Apartheid in the Twenty-first Century: Racial Capitalism and the Struggles in Palestine

Apartheid has become an increasingly important framework for understanding and challenging Israeli rule in Palestine. The Apartheid Convention states apartheid is a crime against humanity. We contend what is missing from this definition of apartheid is an economic and ontological link. Although the current legal definition focuses solely on the political regime, it does not provide a strong basis for critiquing the economic aspects of a settler colonial state embedded in apartheid. To address this concern, we propose a more comprehensive definition of apartheid which grew out of the struggle in South Africa during the 1970s that gained support among revolutionaries due to the limits of decolonisation in South Africa after 1994 — highlighting the reality(ies) that apartheid is intimately connected to capitalism. This conceptualisation was termed racial capitalism. This article argues that racial capitalism provides a more thorough understanding of the destructive dynamics of the Israeli settler colonial project, one that insists that the struggle against Israeli domination must confront both the apartheid state and the racial capitalist system if Palestinians ever hope to achieve liberation.