Today's coverage of the protests, counter-protests and police response in Umm al-Fahm reminded me of a question that's been popping up in my head for the past couple of years. All of the articles I've seen refer to one set of protesters as "Israeli Jews" and the other set of protesters as "Israeli Arabs". On one side we have a religious grouping on the other side a language grouping.

When we were in Israel we met an Israeli who is Jewish but also Arabic - his family is from Iraq, he speaks fluent Arabic and it's the language of his ancestors. Like Israelis of all religions he also speaks Hebrew fluently. But he's not one of the "Israeli Arabs" who were being protested in Umm al-Fahm this week. He's one of the 3.5 million Sephardim and Mizrahim who are linguistically and often culturally Arabic.

The real divide here is not language or culture or ethnicity it's religion. Why aren't we calling a spade a spade? Why don't the news stories talk about Israeli Christians and Israeli Muslims?

I overhear a lot of discussion in the Palestinian human rights community about using the Afrikaans word apartheid to describe the Israeli government's (and the international community's) policy that the predominantly Jewish Israeli population should be separated from the Palestinian Arab population. The South African idea of apartheid (a word meaning separateness) was essentially that different races are better off if they develop separately. It's an idea that was popular in the early 20th century. Australia had its White Australia policy and the United States had the Asian Exclusion Act, both of which severely limited immigration from anywhere but Europe. From the turn of the 20th century it existed in the United States as the doctrine of segregation - that physical separation between races is beneficial. Oppression isn't inherent in the ideas of segregation and apartheid, but flow from the unequal distribution of economic and power that existed in early 20th century America and South Africa (and that's why the end of these policies didn't result in equality).

American audiences understand the term segregation much better than the term apartheid, so I think that when talking to Americans we'd be better off using that term. Obviously the segregation in Israel and Palestine is more extreme and violent than it ever was in the United States or South Africa, but that's a matter of degree rather than ideas.

Qassam rockets aren't really a threat to life according to Aviad's uncle who we visited in south-western Israel a year and a half ago. Here he is standing next to a few that he's got in his office:

He lives on Kibbutz Sa'ad about 5 miles from Gaza. When the Qassam land in his carrot fields they don't explode because they don't really contain explosives, just fuel. If it looks like a metal pipe with sheet-metal fins welded on the side, that's because that's exactly what it is.

When the Israeli Defense Forces attack Gaza they largely do it from Boeing Apache helicopters each carrying 16 Lockheed Martin Hellfire II missiles, designed to destroy "urban targets". Hellfire IIs are laser guided and carry 9kg warheads. I imagine that when attacking houses they use the blast fragmentation / incendiary or thermobaric warheads. The missiles have an 8km (5 mile) range and the Gaza Strip is only about 12km wide at its widest point, and Israel controls Gaza's territorial waters they don't even need to fly above Gaza to kill any family they choose.