[jfengel]

Well, on the right side of the border. Everybody within the actual borders can vote, regardless of race, religion, etc. In a lot of ways it's a more democratic system than the US has, with multiple functioning parties.

The "apartheid" part is the people in the West Bank and Gaza, who are not Israeli but also not their own country.

[StanislavPetrov]

>Well, on the right side of the border.

Which border? The Israelis don't recognize a border, which is why they have illegally annexed the Golan Heights in Syria, are currently attempting to colonize Southern Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza.

[nerfbatplz]

Israel has never published their official borders. Even Somaliland has declared their borders but the "only democracy in the middle east" has never done so in it's entire history.

[halflife]

Israel has clearly defined borders. If youre are talking about the West Bank there’s area a, b and c which are controlled by Israel, both, and PA respectively. I’d call that borders.

[nerfbatplz]

Israel has never defined its own borders. This is easily googleable. There are borders that are well understood by the international community but it is a fact that the state of Israel itself has never defined it's own borders.

[throwaway27448]

Sure and they exercise sovereignty far beyond those borders in a blatantly illegal manner. They do not acknowledge their de facto borders because it would be admitting to acts the world would be required to condemn to maintain the pretense of law and order.

[halflife]

If you need to protect your border inside, than you already failed. Borders are protected outside the country.

[throw310822]

> Everybody within the actual borders can vote

Unless you're a Palestinian in illegally annexed Jerusalem... Then you don't have citizenship and have to keep proving that you live and work in Jerusalem to avoid losing the residency rights.

[throwaway27448]

I mean if voting for a parliamentary representative is your barometer, would you consider Russia a liberal democracy? Or Iran? Both have formal democracies, and Iran even seems to have pretty contentious ones replete with unexpected reformist upsets. If voting at all is your barometer, we could toss in Cuba, China, and North Korea. Apartheid is not characterized by voting rights but by a qualitative difference in access to justice when pursuing basic rights. Think: Jim Crow south. Formally, black people had access to all the same public things white people did. In practice, it took nearly a hundred years to work its way through the courts to be afforded true protection by the state.

Plus, you need only to look at marriage & inheritance laws and access to citizenship to see that the state is dedicated to jewish people—arguably, a jewish supremacist state with a non-jewish underclass.