"The only problem with this report is that it confines the 'apartheid' discourse to Israel, not the U.S." – Phil

That's one problem. But a much bigger problem is the misleading phrase, "What was happening on the highway could be the onset of legal apartheid in the West Bank."

"Could be?" "The onset"? "In the West Bank"? Excuse me, but housing, schools, immigration policy, military service, and numerous other aspects of life in Israel are segregated by law, and have been for years.

With the exception of Scott Wilson's reporting in the WaPo, the U.S. press maintains a discreet veil of silence about the quotidian aspects of Israeli apartheid, so that Hillary Clinton can call it "a model democracy."

In this context, the Slimes' selective focus on one highway which "could be the onset of apartheid" is a flat-out lie from the "Saddam's WMDs" fishwrapper.

And by the way, this highway was discussed in Mondoweiss weeks ago, long before the Slimes' sleepy stenographers got a clue.

But it seems that it is not just the West Bank Arabs that suffer overt discrimination. It is my understanding that the Jewish National Fund controls huge tracts of livable space in Israel proper and they have a Jews only covenant attached that denies Arabs the right to buy such lands. Does this covenant extend to privately owned land owned by Jews who purchased their land from the JNF? If so, then this would represent one of the worst forms of housing discrimination that characterized America's racist past.

"Apartheid, The word may be a little overcharged because its original Afrikaner proponents were open racists. Those in Israel that advocate this separation (or at least its defenders in the US) are not out and out racists." – syvanen

Maybe I'm missing the distinction. Most Afrikaners didn't hate blacks. They simply felt, as European colonists, that they were centuries ahead of indigenous blacks in cultural development, and that the cultural gap precluded joint participation in a mixed democracy.

As nearly as I can understand it, that's precisely the view of Israelis toward Arabs. Read the comments section of Haaretz articles, where Israelis regularly mock the "Palis" as shiftless, violent savages from a no-account culture.

The main difference is that in South Africa, skin color provided an easy shorthand for invidious distinction, while in Israel/Palestine the distinction is cultural and religious. This confuses Americans, who are more apt to associate racism strictly with skin color prejudice.

The phrase "Zionism is racism" is a case in point. This phrase was introduced to dramatize the plight of the Palestinian people. It failed miserably. Within the West it became a tag that the user was an antisemite. The only discussions that were provoked by the use of this term was as evidence that the true victims were the Israeli people. The term was thoroughly demonized. Israel won support by its use. Americans began more and more to hate the UN. Third world leaders were despised as a result. It helped provide the political cover to move 400,000 Israeli settlers into the West Bank.

Presently, the discussion on whether Apartheid applies to Israel or not is a debate that is not thoroughly discussed in North America. I do believe that the analogy is only making more headway amongst the mainstream thanks to Carter's book, which did not really go to great lengths to relate what the separate developments mean to Palestinian life as opposed to the Bantustans of South Africa. But what is more astonishing is that this analogy is not an old one since dissidents like Noam Chomsky have been describing a situation like this for the occupied territories since the 1970s. Only because of better independent media coverage do we get the gritty statistics of the de-development of Palestinians in the West Bank and the isolation in Gaza.

The term is one that aims to shock a dreary public that views that life goes on in the Middle East. The boycott campaign wants to create more attention and more discussion on why Israel needs to be singled out for its human rights violations. It bears remarkable similarities with the former South Africa which has the likes of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu condemning the situation in Palestine as much worse than what they experienced. Whether one agrees with the parallel is for one to research on their own. Since the memory of a segregated South Africa still looms large in comtemporary society, using the infamous A word can only help illuminate more minds to dig deeper into the conflict and to the disastrous policies that Israel is pursuing in order to fulfill Zionism and all its glory.

"Segregation" is a good alternative word in the U.S. milieu. Nobody tried to denationalize American blacks, as South Africa did with its Africans, and Israel does to Palestinians with its occupied territories and its Wall. But "segregation" as we knew it the South fits well with the pattern inside Israel, in which most Arabs and Jews live in segregated neighborhoods and attend segregated schools.

Israel has no equivalent to South Africa's former Group Areas Act, which zoned the whole country into towns for whites, coloureds, Asians, and Africans. But Israel also has no equivalent to our Fair Housing Act of 1968, which allows de facto segregation to be challenged. One is perfectly free in Israel to specify apartment rentals or home sales to "Jews only." The subsidized settlements are of course "Jews only" by definition.

Or you can use the term I coined, "kosher Jim Crow." And that ain't just whistlin' Dixie.

Balad chair: We won't allow another expulsion of Jaffa's Arabs

By Yoav Stern and Yigal Hai, Haaretz Correspondents

Balad Chairman Jamal Zahalka said Friday that the Israeli Arab community would not permit what he termed another expulsion from Jaffa, during a procession marking the 32nd anniversary of Land Day in the coastal town.

"Sixty years ago there was a mass expulsion from Jaffa," he told the procession, the first to be held in the mixed Arab and Jewish town. "We won't let the expulsion happen again."

Zahalka's comments came as the government and the Tel Aviv municipality plan to demolish 500 homes in Jaffa. "If the government and municipality are interested in expulsion, they are imposing on us a conflict that we do not want, but one which we will face and realize our right to defend our homes," he said.

The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee decided to hold the procession in Jaffa for the first time, due to a request by an organization of the town's residents, who said the procession was especially important due to the lack of housing options for Arab residents.

Organizers have defined the Jaffa procession as a Arab-Jewish protest march. The first Land Day protests were held on March 30, 1976, to protest government expropriations of Galilee land for "security and settlement purposes." Those protests deteriorated into violent clashes with security forces, leaving six Arab protestors dead.