Essentially, apartheid was a totalitarian system of governance not unlike many of the regimes in the Arab world today. A white minority subjugated the overwhelmingly black population. It was ideologically driven and obsessed with racial superiority. The superior whites could not mingle with or even sit on a bench with the inferior black peoples. Even the education system was dumbed down for black people because they were deemed mentally inferior.
THERE IS absolutely nothing equivalent to this in the dispute between the Palestinians and Israel today. Within Israel itself, Arabs and Jews share the same shopping malls, benches, hospitals, theaters and, in many cases, suburbs. The educational institutions do not have a
deliberately dumbed down Arab curriculum and the privilege of voting is given to all. The Knesset has Arab members, and Jews, Arabs and Palestinians often work together at construction sites, businesses, hotels and elsewhere.
Most important of all is the fact that Israel is a democratic state. Not a perfect one, but it does have democratic institutions and is definitely not governed by a totalitarian minority! In the disputed territories, some 98 percent of the Palestinian Arab population now lives under the governance of their own Palestinian Authority, where they have the right to vote and change their leaders at least theoretically. True, Israel has adopted security measures that curtail their movement, but these have been necessitated by the conflict and are legitimate acts of self-defense, rather than acts of racial discrimination.
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