The Long Brief: Inside the Minority
Muslim Arabs, Bedouin, Druze, Christians, Circassians, and secular Israelis—how they live, govern, serve, succeed, and fight their battles inside one state.
Shalom, friends.
Today is Christmas. In Israel, Christians are celebrating it openly—in Haifa, in Jerusalem’s churches, in the Old City, in towns and villages across the country. Pilgrims are here too, doing what pilgrims have done for two thousand years: walking, praying, singing, and lingering in the places where their faith was born. That is not a small detail. In much of the Middle East, Christian life has been hollowed out by civil war, jihadist violence, state hostility, and demographic flight. In Israel, Christian communities are present, public, and protected by law. You can argue about policy. You cannot argue about the contrast.
I wrote this after seeing the apartheid allegation once to many times in the same morning. Which is, on it’s face, absurd. It’s impossible, if you’ve ever been to Israel, to think the claim has any merit. A stroll through Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda shuk or, really, just about anywhere in this land, will fully dispel that idea. That most Israelis look like they’ve come from Poland is truly laughable.
I’ve already dismantled the apartheid libel in my book Rooted Truth: Israel’s Case Against the Deniers, but in an effort to make it more accessible—and to arm you against it—I tackle it a bit here.
Though, more than that, I wanted to share an examination of how minorities actually live inside the state. How they vote. Litigate. Serve. Build careers. Fight crime. Protest policy. Negotiate budgets, And argue with power from within the system that governs them.
Apartheid is a legal regime. Israel is a messy democracy under strain. Those two things are not the same—and confusing them has consequences, not only for Israel, but for the meaning of the word itself. And as someone who (when they were much younger) read the dictionary for fun, that’s something worth correcting.
Inside the Minority
Citizenship, identity, power, and friction in a society too plural for slogans
The word “apartheid” functions as an accelerant. People throw it on Israel the way arsonists throw gasoline. Not to illuminate, to burn. The accusation did not appear by accident. It sits in a lineage—Durban 2001 made it a global NGO project—and it keeps returning because it does its job. It recasts Israel as a moral abomination rather than a state facing enemies, dilemmas, and the obligations of citizenship.
The apartheid accusation runs on a rigid story. Jews as a ruling caste. Arabs as a permanently disenfranchised subject class. Policy as an expression of ethnic hatred.
It flattens national politics into a racial morality play. One in which there can be no context because context wrecks the script.
Real apartheid was not a vibe. It was a legal machine. South Africa codified separation into the bloodstream of daily life. Non-whites could not vote. They could not hold power. They could not live where they wished. They could not use the same entrances, schools, hospitals, or services. The state openly engineered a racial order and enforced it with law, police, and bureaucracy.
If Israel were running an apartheid regime over its citizens, we would see that architecture: universal political exclusion, formal racial classification, blanket bans on access to institutions, and a legal framework designed to keep one group permanently subordinate.
Israel does not have that structure. Arab citizens of Israel vote. They form parties. They sit in the Knesset. They work in public institutions. They study in universities. They shop, travel, sue, argue, and build careers in the same public sphere as Jewish citizens.
Arab and Jewish patients lie in the same hospital wards and receive the same care because the state’s medical system treats them as patients, not as a racial category to be contained.
The smear survives by treating any inequality as proof of apartheid. Inequality exists in democracies. Bias exists. Neglect exists. Underinvestment exists. Poor governance exists. None of that is apartheid.
The accusation also requires erasing internal plurality. “The Arabs” become a single undifferentiated bloc. In real life, Israel’s Arab citizenry contains competing political identities, religious currents, class divisions, and communal strategies. A state running apartheid prefers uniformity: one group on top, one group below, everyone locked into place. Israel’s minority reality is noisy, opportunistic, ambitious, angry, hopeful, cynical, and human—but it is definitely not one solid bloc.
One data point captures the problem for the slogan merchants. In 2021, Ra’am—an Arab Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas—joined the governing coalition. It was the first Arab party to become a formal part of an Israeli government. That coalition agreement channeled major budgets toward Arab municipalities and community needs. Apartheid systems do not invite the “oppressed” into the ruling apparatus as bargaining partners. They do not write coalition agreements that empower them.
Israel did, because Israel’s political system runs on votes and deals, not on racial exclusion.