By Dan Steinbock             

Unlike South African apartheid which backed supremacy and exploitation, Israeli apartheid condones ethnic cleansing, even mass atrocities – as evidenced by the obliteration of Gaza and anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.

On November 10, the Israeli parliament passed the first reading of a bill to impose the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners convicted of killing Israeli individuals, with 39 votes in favor and 16 against out of 120 members.

The bill would make it mandatory for Israeli courts to impose death penalty against individuals convicted of killing an Israeli “either intentionally or recklessly” if the act is motivated by “racism or hostility towards the public” and “committed with the objective of harming the state of Israel or the rebirth of the Jewish people.”

The controversial and murky bill has been widely condemned by international and Palestinian human rights organizations and prisoners’ groups. As Amnesty International put it, “The shift towards requiring courts to impose the death penalty against Palestinians is a dangerous and dramatic step backwards and a product of ongoing impunity for Israel’s system of apartheid and its genocide in Gaza.”

However, as I have argued (here and here), such shift would be consistent with the Israeli far-right’s redemptionist dreams of Jewish supremacy and Greater Israel, which the Netanyahu cabinet has effectively condoned. It would also codify the move beyond classic apartheid.

Institutionalization of apartheid   

In South Africa, racial discrimination against black people began with large-scale colonization over four centuries ago. By the early 19^th century, British settlers began to colonize the frontier regions. As takeoffs accelerated in in the late 19th century Europe, South Africa industrialized on the back of mining and infrastructure investment. But the Mineral Revolution was a revolution by, of and for the white colonial settlers.

Following the European powers’ scramble for Africa, the Anglo-Zulu War and two Boer Wars, the Boer republics were incorporated into the British Empire. Meanwhile, South Africa began to introduce more segregationist policies towards non-whites. The goals were reflected by the Afrikaans term apartheid (“separateness,” or “apart-hood”).

After the 1948 all-white elections, the National Party enforced white supremacy and racial separation. When the South African republic was established in 1961, it withdrew from the British Commonwealth.

International counter-reaction, black resistance

A year later, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 1761, which requested member states to break off diplomatic relations and cease trading with South Africa and to deny passage to South African ships and aircraft.

A special committee was set up calling for a boycott of South Africa. Though initially ignored, it found allies in the West, including the UK-based Anti-Apartheid Movement.

By 1973, the UN General Assembly agreed on the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. In the process, “apartheid was declared to be a crime against humanity, with a scope that went far beyond South Africa.”

Popular uprisings ensued in black and colored townships in 1976 and 1985. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the last vestiges of apartheid were abolished, and a new constitution was promulgated into law: one person, one vote.

South Africa and Israel as “apartheid states”          

The apartheid association between South Africa and Israel is not something new. After the UN vote against the South African apartheid in the early 1960s, the country’s prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was particularly annoyed by Israel’s vote against South Africa’s segregation.

“Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude,” Verwoerd lamented. “They took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”

In effect, martial law had been imposed on the Arab citizens of Israel from 1948 to 1966, and it continues to be intermittently enforced to the present.

Effectively, the Israeli government imposed various restrictions on Palestinians, including on their mobility, with security checkpoints set up to enforce these permits allowing entry. Meanwhile, requests for government services for Arab Israelis were directed to military courts instead of civil courts. These measures were subsequently adopted in the occupied territories, particularly the West Bank.

Subsequently, the UN adopted the (non-binding) Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, sponsored mainly by the Arab League, the Soviet bloc and many new African states.

After the 1967 Six-Day-War and the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian resistance intensified, domestically and internationally. 

The debate on Israeli segregation   

Following the Yom Kippur War, the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 3236 recognized the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, inviting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to participate in international diplomacy.

The oil crisis in 1975 paved the way to resolution 3379, which stated that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” In the UN, Israeli ambassador Chaim Herzog, the future president of Israel, stated the decision was “devoid of any moral or legal value.” Then, he tore the resolution in half.

At the end of the Cold War, Resolution 3379 was revoked by the UN Resolution 46/86, introduced by U.S. President George H. W. Bush. It contributed to Israel’s sense of impunity and the rise of its Messianic far-right. But Bush’s UN address wasn’t just about Zionism and racism. It was about wheeling and dealing. The revocation was Israel’s precondition for participation in the Madrid Conference of 1991, which paved the way to the Oslo Accords – which the Netanyahu cabinets have shunned ever since then.

In 2021, Isaac Herzog, the son of Chaim Herzog, became Israel’s president. When South Africa launched its genocide case against Israel, he declared it a “blood libel” against Jews. Later he shredded the UN Charter in protest of the UN General Assembly vote to boost the status of the Palestinian mission.

And yet it was in 2021 that Human Rights Watch warned that Israel had crossed the apartheid threshold. Many Israeli leaders agreed. A year later, Israel’s former attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, said that “my country has sunk to such political and moral depths that it is now an apartheid regime.”

Two years later, he was seconded by the former speaker of the Israeli parliament, Avraham Burg. A month before the October 7 offensive, Mossad’s ex-chief Tamir Pardo concurred: “There is an apartheid state here,” since “two people are judged under two legal systems.”

In the case of South African apartheid, international restrictions fostered domestic opposition. But in the case of Israel, those measures proved soft. It was the ineptitude of the international community that reinforced the marginalization of the Israeli anti-apartheid opposition and the rise of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet in late 2022.

Apartheid and ultra-apartheid   

In South Africa and Israel, apartheid rule has sought to crush all opposition by fragmenting territories, restricting mobility, forcing inequality and imposing segregation. Under the Likud and Netanyahu governments, Israel has been morphing into an apartheid state and its occupied territories into Palestinian Bantustans.

Yet, there are major differences with classic apartheid as enforced in South Africa and its Israeli version in the occupied territories. Apartheid policies can be formal and legal as in South African apartheid, or informal and semi-legal as in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

In apartheid South Africa, a white minority dominated a black majority, whereas in Israel a Jewish majority discriminates against a Palestinian minority, keeping the Palestinians under military occupation.

Third, in South Africa, the objective of apartheid was to sustain a system of racial segregation in which one group is deprived of political and civil rights, and exploited as low-cost labor. During apartheid rule, the per capita income of South African blacks relative to the whites climbed from 8.6 to 13.5 percent. The Palestinians’ starting point relative to the Israelis was almost twice as high in percentage terms. But even before October 7, 2023, it had plunged to a lower level than that of South Africa’s blacks at the end of apartheid rule.

But the ultimate difference between South African apartheid and Israel’s ultra-apartheid is ethnic cleansing – as a prelude to worse.

The ultimate difference   

Unlike classic apartheid and its territorial fragmentation, degree of formality and labor exploitation, Israeli apartheid aims further. Since the UN Partition Plan, its ultimate purpose has been the Judaization of Arab Palestine and the drastic expansion of Israeli borders. Apartheid is an instrument to that goal.

Apartheid South Africa was willing to live with segregated, exploited and underprivileged black people. By contrast, since the late 1970s, the Israeli system has sought to use segregation as an interim instrument to ethnically cleanse the occupied territories through Palestinian displacement, dispossession and, if necessary, abject devastation.

In this sense, Israeli apartheid differs from South African apartheid. It is ultra-apartheid. In Latin, ultra means “beyond”, or “on the far side of.” Going beyond the norm, ultra-apartheid officially shuns classic apartheid, yet benefits from the low-cost labor while ultimately seeking its obliteration.

Today, ultra-apartheid is the inspiration of settler violence in the West Bank and the “judicial reforms” by the Netanyahu cabinet, to accelerate the transformation of the secular and democratic Jewish state into a religious and autocratic regime.

The original version was published by Informed Comment (US) on November 18, 2025.

About the Author

The author of The Obliteration Doctrine (2025) and The Fall of Israel (2024), Dr Dan Steinbock, an expert of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/  For the books and related commentaries, see https://www.differencegroup.net/new-books

By Dan Steinbock             

In climate risk rankings, the Philippines is ground zero. Yet, given the choice to redefine the notion of security in 2022, it chose to shun it.

Despite seven decades of climate denialism, funded primarily by the world’s largest energy giants in the United States and, to a lesser degree, in Western Europe, the elevated risks associated with climate change and extreme weather events are today widely recognized.

In the climate risk and disaster rankings, the Philippines is not just any other nation. The disaster-prone archipelago nation is ground zero of climate disaster risk.   

World’s greatest disaster-risk zone  

The World Risk Index 2025 indicates the disaster risk for 193 countries, or over 99% of the global population. The Philippines is once again at the top of the Index; way ahead of other disaster-prone countries, including India, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico and Myanmar.

Thanks to its great geographic fragmentation and extraordinarily high exposure to weather-related extremes, the Philippine risk profile is characterized by a variety of natural hazards, with river and coastal flooding playing a particularly central role.

Even before the recent typhoons, the findings showed that the country’s exposure is particularly high in regions with flat topography, high population density, and inadequate drainage infrastructure.

Floods are among the most severe hazards of our time — with devastating consequences for people, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Climate change is exacerbating this threat. And when extreme weather events are on the rise, vulnerable communities are bearing the brunt. In the Philippines where half of the population defines itself as poor, the implications are severe.

Furthermore, uncontrolled urbanization, industrial agriculture as a driver of soil degradation, and inadequate preventive measures further increase the vulnerability of many regions – not to mention pervasive corruption.

The Philippines is a textbook case of what happens when disaster risk is amplified.

Figure 1: The World Risk Leader: The Philippines

Increasing GDP losses are coming   

Climate change poses major risks for development in the Philippines, with temperature increases, changing rainfall patterns, and rising sea levels that hamper economic activities, damage infrastructure, and induce deep social disruptions. Just one example: According to the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority (NAMRIA), sea level in Metro Manila has risen by an average of 8.4 millimeters a year from 1901 until 2022, almost three times the global average of 3.4 mm/year in the same period.

Projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) suggest that temperatures in the Philippines will continue to increase by about 1-2°C by the end of the 21st century, depending on the climate scenario. (I believe that these estimates may actually prove conservative because the IPCC modeling downplays feedback effects. The climate impact is likely to hit harder, earlier and broader than expected.)

According to World Bank’s 2022 Philippines report, annual losses from typhoons are estimated to reach 1.2% of the GDP and as much as 4.6% of GDP in extreme cases like Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in 2013. After all, variability and intensity of rainfall are likely to increase. And extreme events will become stronger and more frequent.

Figure 2: The High Economic and Human Costs to Come

The economic damages in the Philippines could reach up to 7.6% of GDP by 2030 and 13.6% of GDP by 2040. While climate change effects will vary across and within regions, all sectors will be affected.

And yet, even today the scarce economic resources in the Philippines are too often misallocated (rearmament drive instead of inter-state diplomacy), mismanaged (neoliberalism instead of human security) and misplaced (corruption instead of people’s welfare).

As World Bank warned in 2022, “policy inaction would impose substantial economic and human costs, especially for the poor.” 

Could the government have opted an alternative policy approach that would have tackled the devastating climate losses? Yes. But that approach was deliberately killed – ironically, in the name of national security.

The promise of human security

From the standpoint of disaster risk and extreme climate, one of the most inspiring appointments after the election of 2022 was that of Clarita Carlos to serve as President Marcos Jr’s National Security Adviser. She was the first female and the first civilian to lead the institution.

Upon assuming office, Carlos, a highly-regarded political scientist, planned to undertake a “human security” approach that focuses more on the daily lives of the Filipinos. It was the right idea in the right time and in the right place.

Historically, this broader view of human security builds on the 1994 Human Development Report by the UN Development Program, which equated it “with people rather than territories and with development rather than arms.” [my italics, DS]

Accordingly, threats to human security may be classified into economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security. This approach would encourage the government to focus its strengths on its greatest enemy: the risk of climate disaster.

But what about the South China Sea tensions? During Carlos’s reign, the Philippines reaffirmed its commitment to international law and the rule of law in inter-state relations. In territorial maritime disputes, Manila would defend its views by being at the forefront of diplomatic efforts aiming at ASEAN-China South China Sea Code of Conduct.

The objective was to ensure peace and stability in the region, while focusing on economic development that had made Asia the global growth engine. That, in turn, is vital to garner the resources to fight the climate disaster risks in the coming decades.

Yet, that’s when the government made its U-turn.

Ignoring the climate focus   

In mid-January 2023, Carlos resigned after the president relayed to her “some information” which she could not disclose in public “because it is a delicate national security issue.”

As she acknowledged two weeks later, she had been opposed by the military since day one. In contrast to Carlos, the military saw as the prime security issue “the perceived external threat beyond our shores.”

Barely a day after Carlos’s interview, President Marcos Jr granted U.S. wider access to military bases. Soon thereafter, the Duterte-Marcos alliance fell apart, mud-slinging superseded politics as usual, former President Duterte was deported to the Hague, ASEAN unity was undermined, geopolitical tensions soared and Filipinos’ livelihoods were ignored.

The longer it will take to embrace a human security approach, the heavier will be the penalties of disaster risks and extreme weather as the Philippines continues its descent into the ground zero of extreme climate.

But that course is not inevitable. It, too, could be reversed. After all, climate risk is not just a political matter. In the Philippines, it is an existential issue.

The original version was released by The Manila Times on November 16, 2025.

About the Author

Dr Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net

By Dan Steinbock             

In October, amid the two-year anniversary of the Gaza genocide, Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank hit an all-time high. And they will escalate – as long as they are allowed by U.S.-led West.

On Thursday dawn, Israeli settlers set fire to the Hajja Hamida Mosque in the Palestinian village of Deir Istiya in the north of the West Bank. Photographs taken at the scene showed racist, anti-Palestinian slogans sprayed on the walls of the mosque, which was damaged in the blaze. Copies of the Quran – the Islamic holy book – were also burned.

October 2025 recorded the highest monthly number of Israeli settler attacks since the UN Humanitarian office (OCHA) began documenting such incidents in 2006. That’s more than 260 attacks resulting in casualties, property damage or both – an average of eight incidents per day.

Reminiscent of the Gaza atrocities, one in every five Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in 2025 across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is a child.

During this olive harvest season, settler violence has reached the highest level recorded in recent years, with the injury of more than 150 Palestinians and the vandalism of over 5,700 trees.

This violence is not a fringe phenomenon. It is deliberate, systematic and escalatory. Shunning all international condemnation, it seeks to establish new “facts on the ground.” It is ethnic cleansing aiming at involuntary population transfer and, unless disrupted, mass atrocities.  

From vigilantes to state terror   

At the beginning of 2024, Zvi Sukkot, Knesset member of the Religious Zionist Party and a colleague of the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, urged the government to “occupy, annex, and demolish all the houses [in Gaza], and build large neighborhoods and settlements.” It sounded harsh, but the zealot was consistent. He had a dream. What happened in Gaza would not stay there but spread to the West Bank.

A far-right Jewish settler living illegally in the West Bank, Sukkot is a former member of The Revolt, a violent Jewish terror group, which has engaged in numerous arson attacks. The group advocates the dismantling of the Israeli state to establish the Kingdom of Israel that follows Jewish Law rather than the rule of (secular) law.

In 2010, Sukkot was arrested in an investigation of a mosque arson and expelled from the West Bank for violent anti-Palestinian attacks. He had defended Jews suspected of firebombing a Palestinian family and been arrested for alleged involvement in “price tagging”; that is, vandalism and violent settler attacks against Palestinians.

As of 2017, the group was still active, in what the Shin Bet internal security agency calls “the second generation of…The Revolt.”

By early 2023, Sukkot had made it to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. And after October 7, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him to chair the Knesset Subcommittee for “Judea and Samaria” (read: the West Bank).

To the settlers, Sukkot is a success story reflecting the march of extremist settlers to the Israeli institutions in the past two decades.

As a member of The Revolt, Sukkot could only firebomb a few Palestinians, mosques and churches. It wasn’t efficient. Now he is in a position to shape the future of the land. He is no longer fighting those in charge. He is in charge.

How did the Messianic far-right march into institutions they once hoped to pull to pieces? Ostensibly, democratically. With the rise of the Jewish dual state, the Netanyahu cabinets have subverted the secular democratic state. The parallels are alarming. Similar trajectories broke the back of the Weimar Republic a century ago.

Ironically, the Israeli settlement policy was first developed by the Labor governments, which paved the way for the foxes to take over the henhouse.

The rise of Jewish settlements   

Since the 1970s there has been a tacit collusion between the Israeli state and the settlers. It is a symbiotic system. The state takes over land, while the settlers, who seek land to further their agenda, engage in violence against Palestinians to achieve their expulsion.

Occasionally, the two cooperate directly, but the preference is to retain an arm’s length distance, to preserve the semblance of the rule of law. The ultimate aim of settler violence is to foster Greater Israel; that is, a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

A new stage ensued in 2018, when the Basic Law codified that “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening.” In keeping with this principle, Israel has dispossessed Palestinians in the West Bank to use their land to build new settlements and to expand existing ones.

According to international law, an occupier must not confiscate land for the needs of the occupier. So, Israel came up with the legal acrobatics of “declaring” instead of “confiscating” land. Based on a subversion of the Ottoman land law from 1858, this bizarre interpretation allowed Israel to take over 16 percent of the West Bank prior to October 7; or 500 to 5,000 dunams per year. Amid the Gaza genocide in the first half of 2024, declarations of state land shot to 24,000 dunams. In other words, while Gaza was burning, Israeli occupation authorities were rushing to take over the West Bank.

Under the labor coalition, the number of settlements grew slowly until the election triumph of the Israeli hard right in the late 1970s. That’s when Prime Minister Begin initiated a huge and purposeful settlement policy to take over the West Bank. In the process, the Jewish settler population soared from a few thousands to over half a million in the West Bank prior to October 7, 2023.

In parallel, Israeli governments have encouraged increasing Jewish settlement in Jerusalem. Since 1967, it has more than tripled to 600,000, whereas the number of Palestinians is close to 390,000. The tacit objective has been to maximize the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, while increasing the Jewish population in Arab East Jerusalem.

Settler violence   

Following the rise of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet in late 2022, the efforts to achieve Jewish supremacy in the West Bank have escalated dramatically. Taking advantage of the Gaza War, groups of violent settlers have carried out organized operations to expel Palestinian communities, through threats, intimidation, property damage, and physical assaults.

Settler Violence Incidents

Until recently, Israeli and international media have characterized instances of settler violence as “rampages,” which suggests violent but uncontrollable behavior, involving a large group of people. In reality, the violence has been systemic and coordinated.

After the settler violence in Huwara in February 2023, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, head of the military’s Central Command in charge of the West Bank, described the rampage as “a pogrom done by outlaws.” He deliberately used the term referring to mob attacks against Jews in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. As a result, Fuchs himself was targeted for assassination by Kahanite settlers, according to Shin Bet. It wasn’t the first time. In 2007, then-prime minister Ehud Olmert lashed out at settlers in Hebron, who attacked Palestinians and their property. Like some other Israeli leaders, Olmert called the attacks a pogrom, which made him the target of far-right settlers, supported by U.S. billionaires like the late casino tycoon, Sheldon Adelson.

Referring to antisemitic violence in Russia, the term “pogrom” is usually defined as an officially tolerated organized massacre. In this sense, the pogroms by the Jewish settlers in the West Bank are indeed reminiscent of those in Kishinev and elsewhere, as many Israelis suggest.

Today, Palestinians know exactly what will follow when Jewish settlers burst into Arab neighborhoods crying for the “Death to the Arabs!”

Settlements as a Security Burden   

Ever since the 1970s, the settlers and their U.S. financiers have argued that the settlements ensure Israel’s security. In this view, settlers allow the residents of Tel Aviv to breathe easy because the settlements are good for national security.

In reality, the settlements are a security burden for Israel. ln the past decades, there have been no major war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Yet, due to the Separation Wall and fragmentation of the West Bank, the line of defense that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is required to protect is today about five times the length it would be without the settlements.

Stunningly, before October 7, the IDF had to deploy more than half its active forces, and in crisis situations even two-thirds of them, in the West Bank. That was more than the forces allocated to guarding all other fronts combined (Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the Jordanian border along the Arava).

Worse, these allocations had to be coupled with a large contingent required to protect the settlements. According to estimates, some 80 percent of IDF forces in the West Bank were allocated to settlement guard duty, while the only 20 percent focused on defending the borders of the pre-1967 Israel.

Furthermore, the IDF presence and operations have contributed to several major uprisings, which penalized economic prospects in Israel as well. If Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon was the architect of Hezbollah, its presence in the West Bank and Gaza has served as the midwife of Hamas.

The brutal occupation has divided Israel internally and isolated it externally. It is responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the genocidal atrocities in Gaza. None of this was inevitable. None of it was warranted.

And none of it could have happened without the continuous flows of arms and financing by the U.S.-led West.

A version of the commentary was published by Informed Comment (US) on November 15, 2025.

About the Author 

The author of The Obliteration Doctrine (2025) and The Fall of Israel (2024), Dr Dan Steinbock, an expert of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/  For the books and related commentaries, see https://www.differencegroup.net/new-books