[runarberg]

Since this is HN and threads are supposed to be more interesting as they get longer, I might mention the neither subtle nor important different between Apartheid and Ethnocracy. It is not an important difference because either is demonstrably bad and shouldn’t happen, neither is it subtle because one portrays to civil rights (as in denying civil rights to a minority) and the other is about demographics (as in controling the demography to favor a certain ethnic group).

The Jim Crow south in the pre civil rights era USA was an apartheid, as the legal framework denied civil rights to Black Americans. It was not however an ethno-state as there was no policy of controlling the demographics of Black Americans. The eugenics movement tried to change that, and if the Eugenics movement had been more successful it is highly likely that some of the states in the USA would have become ethno-states.

In Israel the practices and policies in the West Bank are apartheid, and policies of preventing immigration from occupied territories into Israel, and establishment of Jewish settlements inside the West Bank are behaviors of an ethno-state.

So just like Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa, Israel maintains both an apartheid and an ethnocracy.