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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.

Australia

The treatment of Indigenous Australians by European settlers (read invaders) also bears many similarities to apartheid. It has also been deemed to constitute genocide by a National Inquiry into the separation of Indigenous children from their families in 1997. For more information, see .

Israel

Although all citizens of Israel are equal by law, there are accusations of racial segregation against the Arabs living in the occupied territories.

The website Radio Islam claims that Judaism, Zionism, and Israel's treatment of Palestinians is discriminatory and a form of apartheid, and refers to it as an Apartheid state. Israel and its supporters argue that this comparison is ungrounded and unfair, as its Arab citizens are allowed mostly the same freedoms as the Jews. The Israeli West Bank "Security Fence" is often referred to by critics as the "Apartheid wall".

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has compared Israel's practicies to apartheid and said that "it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa".

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia's practices against women have been referred to as "gender apartheid" and "sexual apartheid". Saudi Arabia's treatment of religious minorities has also been described as "apartheid". Until March 1, 2004, the official government 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". Some other Basques in Spain have argued that the treatment they received as non nationalist by the Basque nationalist authorities in the Basque Country is "apartheid".

United States

Racial segregation was the law in parts of the American South until the American Civil Rights Movement. These laws became known as Jim Crow laws and were similar to apartheid legislation in the forced segregation of facilities and services to black and white people, and prohibition of intermarriage. Some similarities between the situation in the southern states of the U.S. and South Africa were:

• The races were kept separate, with separate schools, hotels, bars, hospitals, toilets, parks, even telephone booths, and separate sections in libraries, cinemas, and restaurants, the latter often with separate ticket windows and counters. (Refer )
• Laws prohibiting interracial sex and marriage (miscegenation) were passed between 1870 and 1884 in eleven southern states ]
• The voting rights of blacks were systematically restricted or denied through suffrage laws, such as the introduction of poll taxes and literacy tests. Loopholes, such as the grandfather clause and the understanding clause protected the voting rights of white people who were unable to pay the tax or pass the literacy test. Only whites could vote in the Democratic Party primary contests. ]

Some differences were:

• In the U.S. after the Civil War, there was never a class of blacks who were not citizens (although it is certain that most were treated as second class citizens);
• There were no "homelands" in the U.S. (although some areas were informally designated black neighbourhoods, and as such were under-resourced and stigmatized), 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 as described above.

The term genocide, meaning not only mass killing of a group but the intention to destroy a group of people, and is often used to describe the Holocaust. The Jim Crow laws were designed to disempower African Americans and characterised them as an inferior race, just as the Third Reich deemed Jewish people. The Jim Crow laws justified and perpetuated the use of lynchings against African Americans, particularly by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. 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.