A new report from Human Rights Watch, which labels Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians as apartheid, comes at a significant inflection point. As its title suggests, a threshold of permanency has been crossed in Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

For the Palestinians, that requires a change of strategy in the quest to secure their basic rights..

The A-word has long been a mainstay of Palestinian narratives. Over the past two decades, it became more commonly used by the Western and Israeli left. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter alluded in the title of his 2006 book to an Israeli choice between "peace” and "apartheid.” Several Israeli prime ministers, from David Ben-Gurion to Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, warned that if Israel didn’t end its occupation of Palestinian territories, it risked being transformed into an apartheid state.