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Controversially, arguments are sometimes made that the past or present actions of other nations are analogous to apartheid in South Africa, or constitute apartheid under the definition adopted in international law.

Israel

Critics of Israel argue that its treatment of Palestinians is discriminatory and a form of apartheid, and refer to it as as a racist and/or an Apartheid state. Israel and its supporters argue that this comparison is ungrounded and unfair. The Israeli West Bank barrier is often referred to by critics as the "Apartheid wall".

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia's discriminatory practices against women have been referred to as "gender apartheid" and "sexual apartheid". Saudi Arabia's repression of religious minorities has also been described as "apartheid". Until March 1, 2004, the official goverment website stated that Jews were forbidden from entering the country.

Spain

Some Basques in Spain have argued that the Navarrese laws that do not grant official status to the Basque language are a form of apartheid. Supporters of Batasuna also call its illegalization "apartheid".

United States

Racial segregation was the law in parts of the American South until the American Civil Rights Movement. Some similarities between the situation in those localities in the U.S. and South Africa were:

• The races were kept separate, and, e.g., schools for black and white children were unequal in quality.
• Interracial sex and marriage were outlawed.
• Blacks were systematically denied voting rights.
• Jim Crow etiquette was similar to apartheid etiquette.

Some differences were:

• In the U.S. after the civil war, there was never a class of blacks who were not citizens; there were no "homelands" in the U.S., and families were not separated as they were in South Africa by not allowing men to bring their families with them to the areas where they worked.
• Blacks are a minority in the U.S., but a majority in South Africa.
• In South Africa, voting rights were denied to blacks outright, by denying them citizenship. In the U.S., denial of voting rights was enforced by local custom, by lynching and other forms of terrorism, or by poll taxes and selective enforcement of literacy requirements.

In a completely different analogy, based on the newly coined term "genocide" used to describe the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) made a 1951 presentation on lynching in the United States to the United Nations entitled "We Charge Genocide," which argued that the federal government, by its failure to act to curb the lynchings, was guilty of genocide under Article II of the UN Genocide Convention.

"The West"

Global apartheid is the view that rich democratic Western nations act in much the same way as white South Africa, by exploiting or ignoring the plight of people in developing countries, inasmuch as many White South Africans justified apartheid by regarding black South Africans as geographically removed from them, and therefore citizens of another territory.