• IN his letter, David Stebbing (This is not apartheid, December 29) argues that there cannot possibly be apartheid in Israel because there are Arab ministers, Arab judges, Arab army officers and Arab professionals.

But that is to misunderstand the charge of apartheid brought by human rights organisations. Nobody is suggesting that apartheid in Israel is identical to apartheid in South Africa.

Of course, there are differences and some are quite significant. Amnesty International and others have argued instead that the (quite different) systems in place in Israel itself, in the occupied city of Jerusalem, in the West Bank and in Gaza, all fall within the “crime of apartheid” as defined in 2002 in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

While the ICC definition of apartheid was inspired by the South African experience, it does not require a comparison with apartheid South Africa.

The ICC defines the crime of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”.

Amnesty and others have stated that the state of Israel does practise such inhuman acts for the purposes of maintaining domination of Jews over non-Jews (mostly Palestinians).

In Israel itself Palestinians, as non-Jews, are officially second-class citizens. In the territories occupied by Israel they are non-citizens with hardly any rights at all. Jews living in nearby illegal settlements have full rights as citizens.

The fact that the state of Israel allows a few token Palestinians to work as ministers, judges, army officers and medical doctors does not negate the fact that Israel has a legal system that enforces the domination of Jews over non-Jews.

SABBY SAGALL, Chair
LUCA SALICE, DIANE PEARSON, LUKE PEARSON, ROBERT BOYCE, VICTORIA BRITTAIN, UNA DOYLE, GARETH MURPHY, HELENA AKSENTIJEVIC, RUTH, APPLETON, CAROLINE MICHIE, PAUL CLYNDES, STEPHEN KAPOS, JULIA DICK, JANET GREEN, SIMON PEARSON
Palestine Solidarity Campaign Camden branch