Ramadan begins today. Across the Muslim world, nearly two billion people will turn toward Mecca in the predawn darkness, whisper the niyyah of fasting, and enter the most sacred month of the Islamic calendar – the month in which the Quran descended, in which the gates of heaven open and the gates of hell close, in which a single night, Laylat al-Qadr, carries the weight of a thousand months.

And inside a country that the overwhelming consensus of global Muslim opinion has declared an apartheid state, approximately 1.8 million Muslim citizens will do exactly the same. They will fast from fajr (dawn) to maghrib (sunset).

They will pray tarawih in over four hundred mosques scattered from the Galilee to the Negev – in the Ottoman splendor of al-Jazzar in Acre, in the ancient simplicity of al-Bahr on the Mediterranean shore in Jaffa, in modest neighborhood masjids in Umm al-Fahm and Rahat and Qalansawe.

In fact, tens of thousands of Muslim worshipers gather every Friday of Ramadan at the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, ascending to what is Islam’s third holiest site, a place many insist is systematically restricted or inaccessible. Yet each Ramadan, the esplanade fills with prayer, bodies aligned shoulder to shoulder beneath an open sky, complicating slogans with lived reality.

They will break their fast with dates and water, as the Prophet instructed, and they will do so as citizens of a state that funds over a hundred of their mosques, pays the salaries of their imams through the Ministry of Religious Services, and has seated a Muslim justice, Khaled Kabub — born in Jaffa, educated at Tel Aviv University, appointed in 2022 – on the highest court in the land. This is the reality that the apartheid framework cannot metabolize, and until it does, it remains not an analysis but an incantation.

The comparison to South Africa is not merely imprecise – it is structurally illiterate. Apartheid was a legal architecture in which an entire racial category was denied citizenship, denied the vote, denied freedom of movement, denied access to courts, denied the right to hold office or own property in designated areas, by explicit statutory design.

In Israel, Arab citizens vote in every election, have been elected to every single Knesset since 1949 – over a hundred Arab members of parliament across seven decades – serve as Supreme Court justices, and in 2021, for the first time, an Islamist party, Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am, sat inside a governing coalition and extracted billions in budget commitments for Arab municipalities.

This is not what apartheid looks like. This is what flawed, unfinished, often unjust democracy looks like – which is a profoundly different diagnosis requiring profoundly different remedies. To conflate the two is not radical politics; it is intellectual laziness cloaked in moral urgency.

Consider the case the apartheid theorists cannot explain. In 2011, Justice George Karra, an Arab Christian citizen of Israel, sat on the Supreme Court panel that upheld the rape conviction of the President of the State of Israel, Moshe Katsav – and Karra was reported as among the strictest voices on that bench, rejecting the appeal, affirming the victims’ testimony, and sending the head of the Jewish state to prison. An Arab judge imprisoning a Jewish president in a country supposedly built on racial supremacy. The apartheid framework does not have a room in which to place this fact, so it simply ignores it.

Consider further: this month, Major Ella Waweya, a thirty-six-year-old Muslim woman born in Qalansawe – who voluntarily joined the Israel Defense Forces in 2013, initially hiding her service from her own family – was selected to replace Colonel Avichay Adraee as the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesperson.

A hijab-less Muslim woman, among the most senior female Arab officers in the Israeli military, will now be the voice the Arab world hears when the IDF speaks. Apartheid does not produce Ella Waweyas. Apartheid produces Bantustans. During Ramadan, the Muslim world fasts from food; it should also fast from flattening complex realities into the slogan of apartheid.

None of this exonerates Israel from the very real and very serious discrimination its Arab citizens face – the underfunded municipalities, the unrecognized Bedouin villages, the violence epidemic that claims Arab lives at catastrophic rates while the state produces committees instead of convulsions. There is marginalization, structural neglect, and a civic hierarchy that privileges Jewish citizens in ways both explicit and ambient.

But marginalization does not constitute apartheid, just as a military campaign in Gaza does not, by definition, amount to genocide. Words have meanings, and when we inflate them beyond their definitional boundaries, we do not sharpen the critique – we blunt it. The Amazigh in Morocco are marginalized. The Kurds in Turkey are marginalized. The Roma across Europe are marginalized. We do not call these apartheid because the word means something specific, and specificity is the precondition for honest diagnosis.

And here is what most of the Muslim world refuses to absorb: Israel is a Jewish state, but “Jewish” in this context does not mean what “Islamic” means in the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is an ethno-national designation, not a theocratic one. Tel Aviv hosts one of the largest Pride parades on earth. There is no religious police, no morality enforcement, no blasphemy law. Alcohol flows freely. Shabbat is observed by choice, not by coercion.

The rabbinate holds power over personal status law – a genuine problem – but the state itself is governed by secular law, secular courts, and secular norms that would be unrecognizable in any country that calls itself an Islamic republic. To say “Jewish state” and hear “theocracy” is to project an Islamic political imagination onto a civilization that separated synagogue and state centuries before the modern Muslim world even began debating the question.

As Ramadan descends upon Israel’s mosques this week, the muezzin will call the adhan over cities where synagogues stand on the next street and churches around the corner – and that coexistence, however imperfect, however strained, however scarred by war and suspicion and genuine injustice, is not the architecture of apartheid.

It is the messy, painful, unfinished architecture of a democracy that has not yet decided how generous it is willing to be – but has, at every juncture, refused to close the door entirely.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)