Rafael Silver is a Jew, Israeli citizen and a veteran of a combat unit in the Israeli army. He left Israel in 2001 because he could no longer be a part of a system that practices apartheid against the Palestinian people.  “I do not use the word apartheid lightly but instead reluctantly,” he writes. “I choose to use this word to describe the reality the Palestinian people have been enduring for generations because I have seen it in action with my own eyes.  I have enforced it during my military service in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip and supported it as an Israeli taxpayer.”