The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) has released its State of Human Rights Report for 2008 to great fanfare for one reason only: it contains the word “apartheid.”

“Israel’s leading civil rights organisation yesterday broke a taboo by describing Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank as being ‘reminiscent of apartheid’ in South Africa,” wrote a breathless Ben Lynfield in The Independent. Press TV, the Iranian-backed Holocaust denial outfit which masquerades as a legitimate news outlet, declared, somewhat ungrammatically, that “a rights group says discrimination between illegal Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank is similar to what was apartheid South Africa.”

Given that the ACRI report will inevitably be boiled down to the “Israel=apartheid” equation, some context is in order. The report is 78 pages long and mentions “apartheid” only once. The West Bank is not the only issue it covers: the status of women is also discussed, as is the Arab community in Israel, the disabled, Ethiopian immigrants and their offspring, poverty, freedom of speech and other aspects of social and individual rights.

Here, though, is the quote which has tongues wagging:

“This state of affairs in which all the services, budgets, and the access to natural resources are granted along discriminatory and separatist lines according to ethnic-national criteria is a blatant violation of the principle of equality, and is in many ways reminiscent of the Apartheid regime in South Africa (even if in South Africa it was a case of a racist separation criterion as against the ethnic-national one applied in the Occupied Territories.)”

No rational observer of the situation in the West Bank could deny that Palestinians live in harsh conditions under an occupation which they deeply resent. It is a situation which requires urgent resolution in the framework of two states. But grafting words like “apartheid” onto descriptions of Israeli policy - or, even worse, accusing Israel of “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” - adds heat, not light.

Indeed, ACRI’s use of the word “apartheid” is so heavily qualified, one wonders why there was a need to invoke it. One is forced to conclude that it’s a marketing ploy, insofar as it guarantees a much wider readership for ACRI’s report than could otherwise be expected. Had, for example, ACRI compared the Palestinian predicament to the treatment of Roma communities, who suffer grave discrimination in terms of jobs, access to social, educational and medical services and residency rights in many parts of Europe, their report would not have had nearly as much mileage.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, the word “discrimination” doesn’t have the same historical resonance as does “apartheid.” There is something vague and even dull about words like “discrimination” or “injustice,” which suggest that bad policies can be accidental, or the consequence of a lack of imagination, or that they flow from the resistance of bureaucracies to change.

“Apartheid,” by contrast, offers sparkling clarity: an ideology of racial superiority brutally enforced by a clique of foreign, alien settlers.

Because of that, what stands out for me in the case of ACRI is not their audacity, but their half-heartedness. They utter the word “apartheid” and then pull back from it. Israel’s actions are “in many ways reminiscent” of apartheid, they say. Yet there are other situations which are just as “reminiscent” - like this one or this one - but where we would be obliged to concede that perception is one thing and historical reality another.

This philosophical failure both grounds and reinforces a policy failure: shrill, imprecise language is not going to speed up the arrival of a two-state solution. Moreover, language aside, there are many reasons to doubt that two states will be achieved any time soon, not least because other issues in the wider region - the stabilization of Iraq, the destabilization of Pakistan, the prospect of a larger US troop deployment in Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear program - are arguably more pressing for the outside world.

Which is why, in the final analysis, Israelis and Palestinians may discover that they can only rely on each other. For that reason, groups like ACRI play a valuable role in sensitizing Israelis to violations of human and civil rights among the Palestinians. But when they employ the language of Israel’s enemies - most people who rant about “apartheid” are much more interested in pushing the original sin version of Israel’s creation, rather than exploring a resolution - whatever gains they make in terms of global media profile cannot compensate for the much bigger loss in credibility among the public they aspire to enlighten.