Four determinations issued between 2021 and 2022 apply the term apartheid to Israel’s rule in the occupied Palestinian territories, and none of the four was issued by a court. The two treaties that define apartheid as a crime, the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute, each require that the acts be committed for the purpose of maintaining domination by one racial group over another, and Israel is a party to neither instrument. What follows sets the treaty language, the determinations by date and issuing body, Israel’s own enacted law and court record, and the measured share of the apartheid framing inside coded antisemitic comment side by side.
Key Findings
- Article II of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, adopted 30 November 1973 and in force since 18 July 1976, reaches “the following inhuman acts 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.”
- Article 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute, adopted 17 July 1998 and in force since 1 July 2002, requires an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups” plus acts “committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
- Clause 1(c) of Israel’s Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, enacted in 2018, states that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” The Supreme Court of Israel dismissed 15 petitions against the law on 8 July 2021 in HCJ 5555/18, while holding that the Knesset may not deny the state’s core democratic identity.
- Article V of the 1973 Convention contemplates trial before “an international penal tribunal.” No such tribunal has been constituted in the roughly 50 years since the Convention entered into force.
- Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022), a peer-reviewed study of 1,504 comments on the Facebook pages of leading UK media outlets, coded 26.9% as antisemitic; the apartheid analogy appeared in 5.2% of those antisemitic comments.
What does the record hold on apartheid in the territories?
Four determinations issued between 2021 and 2022 apply the term to Israel’s rule in the occupied Palestinian territories, and none is a judicial finding: Human Rights Watch in April 2021, Amnesty International in February 2022, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories in March 2022, and a UN Human Rights Office thematic report in 2022.
Each is the conclusion of the body that issued it, reached on that body’s own reading of the definition. Human Rights Watch, a monitoring organization with an advocacy mandate, concluded in its April 2021 report that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. Amnesty International, likewise an advocacy-mission organization, concluded on 1 February 2022 that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians amounting to apartheid under international law. The Special Rapporteur’s March 2022 report to the Human Rights Council states that apartheid is being practised in the occupied Palestinian territory. The 2022 Human Rights Office thematic report on the administration of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, found reasonable grounds to believe that two distinct legal regimes are intended to be permanent.
The International Court of Justice delivered an advisory opinion on 19 July 2024 holding that Israel’s regime of comprehensive restrictions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory constitutes systemic discrimination on grounds of race, religion or ethnic origin, in breach of Article 3 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. That opinion is advisory, it was delivered on a request rather than in a contentious case between parties, and it enters no finding of the crime of apartheid.
The instruments that do carry binding force in the record are the treaty texts that define the crime, the Israeli legislation enacted by the Knesset, the 1995 interim agreement, and the judgment of Israel’s own Supreme Court. Those are dated below.
Is it often said that UN experts have determined apartheid?
It is often said that UN experts have determined that Israel practises apartheid, and one report says so in those words. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Michael Lynk, told the Human Rights Council in March 2022 that apartheid is being practised there because of what the report calls a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system.
A Special Rapporteur is an independent expert appointed by the Human Rights Council, serving in a personal capacity and unpaid, who submits reports to the Council. The report is the mandate-holder’s own document rather than a decision of the Council, and the 2022 Human Rights Office thematic report is likewise an office publication rather than a judgment. No international criminal tribunal has entered a finding on the crime.
The Rapporteur’s March 2022 report cites 700,000 Israeli settlers across some 300 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a count published by the mandate-holder on the mandate’s own definitions. The nearest figures from the demographic literature are lower and are broken out by territory. Sergio DellaPergola’s chapter in the American Jewish Year Book 2019 records, at the start of 2019, 418,900 core Jews in the West Bank and 221,800 in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods incorporated after 1967, alongside 23,200 on the Golan Heights and 6,001,700 within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
The gap is partly a counting convention. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported for Jerusalem Day 2024 that the city’s population passed one million at the end of 2023, 60.5% Jews and Others and 39.5% Arabs, counting the annexed East Jerusalem neighborhoods as part of a single municipal population inside Israel’s total. Hirsch-Hoefler and Ben Shitrit (2020) document how that convention developed in the Bureau’s yearbook: East Jerusalem entered the count for Israel proper in the 1968 edition, a 1970 footnote folded settlers into Israel’s total, and the separate territories chapter was removed in 1997.
What do US official reports record about the occupied territories?
The US Department of State’s country reporting on Israel and the occupied territories, required of the Department by sections 116(d) and 502B(b) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, documents the categories of restriction that the four determinations rest on and applies the term apartheid to none of them.
The Department reports on the territories in sections separate from Israel, a scope choice of its own. Its 2016 Report on International Religious Freedom treats “The Occupied Territories” as a distinct entry, and the Department’s human-rights reporting on the same territories records, under its own headings, restrictions on movement, demolitions of Palestinian structures, administrative detention without charge, and violence by settlers against Palestinians and their property. The reports describe conduct and attribute it; they do not characterize the aggregate as a crime under either treaty definition, and they contain no finding on the purpose element.
That is the shape of the difference between the tiers. Human Rights Watch in April 2021 and Amnesty International in February 2022 read substantially the same categories of restriction as constituent acts of the crime of apartheid, and each said so as its own legal conclusion. An official government record of the same practices, published annually by a state, stops at documentation. Two bodies looking at one set of practices produced a description in one case and a legal characterization in the other, and the divergence sits in the characterization rather than in the underlying categories, which appear in both.
Israel’s position, published by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, rejects the apartheid characterization. That rejection is a party’s own stated position, as the Amnesty and Human Rights Watch determinations are those organizations’ own conclusions.
Does the crime require proof of a purpose to dominate?
Both treaty definitions require a purpose and not only a pattern. Article II of the 1973 Apartheid Convention reaches “the following inhuman acts 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,” and the acts it then enumerates are qualified by that clause.
Article 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute is drawn the same way: the crime of apartheid means inhumane acts “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Under both texts, documented discrimination is a necessary but insufficient element; what separates it from the crime is proof of the purpose or intention behind it. Israel is not a party to the 1973 Convention, and although it signed the Rome Statute on 31 December 2000 it did not ratify it.
Human Rights Watch in 2021 and Amnesty International in 2022 each stated a conclusion on that element, holding that the practices they documented are maintained with the intent of preserving domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians. Those are the organizations’ own findings on their own application of the definition.
The enacted Israeli instrument that speaks in its own words to national purpose is the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, passed in 2018. 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”; clause 1(c) states that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People”; clause 7 states that “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” The law contains no equality clause. That is a fact about the text and not a finding about how anyone is treated.
On 8 July 2021, an eleven-justice panel of the Supreme Court of Israel dismissed 15 petitions against the law in HCJ 5555/18, upholding it while holding that the Knesset, even acting by Basic Law, has no authority to deny the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic.
Is the separation documented as permanent or inferred as permanent?
Permanence is an inference, and the 2022 UN Human Rights Office thematic report names the standard it applied: reasonable grounds to believe that the separation and subordination of Palestinians in the West Bank are intended to be permanent. That threshold is the one used in human-rights fact-finding, and it sits below the proof a criminal court requires on the intention element quoted above.
Against that inference stands the instrument Israel signed. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, signed in Washington on 28 September 1995, established the arrangements as interim, set a transitional period of five years, and deferred permanent-status issues, Jerusalem, settlements, borders and refugees among them, to later negotiation. The transitional period ran out in 1999 with no permanent-status agreement concluded, and the interim division of territory and jurisdiction has continued since. An arrangement drafted for five years has now been in force for 30 years, which is the documented fact on which readings in both directions rest.
Israel’s own commissioned review reached a further conclusion. The report of the commission on the status of building in Judea and Samaria, headed by former Supreme Court justice Edmond Levy and delivered to the government in July 2012, held that the law of belligerent occupation does not apply to the West Bank and recommended regularizing unauthorized outposts. The government never adopted it as policy, and the Levy review is cited here as a party’s own commissioned document rather than as an accepted legal position.
Clause 7 of the 2018 Basic Law, quoted above, is the enacted statement of settlement as a national value, and it carries no territorial limitation in its own text. Between an expired five-year interim framework, a commissioned review the government left unadopted, and a Basic Law provision with no expiry, the record holds the instruments; the characterization of the arrangement as permanent is a reading placed on them, and each body that has placed one has stated the standard it used.
Does the apartheid finding cover Gaza as well as the West Bank?
The four determinations differ in geographic scope, and two of them reach beyond the territories the question names. Amnesty International’s February 2022 report and Human Rights Watch’s April 2021 report both extend their conclusions to Israel itself, with Amnesty’s also covering displaced Palestinians, while the 2022 Human Rights Office thematic report addresses the administration of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The Special Rapporteur’s March 2022 report treats the occupied Palestinian territory as a unit. The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 likewise treats the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza as a single territory. So the phrase in common use covers, across four documents, at least three different perimeters, and no one of them is confined to the words a reader is likely to have in mind.
Gaza is where the divergence is sharpest. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that Israel removed its settlers and military forces from the Gaza Strip in 2005, a party’s own account of its own conduct. The demographic record is consistent on the narrow point: DellaPergola’s 2019 territorial breakdown reports 418,900 core Jews in the West Bank and 221,800 in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods, and records no core Jewish population figure for Gaza at all.
The dual-legal-regime finding therefore has an uneven footing across the perimeter. The 2022 thematic report frames its two-regimes analysis on the West Bank, where settlers are governed under Israeli civil law and Palestinians under military orders. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, by extending their conclusions to Israel’s own citizens and to Palestinians outside the territories, are answering a wider question than the one the phrase “occupied Palestinian territories” describes, and their scope choices are stated in their own reports. Where the argument turns on conditions inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, it turns on the enacted statutes and founding texts rather than on the law of occupation.
Which forum could rule on apartheid, and has one been asked?
No forum has been asked to rule on the crime. Article V of the 1973 Convention contemplates trial before “a competent tribunal of any State Party” or before “an international penal tribunal having jurisdiction,” and no such international penal tribunal has been constituted in the roughly 50 years since the Convention entered into force on 18 July 1976.
What has been filed elsewhere charges other crimes. The contentious case South Africa brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice in December 2023 invokes the Genocide Convention, not the Apartheid Convention. The Court’s 19 July 2024 opinion in the separate advisory proceedings is non-binding by its nature as an advisory opinion. At the International Criminal Court, the arrest warrants issued in November 2024 in the Palestine situation charge war crimes and crimes against humanity, including persecution and starvation as a method of warfare; no count of apartheid appears among them.
Jurisdictional facts narrow the field further. Israel is not a party to the 1973 Convention, so that treaty’s own enforcement provisions, which oblige states parties to prosecute, do not run against it directly, and Israel does not accept the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction. No judgment by a national court entering a finding of the crime of apartheid in respect of the territories appears in the public record.
The one court that has ruled on the enacted Israeli instrument is Israel’s own. In HCJ 5555/18, decided 8 July 2021, the Supreme Court sitting as High Court of Justice dismissed the petitions against the 2018 Basic Law and upheld it, while setting a constitutional limit the Court said the Knesset may not cross: an amendment may not deny the core democratic identity of the state or inflict mortal harm on the minimal core characteristics of its identity as Jewish and democratic. The law stands, and the limit stands with it. Neither half of that judgment resolves the treaty question, because the Court was asked about Israeli constitutional law and not about Article II of a convention Israel has not joined.
Where does apartheid vocabulary sit in measured online discourse?
5.2% of the antisemitic comments coded by Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) invoked the apartheid analogy. The peer-reviewed study analyzed 1,504 comments on the Facebook pages of leading UK media outlets reacting to the May 2021 escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, of which 26.9% were coded antisemitic against a scheme based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition.
Within those UK antisemitic comments the frames were distributed unevenly and the categories are non-exclusive, so they do not sum: the “evil” stereotype appeared in 39.8%, Israel’s sole guilt in 27.9%, child murder or blood libel in 8.1%, denial of Jewish self-determination in 7.7%, the apartheid analogy in 5.2% and the Nazi analogy in 4.2%. Coders needed the surrounding thread to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK cases. The same study coded 12.6% of 1,500 French comments and 13.6% of 1,520 German comments as antisemitic.
Two later studies measure associations rather than shares. Enstad (2026), reporting two nationally representative Norwegian surveys (N = 1,575 and a preregistered replication with N = 1,653), found that endorsement of Holocaust inversion, the belief that Israel treats Palestinians as badly as Jews were treated during the Second World War, was associated with justification of harassment and violence against Jews and with refusal to take a stance against such aggression. The finding is correlational, and the second study confirmed the first.
Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025), in two British experiments (N = 354 and N = 490) that primed participants with war-in-Gaza material, found two separate pathways to anti-Jewish hostility: one running through social dominance orientation and associated with right-leaning political orientation, and one running through out-group identity fusion with the Palestinian people, associated with the left. Both are measured associations reported by the authors with their own caveats.
These are measurements of discourse and of attitudes, on keyword-bounded and time-bounded samples. They record how the framing circulates and what it correlates with; they measure nothing about conditions in the territories.
Methodology and limitations
This report assembles four kinds of evidence and labels each by type. Treaty texts (the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute) are quoted from the instruments themselves and supply the definitional elements. Enacted legislation (Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, 2018) is quoted from the Knesset’s published English translation, which the Knesset itself labels unofficial. Court records (HCJ 5555/18, judgment of 8 July 2021) and the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement supply the domestic and bilateral record. Official statistical releases (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Jerusalem Day 2024) and academic demographic estimates (DellaPergola, 2019) supply the counts. Peer-reviewed studies (Becker, Ascone and Troschke, 2022; Enstad, 2026; Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh, 2025) supply the discourse and attitude measurements.
Determinations by monitoring organizations and by UN mandate-holders and offices are named in the body with their dates and described as those bodies’ conclusions on their own application of the definition. Figures published by a party to the events, including the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs position on the 2005 Gaza withdrawal and the government-commissioned Levy review of July 2012, are attributed as that party’s own material.
Limits. Enstad (2026) and Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025) are carried from their abstracts, so no full-text detail is implied. Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) sampled comments on media Facebook pages in three countries during one escalation in May 2021, so its shares describe that corpus and not online discourse generally, and its frame categories are non-exclusive and cannot be summed. DellaPergola’s territorial figures are the author’s own estimates published in a yearbook chapter, not an official count. The Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s total, a scope choice distinct from the convention international monitors use, which Hirsch-Hoefler and Ben Shitrit (2020) document; comparing settler counts across sources without stating the convention produces differences that are definitional rather than empirical. Treaty texts state the elements of a crime and not their application to any set of facts.
What this report records is what the named instruments, judgments, official releases and peer-reviewed studies hold, and what has been measured about how the apartheid framing circulates.
Conclusion
So does the record answer the question in the words it is asked? Not as a verdict. The term is applied to Israel’s rule in the territories by four dated determinations from 2021 and 2022, each issued by a body without judicial power and each reached on its own reading of the definition. The two treaties that make apartheid a crime both require proof of purpose, in Article II of the 1973 Convention and in Article 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute, and Israel is a party to neither. The international penal tribunal Article V contemplates has never existed. The Court that ruled at The Hague in July 2024 ruled on systemic discrimination in an advisory opinion. The Court that ruled in Jerusalem on 8 July 2021 upheld a Basic Law whose clause 1(c) reserves national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish People, and drew a constitutional line around the state’s democratic core in the same judgment.
The rest of the record is a set of documents pulling in different directions. A 1995 agreement built for five years is in its 30th. A 2012 commissioned review concluded the law of occupation does not apply and was never adopted. A 2022 office report inferred permanence at the threshold of reasonable grounds to believe. Official US country reporting documents the same restrictions the determinations enumerate and names no crime. Four determinations that circulate as one answer cover at least three different perimeters, one of them wider than the territories the question mentions.
And the vocabulary has a second life away from the legal question. In the 1,504 UK comments Becker, Ascone and Troschke coded in 2022, the apartheid analogy carried 5.2% of the antisemitic ones, sitting in the same distribution as blood libel at 8.1% and the Nazi comparison at 4.2%; Enstad’s two Norwegian samples found Holocaust inversion travelling alongside the justification of violence against Jews. A word can be a contested legal term of art in one forum and a small, steady thread in a comment section in another. Which of those two lives is doing more work when the phrase reaches a reader who will never open Article II, and does the second one feed the thing the Institute was built to measure?
Frequently Asked Questions
Which treaties define apartheid as a crime, and is Israel a party to them?
Two. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid was adopted on 30 November 1973 and entered into force on 18 July 1976; the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted on 17 July 1998 and entered into force on 1 July 2002. Israel is a party to neither, and although it signed the Rome Statute on 31 December 2000 it did not ratify it.
Is an International Court of Justice advisory opinion binding?
No. An advisory opinion is delivered in response to a request from an authorized organ rather than in a dispute between parties, and it carries no binding force on any state. The Court’s opinion of 19 July 2024 on the Occupied Palestinian Territory was issued in those proceedings, which is why it is not a judgment against a party.
How is a UN Special Rapporteur appointed, and what force does the report carry?
A Special Rapporteur is an independent expert appointed by the Human Rights Council, serving in a personal capacity and unpaid, who submits reports to the Council. The report is the mandate-holder’s own document. It is neither a decision of the Council nor a judicial finding, and the March 2022 report on the occupied Palestinian territory is one such document.
Why do published counts of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem differ?
Chiefly because of what each source counts as inside Israel. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reports the annexed East Jerusalem neighborhoods within Israel’s own population, which is why its Jerusalem Day 2024 release gives a single municipal population of over one million. Hirsch-Hoefler and Ben Shitrit (2020) trace that convention through the Bureau’s yearbook from 1968 onward, and note that unrecognized outposts sit outside the Bureau’s count entirely.
Does the 1973 Apartheid Convention apply to states that have not ratified it?
Its enforcement provisions run against states parties. Article IV obliges parties to adopt legislation and to prosecute, and Article V provides for trial before a competent tribunal of any state party or before an international penal tribunal that has never been constituted. A state that has not ratified is outside that machinery, which is one reason the question has not reached a criminal forum.
How did antisemitic comment shares differ across the three countries Becker and colleagues studied?
Substantially. The 2022 peer-reviewed study coded 26.9% of 1,504 UK comments as antisemitic, against 12.6% of 1,500 French comments and 13.6% of 1,520 German comments, all responding to the May 2021 escalation on the Facebook pages of leading media outlets. Coders needed thread context to establish the meaning in 38.7% of UK cases, about 62% of French and 48.3% of German.
What does Israel’s 2018 Basic Law say about the status of Arabic?
Clause 4 states that “Hebrew is the language of the State,” that “Arabic has a special status in the State,” and that “nothing in this article shall compromise the status given to the Arabic language in practice, before this basic-law came into force.” The Knesset publishes the English text as an unofficial translation.
Sources
- Becker, M., Ascone, L., 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.
- DellaPergola, S., 2019. World Jewish Population, 2019. American Jewish Year Book 2019, vol. 119, Springer (Berman Jewish DataBank reprint). Academic reference.
- 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, abstract-sourced.
- Hirsch-Hoefler, S., Ben Shitrit, L., 2020. So, how many settlements are there? Counting, tracking, and normalizing Jewish settlements in the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics Yearbook, 1967 to the present. POMEPS. Organizational report.
- International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, 1973. Adopted 30 November 1973, entered into force 18 July 1976. United Nations Treaty Series. 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.
- Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 1995. Signed Washington, 28 September 1995. Primary record.
- 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 (unofficial-status) English translation, main.knesset.gov.il. Official record, enacted legislation.
- Levy, E. (chair), 2012. Report of the commission to examine the status of building in Judea and Samaria. Israeli government-commissioned review, July 2012. Party’s own commissioned document.
- Ozer, S., Obaidi, M., 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, abstract-sourced.
- Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998. Adopted 17 July 1998, entered into force 1 July 2002. United Nations Treaty Series. Treaty text, primary record.
- US Department of State. Country reporting on Israel and the Occupied Territories, including the 2016 Report on International Religious Freedom, Israel and the Occupied Territories. state.gov. Official record.