Israel is an apartheid state

Apr 11, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – There was once a time when Guyana remembered what a spine felt like. In the 1970s, Forbes Burnham did not dabble in the evasions of “balanced statements.” He called apartheid by its proper name, broke relations with South Africa, and barred the traffic of sport and commerce with any one with links to the apartheid state.

In 1981, the English cricketer Robin Jackman was selected for England cricket team to play a Test in Georgetown. But the Guyanese authorities refused him a visa because of his then recent coaching ties to apartheid-era South Africa. The Burnham government was enforcing a broader interpretation of the Gleneagles Agreement which sought to discouraging sporting ties between Commonwealth States and South Africa.

The English Cricket Board argued that the denial of a visa to Jackman amount to a restriction of the selection of its team and they withdrew from the Test. Despite tremendous pressure, Burnham did not budge. That defiance became a vivid illustration of Guyana’s opposition to apartheid and an example that the country was willing to incur price for its principled stance.

Half a century on, the present government of Guyana contents itself with the timid grammar of diplomatic nicety. It behaves as if injustice were a matter for polite disagreement but not censure.

But Burnham was not alone in exposing apartheid. Jimmy Carter warned as early as 2006 that the conditions imposed upon Palestinians by the State of Israel bore the unmistakable marks of apartheid. Since then, the case has not weakened; it has hardened.

In the occupied territories, two populations inhabit the same land under two different systems of law: one civilian, one military; one endowed with rights, the other subject to them. Roads bifurcate the landscape—this lane for Israelis, that path for Palestinians. Walls rise, checkpoints multiply, and a bureaucracy of permits and prohibitions constricts the ordinary business of life into a daily negotiation with power. The 2018 Nation-State Law, elevating one ethno-national identity above all others, supplied the legal varnish to what practice had long made plain.

International bodies have dispensed with euphemism. A United Nations Special Rapporteur described a “deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system” privileging hundreds of thousands of settlers while consigning millions of Palestinians to a regime of institutional subordination. Amnesty International, in its own exhaustive accounting, arrived at the same verdict: apartheid, not as metaphor but as legal fact.

To this ledger must now be added the chilling drift of recent legislative and policy proposals that contemplate capital punishment in the context of Palestinian resistance—measures advanced in Israeli political discourse that would further entrench a system already defined by unequal valuation of human life. Whether couched as security policy or judicial reform, the implication is unmistakable: Israeli laws against the Palestinians itself becomes an instrument not merely of control, but of exemplary terror.

And yet the People’s Progressive Party/Civic prefers the safety of condemning “violence on both sides,” as though the symmetry existed outside the imagination of press releases. This is not balance; it is abdication.

The two-state solution, invoked like a ritual incantation by the PPPC government, has long since been rendered a diplomatic ghost. The territory of the Palestinians is fragmented. Its sovereignty hypothetical. Its future postponed into irrelevance by the relentless expansion of settlements and the expanding occupation and now genocide and invasion.

What, then, is required of a country like Guyana that once when to stand up regardless of the price to be paid? Not another statement lacquered in neutrality, but an act commensurate with its own history. If apartheid in South Africa merited rupture, apartheid elsewhere cannot be excused by geography or alliance. The government of Guyana must say, plainly and without adornment, that Israel practices apartheid. And it must act accordingly.

That means the immediate severing of diplomatic relations. That means the suspension of economic ties. That means the refusal to lend even the faintest legitimacy to a system that organises human worth along lines of ethnicity and power. Anything less is not caution; it is complicity.

The people of Guyana must summon the courage their leaders conspicuously lack. They must demand, in voices too loud to be muffled by protocol, that the government sever every diplomatic and economic tie with the State of Israel. This must be done not tomorrow, not after another round of hollow statements, but immediately.

As for the predictable frowns from United States officials, they may be consigned to the same place reserved for all external pressures that would have Guyana barter its conscience for approval. Because a nation that once stood against apartheid cannot now plead timidity when principle again calls for action.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.) 

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• “apartheid” state, Forbes Burnham, genocide, Israel, Peeping Tom

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