If Israel is an apartheid state, it’s the strangest one on Earth.
What I saw during my visit to Israel destroyed this absurd lie.
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This is a guest essay by Dr. Maarten Boudry, a philosopher of science who has authored six books and more than 50 academic papers.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
I recently travelled through Israel with a delegation of the Europe Israel Press Association, a non-profit that’s independent of the Israeli government.
While there, I talked to a wide variety of people: residents of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Bedouins and Arabs living in villages near the Lebanese border towns and in East Jerusalem, and members of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) from various parties.
During my visit, I was particularly struck by the loyalty that many Arab Israelis — though certainly not all — feel toward Israel. At the Sheba Medical Centre, we found Jews and Arabs working side by side in operating rooms, treating Israeli, Arab, and Palestinian children without distinction. Even though Arabs are exempt from the military draft, a surprising number have volunteered to defend Israel.
We spoke to one of them: IDF Major Ella Waweya, a young Arab woman who joined the army against her family’s objections. (They have since become reconciled to her choice.) In 2016, she earned the highest military honour and now serves as Deputy Commander of the Arabic Spokesperson’s Unit. An observant Muslim, she is proud to speak Hebrew with an Arab accent.
She told us that her career has inspired many others to sign up, including a dozen Arab recruits from her own village alone.
In the Bedouin village of Arab al-Aramshe, on the Lebanese border, one community member told us that he identifies as both Israeli and Bedouin and sees no difference between himself and his Jewish neighbours. They all serve in the IDF, their children attend the same schools, and they were evacuated together by the government following Hezbollah’s rocket attacks.
I heard even stronger declarations of loyalty to Israel among the Druze community along the northern border. During the Six-Day War with Syria in 1967, Druze soldiers had no qualms about firing on their fellow coreligionists in the Syrian army. The Druze hold that national loyalty takes precedence over religious identity, especially in a country like Israel. They know something that many progressives in the West fail to grasp: Israel is the only country in the region to grant them freedom of religion and full democratic rights. In every other Arab nation in the region, the Druze face discrimination, oppression, and even persecution as apostates.
It is possible that the Arabs and other minorities I met through the Europe Israel Press Association are not representative of that population at large. They may well have been screened by the organization for their pro-Israel views — and inveterate “anti-Zionists” would probably not want to have any truck with such a program anyway.
But surveys suggest that these pro-Israel Arabs are not outliers. In a post-October 7th poll, 70 percent of Arab Israeli respondents said they felt a sense of belonging to their country, a dramatic increase over the 48 percent who expressed such sentiments prior to October 7th. In a 2024 poll, 32 percent of Arabs stated that they trusted the IDF and 23 percent said they trusted the police. While those numbers are significantly lower than those among Jewish citizens (80 and 42.5 percent, respectively), they’re surprisingly high for an allegedly “Jewish supremacist apartheid state.”
Even Mansour Abbas, leader of the Arab and Islamist Ra’am party in the Knesset, emphasised that “we are part of Israel, committed to our citizenship.” When we asked him whether Israel was an apartheid state, Abbas said it was not, though he added that the country could become an apartheid state if it decided to annex the West Bank and Gaza, since incorporating 5 million Palestinians would threaten its Jewish-majority character. But for now, within its internationally recognised borders, Israel is a democracy, he agreed.
It goes without saying that many Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza do not exactly share this positive appraisal of Israel and its military. But even in East Jerusalem, which has been under Israeli control since the 1967 Six-Day War, sentiment towards Israel is not always as straightforward as you might think.
We paid an extended visit to Jinnovate, a centre that promotes tech entrepreneurship within Palestinian society, for which it receives funding from the Israeli government. The centre’s director, Mahmoud Khweis, is a Palestinian entrepreneur who grew up in East Jerusalem and was educated at Harvard Business School and The John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Khweis is a firm believer in what he calls “science diplomacy,” i.e. bridging political divides by working side-by-side to tackle technical challenges. He has worked with the United Nations, the World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development, but has never received any support from the European Union. That’s because it views East Jerusalem as an illegally occupied territory, so collaborating with Jinnovate could be seen as legitimising “the occupation,” even though the centre provides invaluable opportunities for bright young Palestinian science students and engineers.
Although it was not included on the press tour, I decided to check out the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem — a small, family-run business that made headlines earlier this year after the Israeli police raided it twice and arrested two of its owners, claiming that they were selling materials which incited terrorism.
When I arrived, just before the start of Ramadan, there were no signs of the earlier commotion; the family was busy selling books as usual. I had a friendly chat with the young owner, a jovial guy who cracked jokes about his stint in prison and his growling stomach. (Being an observant Muslim, he was looking forward to breaking his fast.) I bought a few anti-Zionist titles by Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein — as well as, for good measure, a book by political scientist Yascha Mounk, who is pro-Israel.
I didn’t find any materials inciting terrorism, nor did I expect to. But one key detail, which you won’t find in most Western newspapers, is that the Educational Bookshop was allowed to reopen a few days later, once again offering a treasure trove of books which are highly critical of the State of Israel and Zionism — as they should be permitted to, of course, in any liberal democracy that values freedom of expression.
I didn’t meet any Israelis who expressed a desire for genocide or ethnic cleansing in Gaza on my trip. However, I did encounter several people who admitted that, since October 7th, they have been unable to bring themselves to care about the fate of innocent Gazan civilians.
Understandably, this sentiment was particularly strong at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, many of whose traumatised and heartbroken residents used to employ Gazan guest workers, some of whom may have acted as informants for the terrorists who carried out the October 7th attacks. Some of these kibbutzniks had even been among the volunteers who drove Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals.
But the bluntest expression of this hardened attitude toward Gazans came from Kazim Khlilih, an Arab Israeli LGBTQ influencer who had volunteered to serve in the IDF. He told us, “I know I shouldn’t say this, but I have no compassion for the people in Gaza. I don't care.” This may sound callous, but we should bear in mind that Kazim lost a cousin on October 7th, a paramedic brutally murdered by Hamas at the Nova Music Festival.
Similarly, one of the most hawkish views on Gaza I heard during our trip was expressed by influential Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, who is the son of an Arab-Israeli father and a Palestinian mother and was raised in East Jerusalem.
Toameh suggested that “the IDF should have temporarily reoccupied Gaza and declared itself the government.” Instead of constantly moving in and out to fight shifting pockets of Hamas resistance, Toameh believes it would have been more effective had the IDF mimicked what Hamas did after its violent takeover: openly declare that they will rule Gaza, at least temporarily. In his view, this would have sent a strong message to the civilian population that Hamas’ time was over.
Israeli society is far from perfect. The country grapples with its fair share of ethnic and religious divisions, which are intensified by ongoing wars and the constant threat of terrorist attacks. At least part of the Jewish population harbour strong suspicions toward the Arab minority. Israel is a liberal democracy but it is a “desperate and struggling one,” as historian Fania Oz Salzberger told me.
Still, the existence of Israel shows that Jews, Arabs, and other religious and ethnic minorities can coexist peacefully. In some respects, Israel is actually doing a better job of integrating its Muslim minority than many of the European countries that have been quick to accuse the Jewish state of “apartheid” and “genocide.”
The patriotism of many Israeli Arabs is remarkable — and would be unusual among their coreligionists in Europe. In fact, even if you’re a Muslim, you’re probably better off living in the Jewish state than anywhere else in the Middle East. Nowhere else in the region do Muslims enjoy so many political and religious freedoms.
This is especially true for LGBT Muslims. When a mosque in Berlin announced that it would welcome women and gay people, its female imam received so many death threats that the police had to provide her with 24-hour protection. As Kazim put it, when we asked him about being a gay Muslim in the Jewish state, “It’s not easy, but if I compare it to Europe, thank God I’m a minority in Israel.”
In his book, “Orientalism,” Palestinian-American academic Edward Said arraigns the “simple-minded dichotomy” found in Western orientalist discourse between “freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs.”
Of course, that’s a wild caricature of Western discourse about Islam; no one but the most extreme racist would portray all Arabs as inherently violent or evil. The Arab world is far from immune to Enlightenment ideas, as evidenced by the many liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims you’ll encounter in Israel and elsewhere.
Yet Said, with his myopic focus on “discourses” rather than underlying facts — a tendency he inherited from French historian Michel Foucault — was overlooking an inconvenient truth: There is only one country in the Middle East that upholds liberal Enlightenment values. If you genuinely care about progressive values, you should hope that the surrounding Middle Eastern countries will come to resemble Israel more closely in the future. For all its flaws, Israel remains the region’s lone beacon of freedom and pluralism.
On my last day in Israel, I had lunch with the Belgian ambassador at a restaurant in Tel Aviv. As we chatted about the political climate in Israel and the craven decision by some European universities to boycott the country, my host suddenly gestured toward the table beside us. “That’s my friend Ehud Olmert over there!” he exclaimed.
I knew that Olmert had been Israel’s Prime Minister from 2006 to 2009, but I wouldn’t have recognised him on sight. Olmert is known for his peace offer to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, which Abbas rejected, but also for a less savoury reason: Olmert served 16 months in jail for corruption and bribery.
As the elderly former statesman approached our table and I shook his hand, a thought struck me: This Jewish politician and lawyer, once the most powerful man in the country, ended up in prison thanks, in part, to an Arab Justice on the Israeli Supreme Court.
Does that sound like an apartheid state to you?
A version of this essay also appeared in Quillette.
 | A guest post by
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This is the finest article I have read here on Substack in sometime and one of the finest articles I've read on Substack period. It is both thoughtful and incredibly nuanced. Dr. Maarten Boudry did a wonderful job on it. His observations in this article capture the Jewish state in all its complexity, the good and the bad. But it can't be accused of being a one-sided anti-Israel screed like what Ilan Pappe, Gabor Mate or Rashid Khalidi would write but nor is it a glorified account of Israel as one might get from someone like Alan Dershowitz or Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Dr. Boudry is fair and balanced. Something we could really use more of nowadays. He shows throughs his own observations that Israel warts and all, is NO apartheid state and is in fact an imperfect liberal democracy. Many Israeli Arabs are in fact patriotic. That percentage of the Arab minority in Israel has increased since October 7th. Israeli Arabs have all the same rights as Jews. They have citizenship, the right to vote, representation in the Knesset, can go anywhere they want, live anywhere they want, use the same drinking fountains, swim on the same beaches, ride the same buses, go to the same schools, and eat in the same restaurants as Jews. Non-Jews are perfectly welcome in Israel and are treated exactly the same as Jews. Israel has opened its doors to the Black Hebrew Israelites, African-American Christians, African and Ukrainian refugees, and Syrian refugee children. Israel is in fact, the safest place for Christians in the Middle East. hundreds of thousands of Muslims of all different sects live in Israel too along with the Druze, people of other faiths, atheists, and agnostics. The idea a multicultural democracy with equal rights for everyone is an apartheid state like South Africa from 1948-1994 is ludicrous.
The biggest bank in Israel is owned by an Arab. Israeli Arabs are 30% of doctors and 50% of the pharmacists in Israel. Increasingly more and more are joining the middle class and the number of Israeli Arabs joining the IDF every year continues to go up. Israel rescued most of the Ethiopian Jewish community in Operations Moses, Joshua and Solomon in the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s. The Jewish state has also done much good work to help the people of Africa. They also have let in and treated Palestinian children and children from Arab countries. Would an apartheid state ever do anything like that? I don't think so. A bookshop owned by Muslims in East Jerusalem being allowed to sell any book they want including those critical of Israel or Zionism? I can't imagine in an apartheid state they'd allow such a thing. Not to mention, Jews themselves are quite a heterogenous bunch. There are white-passing, black, brown, red, and yellow Jews living in Israel. The majority of Israel's population are Mizrahim as a matter of fact. The story of Jinnovate is most inspiring. Shame on the European Union for not working with them! By the way, East Jerusalem isn't "illegally occupied" it was conquered fair and square by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. Furthermore, Jews lived there for thousands of years before Jordan (actually) illegally occupied the area and expelled its Jewish population. They ethnically cleansed the Jews from the Old City of Jerusalem, destroyed ancient synagogues, desecrated Jewish cemeteries, built a town over much of the sacred Mount of Olives, and banned all Jews Israeli or not, from visiting any Jewish holy sites. With Israel's lightning victory in the Six-Day War, Jews regained access to the Old City, the Wailing Wall, the Temple Mount, the Cave of the Patriarchs, and Rachel's Tomb.
Is there a real apartheid system against the Palestinians? Yes. But it doesn't exist in Israel or the West Bank. It exists in every single Arab country. Israeli Arabs and West Bank Palestinians are treated equally by the nation state of the Jewish people. But in countries like Egypt, Syria, Joran, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. Palestinians literally and legitimately, are treated as second-class citizens. They can't own property or land, integrate into their respective countries' societies, attend university, or become citizens (with the exception of Jordan but even then, they are treated like dog****). They also are barred from most professions in the Arab world. In general, there is no better place to live for minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people than the Jewish state. Israel is without question one of the least racist and most inclusive nations on Earth and certainly the least racist and most inclusive in the Middle East by far. Just ask Berbers in Algeria, Nubians and Sub-Saharan African workers in Egypt, the Bidoon people in Kuwait, the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups in Sudan, or the Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Syria, or Turkey how "tolerant" the rest of the Middle East is. You will never ever see a pride parade in Dubai, Damascus, Khartoum, or Cairo. Two men who are in love can't openly hold hands or kiss in Baghdad. A young woman who is a lesbian must stay in the closet in the West Bank or Gaza. All of this would be perfectly okay and allowed in Israel. Women are chattel or at the very least, second-class citizens in the rest of the Middle East. Though some Arab countries can rightly be credited with making progress on women's rights, women in the Arab and Islamic world are generally still not equal to their male counterparts. In Israel, women have full equal rights and always have. Women in Israel can vote, earn equal pay with men, get a divorce, wear whatever they want, drive, go out without male permission, and serve in combat in the IDF.
Thank you for your insight, honesty, and openness. No society is perfect (nor should it aim to be), and much can be learned when everyone stops shouting.