Even if you call Israel a democracy, it is still apartheid

JVL Introduction

In an op-ed in Haaretz Yuli Novak, executive director of B’Tselem, Israel’s premier human rights organisation does not pull her punches:

“A political system that treats the preservation of one ethnonational group’s majority as a legitimate political goal is not a democracy. It is a system of demographic engineering, designed to maintain one group’s supremacy at the expense of another that is denied basic rights. Calling it “democracy” does not change what it is: apartheid.”

So Novak has littler time (none, to be honest!) for the new “Democrats party” led by MK Yair Golan which will be contesting the forthcoming elections on a left Zionist basis.

It merely show, she argues, “how successfully the Israeli regime has narrowed the boundaries of our imagination and trapped us within a worldview in which separation and the preservation of Jewish supremacy” can sound moral or even leftwing.

RK

This article was originally published by Haaretz on Tue 19 May 2026. Read the original here.