“Most Israelis support an apartheid regime [mishtar apartheid]
in Israel,” announced the lead headline in the October 23 issue
of the left-liberal Hebrew daily Haaretz, Israel’s most
internationally prestigious newspaper. “Survey: Most Israeli
Jews advocate discrimination against Arab citizens,” was the
translation of this headline in the same day’s English edition
of the paper. Any way you look at it, it’s shocking — though, as
we shall see in a minute, not quite true. Nevertheless,
“apartheid” and “discrimination” are two very different things.
“Apartheid,” a word first used in its now accepted sense in
Afrikaans in 1929, means the systematic segregation of one
people, race or group from another, such as existed in South
Africa until 1990 and in the American South, where it was
commonly known as “Jim Crow,” until the early
1960s.“Discrimination” means the systematic favoring of one
people, race or group over another, such as exists in numerous
countries around the world today. Did the English Haaretz simply