For a long time, the word was only associated with South Africa.

But more and more people are using it to describe Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

Let's talk about the A word.

Amnesty International has accused Israel of being an apartheid state.

We call it apartheid because it is apartheid under international law.

Human Rights Watch has released a report that says

Israeli authorities are committing crimes against humanity of apartheid.

The Israeli government completely rejects the label.

So what does apartheid actually mean?

What did it look like in South Africa?

And why is the word being brought up in the context of Israel?

Let's start with South Africa's story.

Since the 1600s, the territory that's now South Africa was under Dutch and then British colonial rule.

For centuries, you had a white minority ruling over and exploiting the indigenous Black population, who were the majority.

From the early 1900s, there were laws that essentially forced the Black population to live in impoverished areas known as reserves.

But in 1948, a new government led by the National Party came to power.

They took segregation even further, under a policy they called apartheid.

The word means separateness in Afrikaans.

How they promoted apartheid to the South African population was that unless the white community was solid on every single aspect of segregation, there would eventually be a situation where they would be overwhelmed by the Black majority.

Over the following decades, under the apartheid policy, the National Party introduced a bunch of laws.

They covered every aspect of life, but were all essentially aimed at the same thing, keeping the white minority in power and the Black population subjugated.

One of the main laws classified people into four racial groups.

Native, that was the term for Black people.

Coloured, for those of mixed race.

Asian, that was applied to people of Indian heritage.

Or white.

The Population Registration Act was central to the legislation because that would allow you to have a clear legal definition of who belonged to what race and therefore you could begin to say who should be schooled where, who should live where, who can marry who.

And rules about who could live where were a big part of how apartheid operated.

Black South Africans were forced to live in rural areas called bantustans, or homelands.

These made up 13% of the total land, even though Black South Africans were at least 75% of the population.

There were other laws too.

Black South Africans had to carry a special pass if they wanted to travel outside of the bantus, to go to work for example, and were fined or arrested if they didn't have the right paperwork.

Public communities were also segregated.

Non-whites were banned from certain parks, beaches and transport.

The education systems were different too.

You had your bantu education and basically this would be a form of education where they teach you how to do gardening, how to do cooking.

They weren't allowed to, say, study maths and science.

There's a very rich literature on the Black South African experience under apartheid and the overwhelming central aspect of that is the experience of being made a stranger or an alien in the land of your birth by an immigrant settler community.

Apartheid finally ended in 1994, but it took decades.

There was opposition from the start, with mass protests and civil disobedience campaigns led by Black activists and the African National Congress, or ANC.

That's the party of Nelson Mandela, which has dominated South African politics in the post-apartheid era.

As the resistance movement grew through the 60s and 70s, the South African government responded with violence.

We had young people coming together, standing in union against what was happening and so on.

And during that time, you had people just murdered, being shot at and so on.

Over time, the anti-apartheid movement also gained support internationally.

There were student protests in lots of countries.

South African sports teams came under pressure when they played abroad.

Feelings about recent tragedies in South Africa are naturally running very strong just now.

The country was banned from major sporting events, including the Olympics.

It was all part of a bigger campaign to isolate South Africa politically and economically.

There was a UN arms embargo, boycotts and sanctions.

By the late 80s, major Western governments like the US and UK had joined in too.

And those are just some examples among a whole web of internal and external factors that eventually pushed South Africa's government to change course.

Whilst none of them, by in and of themselves, were able to overthrow the government, they were able to create a situation of endemic crisis which the apartheid government realised it could not get out of.

At some point, it became too costly to continue this racial segregation and that and other factors then contribute towards this move towards democracy.

That happened in the 1990s.

And this was a huge moment.

When Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

He was one of the main anti-apartheid leaders and had been locked up for 27 years for his opposition to the government.

When South Africa's first free elections were held in 1994, he became president.

Another huge moment.

So that was the story of apartheid in South Africa.

The short version, anyway.

The South African experience explains the root of the word.

But the concept of apartheid has evolved.

That's because apartheid has been established as a crime against humanity under international law.

In 1973, the United Nations adopted what's known as the Apartheid Convention.

It defines apartheid as

And in 1998, apartheid was included in the Rome Statute, the treaty that underpins the International Criminal Court.

And it uses similar language.

And in recent years, that conclusion, that the crime of apartheid exists, is one that many human rights organizations have come to in relation to Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

They include Palestinian groups, Israeli groups, and two big international ones,

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, who've both published investigations that are hundreds of pages long.

And there's a lot of evidence to support this claim.

The core accusation is that the Israeli government maintains a system of oppression and domination that prioritizes Israeli Jews over Palestinians.

Now, all of them have reached their conclusion in slightly different ways, and they differ over exactly where they think apartheid is happening.

Let's look at the map.

You've got Israel here, and then the Palestinian territories, which are under Israeli military occupation, meaning Israel has ultimate authority over this whole area.

Now, some groups, including Amnesty, argue that apartheid is happening in Israel itself, as well as the occupied territories.

We'll get back to that.

Other groups, like Human Rights Watch, say the term apartheid only applies in the occupied territories.

Here are some of the things they point to.

There are 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank in East Jerusalem, and the Israeli government has granted them a superior status under the law as compared to Palestinians living in the same territory.

That's how Human Rights Watch puts it.

It's things like separate justice systems.

Settlers are subject to Israeli civil law.

Palestinians are typically subject to Israeli military law.

The Israeli military writes the regulations and the rules which determine how and where you build, how and where you travel, how and where you conduct your normal business, your economy, how much water you are allowed.

It's two different worlds.

The Arabs live under military occupation, while the Israelis are enjoying the Palestinian land which they live on, but at the same time, they're enjoying all the privileges that you can get by being an Israeli citizen.

Palestinians can't move around in the way Israelis can.

In the West Bank, they have to pass through military checkpoints, they often need special permits, and are banned from using certain roads.

We have a Palestinian-dedicated app that shows the route that Palestinians can take when they want to go from one place to another.

They also can't travel freely between the West Bank and Gaza.

Even before the recent war, Israel had a total blockade on the Gaza Strip.

And this is all part of what the rights groups call territorial fragmentation.

Because while Israeli territory is contiguous, i.e. it's one chunk of land,

Palestinians have been pushed into a patchwork of territory.

The Israeli organization B'Tselem says, this separates the Palestinians into distinct groups, which helps Israel promote Jewish supremacy and thwarts criticism and resistance.

So there is quite a lot of agreement among rights groups that Israel is practicing apartheid here.

Less so on whether the criteria for apartheid is met in Israel itself.

The Israeli government, and others, say that all Israeli citizens have equal rights, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20% of the population.

There is formally a democratic regime.

Jews and Arabs have the same rights.

They can be elected.

There is even an Arab judge in the Supreme Court.

So actually, there is some discrimination, of course, between Arabs and Jews inside Israel.

But basically, according to the Israeli law, there should be no discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender, so forth.

Others say that, in practice, it's not so clear-cut.

Amnesty, for example, argues that Palestinian citizens of Israel do face considerable rights violations, including things like home demolitions and forced evictions.

And they say because those violations are happening in the context of the wider system of domination and oppression of Palestinians, the apartheid criteria are met.

People began to say, well, this system of apartheid doesn't only exist in the West Bank for settlers versus Arabs, but it's really part and parcel of the entire system of Israel in all the areas under its control, even though it is applied in different ways.

Now, the Israeli government has called groups like Amnesty delusional for making the accusation of apartheid and say they're fueling anti-Semitism.

Israel isn't perfect, but we are a democracy committed to international law, open to criticism.

I hate to use the argument that if Israel wasn't a Jewish state, no one at Amnesty would dare make such a claim against it.

But in this case, there's simply no other explanation.

Criticizing the government for practicing apartheid is becoming not politically correct in Israel.

You will not find it in the mainstream media, even in the academia.

Professors are very careful about using apartheid, but asking the question, is Israel apartheid, is more legitimate, yes.

Outside of Israel, especially in the context of what's happening in Gaza, that question is getting more and more attention.

For example, some people are drawing parallels between the pro-Palestine movement and the campaigns to isolate South Africa during its apartheid era.

South Africa's government itself is making a link.

It referred to apartheid at the UN's highest court, where it's bringing a case against Israel for another international crime, genocide, which Israel also denies.

We as South Africans sense, see, hear and feel to our core the inhumane discriminatory policies and practices of the Israel regime as an even more extreme form of the apartheid that was institutionalized against black people in my country.

So the label of apartheid is being attached to Israel.

And in the court of public opinion and international diplomacy, labels can be powerful.

Ultimately, though, the legal question of whether Israel's guilty of the crime of apartheid is one for an international court to decide.