Featured photo from Wendy Isaack © Annexation Wall in Bethlehem, occupied Palestine, May 12, 2013.
By Wendy Isaack
It was August 2023, and I felt as if I was being transported back to the 1980s: my childhood in South Africa. Before me lay a sprawling village of tightly packed, squat concrete structures with corrugated metal roofs wending along slender dirt roads. This was my thirteenth trip in eleven years to document human rights conditions in and around Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territory. On this visit, as I stopped in Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Naqab, I felt like I could have been visiting apartheid-era black townships.
South Africa’s apartheid regime forcibly displaced my parents and their families to a township in northern Kwa Zulu Natal in the 1960s. When the National Party came to power in 1948, the Group Areas Act of 1950, the cornerstone of apartheid policy, was adopted. With primary goal of maintaining white supremacy, this legislation separated South Africans along racial lines and partitioned land based on race, essentially laying down the law about where different racial groups could reside, work and own property. Add to this, the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act of 1951 with the primary purpose of ensuring that racial groups remained in their designated areas, was used to forcefully remove unwanted black people from white areas, and afforded landowners, local authorities and apartheid government officials the legal avenues to evict people and/or demolish their homes in order to get them off the land. Similarly, the 2018 Nation State Law passed by the Israeli Knesset codifies and strengthens existing racist legislation, as expert commentators note, re-affirms the racist foundations of the state and does not distinguish between the state of Israel and Palestinian territory that it has militarily and illegally occupied since 1967.
Apartheid an Afrikaans term meaning “apartness” or “separateness” was an ideology introduced by the National Party (NP) government in South Africa in 1948. It called for separate development of the different racial groups, and through various laws and policies, enforced racial segregation, subjugation, domination and oppression of African people from 1948 to 1994. As set out in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid is a crime against humanity, committed in a context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one group over another, with intent to maintain that system. The extent to which Israel has created and maintained a system of oppression and domination over Palestinians since its creation in 1948 has been addressed by many legal experts and human rights organisations, carefully considering for instance, the territorial fragmentation; segregation and control of the population and arbitrary dispossession of land and property. As Human Rights Watch documents, Israeli authorities rely on their domestic law to govern and control Palestinians and their land in the West Bank in several ways: Palestinians are ruled under military law and prosecuted in military courts; due to difficulties in obtaining building permits in East Jerusalem and the 60 percent of the West Bank under Israel’s exclusive control (Area C), many Palestinians build homes which are routinely demolished due to lack of Israeli government permits. Reportedly, in September 2024, Israel’s supreme court ruled in favor of a settler organization to evict a Palestinian family from their homes in East Jerusalem, under a discriminatory law that allows settlers to claim land Jews owned in East Jerusalem before 1948. Palestinians are barred under Israeli law from making analogous land claims in Israel. Like villages in the Naqab, the township where I was born and raised was extremely poor and lacked government services. As a child, relatives told me about the spacious farms that the apartheid regime stole from my parents’ families, about their goats, chickens and verdant vegetable fields. Meanwhile in our black township, with two parents and at least eight children, families were crowded into one or two rooms with no electricity and limited water, barely able to eke out a living. My mother was the eldest in a family of 16 children.
The Bedouin dwellings in the Naqab all within Israel’s borders, felt all too familiar to the small house, with limited municipal services and dusty roads that I grew up in. Their ties to the land date back millennia, yet Israeli practices leave them fighting to remain in their ancestral homes. According to The Association of Civil Rights in Israel more than half of the roughly 160,000 Negev Bedouins remain in communities, which the state refuses to develop and bring under municipal administration – therefore unrecognised as a matter of state policy – without access to power and running water. Furthermore, they are routinely subjected to demolition orders. Reportedly, on July 27, 2023, the Beer’sheva Magistrate’s Court ordered the forced eviction of 500 Palestinian Bedouins in the village of Ras Jrabah, in the Naqab region, and to a pay a fine of 117,000 NIS (approximately 31,700 USD) to cover legal expenses by March 2024. According to Amnesty International, such court orders highlight the deep discrimination that Palestinian citizens of Israel face under apartheid – forcing them to leave their homes, vacate the lands where their families have lived for decades so that Israeli authorities can build homes for Israeli Jews.
At the village of Al Araqib, for example, during my visit in August 2023, I learned that residents had just rebuilt their community for the 218th time in thirteen years. With recycled and cheap materials, they rebuilt despite knowing Israeli forces would again tear down the structures. Al Araqib’s land is desirable for the settlement of Israeli Jews as it lies just within a region in the desert considered arable. A few years prior, the Israeli government had ripped up the villagers’ olive and fruit trees. For instance, under the guise of ‘forestation’ project by the Jewish National Fund, is a forced displacement operation as part of the Zionist settler colonial aims. JNF is a quasi-Israeli government agency with nonprofit status in the United States and United Kingdom. Its projects destroy biodiversity and homes in the Naqab and West Bank.
What happened to the women?
As a Black South African woman who grew up under apartheid, my experiences taught me the importance of solidarity with oppressed people. I became a human rights lawyer to pursue global gender justice and was drawn to the Palestinian human rights struggle.
During my journeys in Palestine, it was impossible to miss the resonances between the Palestinian’s and black South African’s experiences, including those of women’s. State-imposed racist oppression has reinforced and exacerbated gender inequity in both places. Apartheid in South Africa had made Black people suffer. In particular, apartheid policies disproportionately deprived the majority black women of educational and work opportunities, relegating them to the bottom of economic and social hierarchies. The legacy of this intersectional oppression continues to manifest in ongoing inequalities, including today’s soaring poverty rates among black women.
As it did to non-whites in South Africa, apartheid strips Palestinians of dignity. The way in which Israel racially discriminates against Palestinians is institutionalized and entrenched in laws that govern how the Israeli state operates. Immediately after 1948, the state of Israel adopted several laws entrenching Jewish Israeli supremacy and control over Palestinian people and land following the Nakba in 1948, which is now ongoing. It is well-established that the legal pillars of Israel’s institutionalized system of racial domination and oppression include several items of legislation, including most notably the 1950 Absentee Property Law which legalised the confiscation of the Palestinian land and homes – particularly those belonging to internal and external Palestinian refugees.
To maintain racial domination, apartheid regimes carry out criminal acts against the oppressed population. To mention just a few of these “inhumane acts” of apartheid that Israel has committed since 1948: Forcible transfer of populations, including forcible displacement and confinement; forced exile and preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes and lands, revoking residency rights and the expropriation of Palestinian land for the benefit of Israel’s Jewish population. Persecution, notably the systematic and severe deprivation of fundamental human rights of Palestinians based on their identity and because of their opposition to their system of apartheid.
In addition to being murdered, made disabled and/or losing loved ones at the hands of the Israeli forces, Palestinians endure daily oppression that undermines all aspects of their dignity. Palestinian women disproportionately suffer from family separation due to Israeli laws that can render them stateless or unable to return to parts of Palestinian territory should they travel or marry. Israel maintains a population registry for everyone in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza. At birth, each person is assigned an identity document that determines freedom of movement. According to Visualising Palestine, over 50 Israeli laws discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and in East Jerusalem, Palestinians have a residency ID, a precarious status that Israeli authorities can revoke at their discretion. Reportedly, Israel has revoked 14,500 IDs from Palestinians and East Jerusalem an estimated 10,000 Palestinian children are unregistered due to the difficult process of obtaining a Jerusalem ID. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Palestinians carry a green ID, are only allowed to live on 40% of land in the West Bank, face numerous barriers to movement and are barred from using certain segregated West Bank buses and roads, designed to serve illegal Israeli settlements.
Representatives of Palestinian women’s human rights organizations, activists and the many Palestinian women that I have had the privilege to meet and speak with over the years shared accounts with me of violence and arbitrary arrest at Israel’s ever-present checkpoints, particularly Qalandiya checkpoint in Ramallah and al-Bira and Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem and for Palestinian residents of the West Bank with permits to enter East Jerusalem. Israel’s racist restrictions of Palestinians’ movement also exacerbate harm, and added to this the routine use by Israeli authorities of arbitrary administrative detention – the practice of placing Palestinian men and women behind bars for extended periods of time, without formal charges. This I can personally attest to since the mother of my late friend, Suha Jarrar, has been routinely held in administrative detention several times and could not even attend her daughter’s funeral in July 2021.
South African political responses to Israel’s apartheid regime
As witness to both apartheid South Africa and the regime of rights violations against Palestinians, I am unsurprised that major human rights organizations and UN experts joined Palestinian rights advocates in identifying Israeli crimes of apartheid. And I suspect anyone who honestly assesses both situations would find the atrocity denialist narratives from the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) and members of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and other parties intolerable.
The SAZF, for example, recently framed the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s (NMF) campaign to counter the ethnic cleansing campaign espoused under Christian Zionism as “a gross distortion of everything” Nelson Mandela stood for. SAZF’s statement twisted NMF’s stance against colonialism and apartheid as opposition to “religious freedom.” I believe if Mandela was alive, he would have roundly rejected this misuse of human rights values to justify genocide and apartheid. He remarked in 1997: “[i]t beho[o]ves all South Africans, themselves erstwhile beneficiaries of generous international support, to stand up and be counted among those contributing actively to the cause of freedom and justice….we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” He added “all of us need to do more in supporting the struggle of the people of Palestine for self-determination.” On September 4, 2025 his grandson, Mandla Mandela unequivocally stated: “Many of us that have visited the occupied territories in Palestine have only come back with one conclusion: that the Palestinians are experiencing a far worse form of apartheid than we ever experienced…We believe that the global community has to continue supporting the Palestinians, just as they stood side-by-side with us.”
Prior to the SAZF’s statement, the Democratic Alliance (DA), Patriotic Alliance (PA) and African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) members of the South African Parliament claimed to have found “no evidence of apartheid” against Palestinians. They stated that “Israel is a vibrant progressive multi-racial and multi-ethnic society.” This followed their so-called “fact-finding mission” to Israel in May 2024, during which they reportedly spoke to no Palestinians.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, in its July 2025 report titled Our Genocide, sets out how Israel’s apartheid regime led to the genocide in Gaza. It explains how apartheid underlies Israel’s military rule of millions in the West Bank and its institutionalized discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Palestinian groups like BADIL have long made similar observations.
In the true spirit of Nelson Mandela, the South African government, under leadership of former Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Dr. Naledi Pandor, instituted proceedings with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. The government also called for recognition of apartheid being committed against Palestinians in advisory proceedings before the ICJ on Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem in which the court found Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory violates international law. South Africa was a co-convener of Hague Group’s emergency summit in Bogota in July 2025, an effort to restore international rule of law and pursue accountability for grave crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians.
Black South African feminists lead conference on codifying intersecting oppression
Against this backdrop of South African leadership in the struggle for accountability for international crimes, Nelson Mandela Foundation and MADRE, a feminist organization, co-hosted the conference The Struggle for Justice and Accountability for Apartheid in June 2025 in Johannesburg on the draft crimes against humanity (CAH) treaty under negotiation at the United Nations. Legal experts, feminist scholars, lawyers representing South African apartheid victims, Palestinian human rights advocates, activists confronting persecution based on sexual orientation and gender identity, supporters of gender justice in Afghanistan and government members discussed how the apartheid provision of the treaty should be framed to contribute to justice for all victims. The need for justice for apartheid against Palestinians and the legacy of intersectional discrimination under apartheid in South Africa emerged as central themes.
Participants concluded that the South African government has a leadership role to play in ensuring the apartheid provision in the draft treaty accounts for all its victims, and in calling for redress and reparations. South Africa can build on pan-African solidarity evident in, for example, the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights condemnation of Israeli apartheid in recently adopted resolutions. Adopted in November 2024, resolution ACHPR/Res.611 (LXXXI) obligates African states parties to prevent genocide and to avoid aiding or abetting apartheid and other crimes against the Palestinians and the latest July 2025, resolution ACHPR/Res.641 (LXXXIV) which condemns Israeli illegal occupation and apartheid policies.
Both the political will that these actions exemplify, and modernized legal language in the draft treaty will be necessary to ensure justice for all apartheid victims, including Palestinians and all those who have suffered oppressive regimes based on intersecting forms of discrimination. The current language in the draft treaty, copied from the Rome Statute, risks excluding Palestinians and others from recognition as apartheid victims. Rigid, biologically based interpretations of “racial groups” under apartheid and genocide could be reified unless the treaty drafters modernize the language. Participants agreed that “based on” should be added to the treaty, in congruence with understandings of race as a social construct under international human rights law and the crime of persecution.
Participants were informed of efforts to codify gender apartheid, a campaign that has gathered steam in the face of grave, systematic oppression based on gender in Afghanistan. Black South African feminist scholars, notably, Prof. Pumla Dineo Gqola, Nelson Mandela University argued persuasively that apartheid was always a racist, gendered and violently homophobic project. They cautioned that the understanding of apartheid in the draft treaty must account for this multi-faceted discrimination. They called for treaty drafters and civil society advocates to elevate Black South African and Namibian feminists’ voices and scholarship and to ensure the negotiations, particularly on the apartheid provision, reflect their input. Mutual solidarity—not solidarity dependent on their continued erasure—is what they call on feminists around the world for.
This is especially pertinent as the limitations of South Africa’s approach to accountability for its own apartheid legacy come under scrutiny in its courts. As the country’s first charges of the crime against humanity are set to go to trial, we must ensure that the international push for accountability and reparations takes hold both in our foreign and domestic policy. As conference participants noted, individual criminal cases are important, but not enough. We must insist not only that the unspent millions in reparations funds go to those most impoverished and harmed under the apartheid regime and that the government recommit to transformative redress.
The negotiations for the draft treaty, which will obligate states to prevent and punish crimes against humanity, can be a platform to build momentum towards justice and reparations for apartheid. This momentum is desperately needed for Palestinians, who not only require recognition for genocidal crimes committed since October 2023, but also for decades of apartheid. This momentum is also necessary to ensure that victims of grave crimes committed on intersecting discriminatory grounds are finally recognized.
Entities like the SAZF and DA undoubtedly enjoy backing and support from powerful forces in faces like Washington D.C., but the tide is turning towards justice and recognition of grave crimes against Palestinians. Consider for instance, Executive Order (EO) titled Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa, issued by US President Trump on February 7, 2025 “supposedly” in response to the Expropriation Act, 2025. What rendered this EO particularly scandalous was that clearly direct interference in the domestic affairs and policy reform efforts of a democratic state and as stated in several reports, primarily a response to the South African government’s Genocide case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel. As if that was not enough, Hellen Zille, senior political leader of the DA recently stated: “Genocide is a very big word and I haven’t been to Gaza, and I don’t know,” despite the numerous pronouncements through provisional orders by the ICJ. This clearly demonstrates the DA’s alignment with the Israeli government genocidal project, as confirmed in the in the ground-breaking report issued on September 16 of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem headed by South Africa’s renowned judge, Navi Pillay.
Disingenuous PR campaigns can neither erase our own memories as black South Africans nor squash our natural will to solidarity with oppressed peoples. Now, more than ever, is the time to call for the South African government to continue to lead in the struggle for apartheid accountability.
Wendy Isaac is a Senior Gender Justice & International Law Fellow, MADRE