Academic Study: Israel Not Guilty of ‘Apartheid’ or ‘Genocide’

Two academics have just released a study that concludes that there is no evidence to support the charges of “apartheid” and “genocide” that are continuously made against the Jewish state, and a third charge, about “settler-colonial” activity, is in their view an “inadequate classification.”

More on this study can be found here: “Israel not conducting genocide, not guilty of apartheid, new academic study shows,” by Alex Carson, Jerusalem Post, September 28, 2026:

A new academic study published last Thursday examines legal and historical evaluations of charges labeling Israel as an apartheid state, a settler-colonial project, or guilty of genocide, concluding that “apartheid and genocide are not established and that settler colonialism is an inadequate classification, including in the settings where each accusation is strongest.”

Authored by Philippe Karpe, a Senior Researcher and International Expert at CIRAD, and Gunther Jikeli, an Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University Bloomington, the paper was published on SSRN.

The authors examine the legal definitions governing apartheid under the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute. According to the study, while “racism and substantial disparities persist” within Israel’s citizenship regime inside the Green Line, Arab citizens participate in national elections, litigate in courts, and serve in the Knesset.

There is much more evidence that might be adduced to show how absurd is the charge of “apartheid.” Arabs head businesses at every level. An Arab up until recently headed Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi. Arab and Jewish patients are treated in the same hospitals by the same Arab and Jewish doctors and nurses. Arabs and Jews play in the same orchestras and on the same sports teams. Arabs and Jews work together in offices and factories. Arabs and Jews own businesses together — everything from restaurants to high tech start-ups. There is only one difference in how Jews and Arabs are treated in Israel: Jews must, while Arabs may, serve in the armed forces.

The authors state that applying the apartheid label here “equates ethnonational inequality with a system of legally enforced racial segregation and political exclusion that does not exist there.”

Regarding the West Bank, the authors note that prolonged occupation, settlements, and unequal administrative arrangements present “the strongest case” for the accusation. However, the study states that the evidence does not establish the required purpose or intent to maintain “systematic racial domination and oppression.”

It is too bad that Karpe and Jikeli use the word “occupation” about Judea and Samaria, and make no mention of the legal status of that territory, which is still based on the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine. The Mandate assigned to the future Jewish state all the land “between the river and the sea.” They note that there is no attempt to “racially dominate” the Arabs, who, in Judea and Samaria, are left alone to conduct their own lives unless, of course, there are terrorist attacks on Jews that necessarily require intrusions into Arab villages to find the culprits.

The authors point out that the West Bank’s administrative divisions originate from the negotiated Oslo Accords, noting that “Palestinian non-citizenship and Palestinian Authority jurisdiction supply a national-territorial explanation for part of the legal differentiation.” Furthermore, the study notes that Gaza’s distinct internal governance and subsequent military actions “must still be distinguished analytically from an institutionalized racial regime.”regime.”

As of 2005, every last Israeli had been pulled out of Gaza. There was no “occupation” of Gaza, and the IDF “military actions” in the Strip that began soon after the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023 were not meant to impose a “racial regime,” but to fight back against the terror group Hamas, to obtain the release of the hostages and to ensure that Hamas would never again pose a threat to the people of Israel.

Turning to settler-colonialism, the authors evaluate the framework across pre-state settlement, the 1947 to 1949 displacement, and the post-1967 West Bank settlement enterprise.

It needs to be constantly repeated: Israel has as much right to build in Judea and Samaria as it does in Haifa and Tel Aviv. The League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine makes clear that the Jews were always to be sovereign from the river to the sea, including all of Judea and Samaria. That right did not disappear when, for 18 years — between 1949 and 1967 — Jordan held Judea and Samaria (which the Jordanians renamed “the West Bank”) and then lost that territory to Israel, which then allowed the Jewish state to enforce its pre-existing right to that land.

While acknowledging that the framework illuminates aspects of land acquisition and settlement expansion, the authors argue it fails to account for “Zionism’s national and refugee character, Jewish historical attachment, or the absence of a conventional or functionally equivalent metropole.”…

The Israelis cannot be considered “colonial-settlers” of land that Jews had been living in continuously for the last 3000 years. There is no single “metropole” from which so-called Jewish “colonists” arrived to settle on land to which they have no claim. The League of Nations in 1921 recognized the claim of the Jews to the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and that claim did not disappear when the UN replaced the League of Nations. In Article 80 of its charter, the UN recognized its responsibility to see any unexpired mandates through to fruition. In the case of the Mandate for Palestine, that meant seeing that Mandate become the Jewish state.