attitudinal association between measured constructs in a survey sample. Neither measures the legal question, and neither speaks to whether any individual commenter holds any belief.
Methodology and limitations
This report reads instruments, rulings, official statistics, published determinations and peer-reviewed measurement, in that order of evidentiary weight, and it measures the discourse around a contested legal characterization rather than the characterization’s merits.
The primary and official records are the text of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, quoted from Article II; Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, quoted from the Knesset’s published English translation, which the Knesset labels unofficial; the Israeli Supreme Court’s judgment in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, delivered 8 July 2021 by an eleven-justice panel, with the vote split not recorded here; and the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics population release of September 2025. The Bureau’s counts cover residents of Israel on the Bureau’s own scope, which includes East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers; its published percentages use a 9.888 million base rather than the 10.148 million total, so counts are used here in place of shares.
The 2021 and 2022 apartheid determinations are organizational and mandate-holder positions under each body’s own reading of the treaty definition, dated and quoted as such, and each of the issuing organizations states an advocacy mission. The published objections are a working paper archived on SSRN, not peer-reviewed, and two research organizations aligned with a party, NGO Monitor and the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, whose figures are their own counts on criteria their publications do not set out. The 67 recognitions figure is the Palestine Liberation Organization Negotiations Affairs Department’s own compilation from 2023, a party’s own published count.
The three law-journal articles are legal argument rather than measurement, and produce no rates. Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) is peer-reviewed; its shares are of keyword-bounded comment samples on one platform in one month, its categories are non-exclusive, and the reported categories are a subset. Harber and colleagues (2026) is peer-reviewed and carried here from its abstract; its findings are correlational and its samples are 373, 243 and 493.
No contentious judgment has determined whether the elements of the 1973 Convention are satisfied in the occupied Palestinian territory. The International Court of Justice addressed the adjacent question in its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, finding a breach of the anti-segregation provision of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; an advisory opinion is not a contentious judgment and binds no party, and the Court did not rule on the 1973 Convention’s own elements. The domestic ruling in the record addresses the constitutionality of an Israeli Basic Law.
Conclusion
So is a name a right, and does its denial make an apartheid system? Article II(c) of the 1973 Convention names the right to a nationality once, among eight rights and freedoms, and Article II conditions every listed act on a purpose clause about domination by one group over another. Human Rights Watch in 2021, Amnesty International in 2022 and the UN Special Rapporteur in 2022 each place identity, nationality or status inside that structure as a component. The word denial, in the treaty, attaches to conduct and requires a purpose; it is not a test that stands alone.
The record around it is unusually legible for a contested subject. Israel’s 2018 Basic Law says in one sentence that the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People, and Israel’s Supreme Court upheld that law in 2021 while holding that the Knesset could not deny the state’s core democratic identity. Israel’s official statistics count 2.130 million Arab residents in September 2025 in a classification built from religion and community, with no national category in it. A 2023 European Journal of International Law article argues the nationality right is effectively denied through obstruction of self-determination; a working paper argues the purpose and racial-group elements fail. The Palestine Liberation Organization’s own 2023 compilation counts 67 recognitions. Each of those is checkable at its source, and they do not resolve each other.
What the measurement adds is where the vocabulary goes next. In 1,504 coded UK comments from May 2021, denial of Jewish self-determination appeared in 7.7% of the antisemitic subset and the apartheid analogy in 5.2%, and Harber and colleagues report in 2026 that conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists mediate the association between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes. A treaty clause about who is entitled to a nationality, and a Basic Law clause about whose self-determination is exclusive, are arguments about names, and the same grammar of names is a coded category in a comment corpus. The question that leaves this report open is whether an argument conducted in the vocabulary of who may have a nation is one of the inputs that carries the older trope forward when it reaches an audience that never read the clause.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which treaty defines apartheid as a crime, and what does it require?
The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid sets out the definition relied on in the published determinations. Its Article II lists six lettered categories of inhuman acts and requires that they be committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group over another and systematically oppressing them.
Why is the phrase “racial group” in the Convention contested here?
The 1973 treaty text uses “racial group of persons” throughout Article II, including in provisions such as the reference to the prohibition of mixed marriages in Article II(d), and the working paper archived on SSRN disputes whether the categories at issue in this case answer to that term as the treaty uses it. The text itself does not define the term, which is why the element is argued rather than measured.
How does Israel’s official statistical series classify residents?
The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics reports population by group, defining Arabs as Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze, and others as non-Arab Christians, other religions, and those registered as not classified by religion. In September 2025 the Bureau counted about 10.148 million residents on that basis, including about 260,000 foreign residents counted in the total but outside both named groups.
Why do Israeli and Palestinian population figures for the same people differ?
Scope differs. The Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem residents inside Israel’s total, while the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics enumerated 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza in its 2017 census, using administrative estimates for East Jerusalem because it could not enumerate there directly. Every later total in either series is a projection off a different measured base.
Which court has actually ruled on Israel’s Nation-State Law?
The Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice with an eleven-justice panel, decided HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset on 8 July 2021, dismissing fifteen petitions and upholding the Basic Law. The same judgment held that the Knesset as constituent authority cannot deny the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic, a limit the Court derived from the Declaration of Independence, the Basic Laws, Knesset legislation and its own case law.
How do researchers decide that a comment denies Jewish self-determination?
Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) coded comments against a scheme built on the IHRA working definition, and report that the antisemitic meaning could only be inferred from the surrounding thread in 38.7% of the UK antisemitic comments, 48.3% of the German and about 62% of the French. The coding therefore rests substantially on conversational context rather than on a comment’s own wording.
Sources
- Becker, M., Ascone, L., and Troschke, H., 2022. Antisemitic comments on Facebook pages of leading British, French, and German media outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
- European Journal of International Law, 2013. Article summarizing the 2011 Russell Tribunal on Palestine finding, volume 24, issue 3, page 867. Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/ejil/article/24/3/867/481600. Peer-reviewed.
- European Journal of International Law, 2023. Article on the obstruction of Palestinian self-determination and the right to a nationality. Oxford University Press. Peer-reviewed.
- Fordham International Law Journal. Article examining whether the criminal offence of apartheid applies in the occupied Palestinian territory (year not stated on the copy consulted). https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2880&context=ilj. Peer-reviewed law review.
- Harber, R., Bulska, D., Malloy, C., and Vila, J., 2026. Antisemitism, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Anti-Israel Attitudes. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001635. Peer-reviewed (abstract-sourced).
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. Media release, September 2025. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israeli Supreme Court sitting as High Court of Justice, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Akram Hasson v. Knesset, judgment of 8 July 2021. versa.cardozo.yu.edu. Official record (court judgment).
- Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 2025. The Death of Genocide. jcfa.org. Research institute aligned with a party.
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, official English translation labelled unofficial by the Knesset. main.knesset.gov.il. Official record (enacted legislation).
- NGO Monitor, 2025. Annual Report 2024. ngo-monitor.org. Monitoring organization (advocacy mission).
- Palestine Liberation Organization, Negotiations Affairs Department, 2023. Recognizing Apartheid. nad.ps. A party’s own published compilation.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017, final results. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record (national census).
- SSRN working paper. Why Allegations that Israel Is an Apartheid State Are False under International Law. papers.ssrn.com. Working paper, not peer-reviewed.
- United Nations, 1973. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, Article II. Official record (treaty text).