Voices against Israel’s apartheid system

If you change the names, the description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would be a description of what is happening in South Africa. — South African anti-apartheid campaigner and Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1989

Apartheid is a crime against humanity. Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality. It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians contrary to the rules of international law and waged war against a civilian population, in particular children. — Anti-apartheid campaigner and former South African president Nelson Mandela, 2001

When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank and connects the 200-or so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road … this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa. — former US president Jimmy Carter, 2006

This is a very simple story, a story of dispossession, of colonisation, of occupation, of expulsion. And the more I go into it, the clearer the story becomes … it also brought me to think of the state of Israel, and the Jewish majority in it, in very much the same terms that I used to think about places such as South Africa, and the white supremacy regime there. — Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, 2005

Palestinians are driven to call for this boycott after forty years of the occupation of their land, destruction of their homes and the kidnapping and murder of their civilians. — British film director Ken Loach, 2006

I was really not prepared for all the horrors that I saw. I had heard about checkpoints. And I thought a checkpoint was something like a toll booth on a highway here in the United States. It's not like that at all. And it's gotten worse
every time I return. The way they are now, they remind me of when animals are rounded up and taken to slaughter, it's just so humiliating. — US human rights activist and Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, 2008

In its conduct and methods of repression, Israel … resemble[s] more and more apartheid South Africa at its zenith — even surpassing its brutality … How do we evaluate the inhumanity of dropping bombs and blazing white phosphorous on civilian populations, burning people alive, gassing them in a Gaza ghetto under relentless siege with no place to run or hide? — former South African government minister Ronnie Kastrils, 2009

“Palestine still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions … They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed,
when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine. — Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy, 2006

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. — Canadian author Naomi Klein, 2009

The message of the bulldozers is: “You do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948 and prevented your return, and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel.” … And that is why house demolitions remain so prominent, the bulldozer beside the tank. Because in the end this process of
reoccupation is one of displacement. — co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions Jeff Halper, 2002