I got this from Dennis Kobray via Green Alliance’s discussion listserv.

The apartheid state in question is, of course, Israel.  Its first class citizens are Israeli Jews, the majority of them of European or sometimes American origin.  The second class citizens are Israeli Arabs, who enjoy significant but limited rights under the law including token representation in the Knesset.  The eleventh class citizens are not citizens at all.  They are Palestinians.  One expects to be able to say that Palestinians live in Palestine and are governed by Palestinians, but the truth is something different.  The areas in which Palestinians may inhabit have shrunk nearly every year since the Nakba, their  name for the wave of mass deportations, murders, the dispossession, destruction and exile of whole Arab towns, cities and regions that attended the 1948 founding of the state of Israel.  As the whole world, except for the US public knows, Palestinians have lived under military occupation, without land, without rights, without hope, for nearly sixty years now.

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The parallels with apartheid South Africa are many and striking.  Like its earlier apartheid cousin, Israel menaces all its neighbors with an impressive array of nukes and the largest military establishment in the region.

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White South Africans rightly fretted at the fact that they were a minority ruling over an unhappy majority, and concocted schemes to exile the country’s black population to isolated rural reservations it called bantustans.  Israeli pundits calmly discuss the demographic bomb, their name for the fact that second and eleventh class citizens, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians will soon outnumber them within the borders of their supposed “Jewish state” while Israeli politicians sit in Knesset and hold ministries in successive governments openly calling for mass deportations and ethnic cleansing.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/192/192_cover_Israeli_apartheid_dixon.html