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As exemplified by the pan‐European ‘Identitarian movement’ (IM), contemporary far‐right populism defies the habitual matrix within which right‐wing radicalism has been criticised as a negation of liberal cosmopolitanism. The IM's political stance amalgamates features of cultural liberalism and racialist xenophobia into a defence of ‘European way of life.’ We offer an alternative decoding of the phenomenon by drawing on Jürgen Habermas's ‘postnational constellation.’ It casts the IM's protectionist qua chauvinistic populism as ‘inverted’ postnationalism, engendered through territorial and ethnic appropriation of universal political values. As such, inclusionary ideals of cosmopolitan liberalism and democracy purporting humanistic postnationalism have been transformed by Identitarians into elements of a privileged civilisational life‐style to be protected from ‘intruders.’ Remaining within the remit of the grammar of the postnational constellation, trans‐European chauvinism, we contend, is susceptible to inclusive articulation. Foregrounding radical emancipatory social transformation would however require not more democracy, but a principled critique of capitalism.

This article engages the analogy of Palestine/Israel to apartheid South Africa, and probes the political imaginary that contours this discussion while explicating the circumstances of its emergence. Accordingly, it contends that apartheid is not merely a system of institutionalized separation; rather, it organizes the facts and reality of separation(s) within a frame and against a background unity that effectively allows it to be perceived as such. To that end, the article explores four key factors that created background unity in apartheid South Africa: labor relations; political theology; role of language; and geo-political unit(y), and scrutinizes their political and experiential ramifications in Palestine/Israel. Prologue 1 J.G. Strijdom, South Africa's prime minister from 1954 to 1958, described the racialized construction of space at the core of apartheid in these terms: "in a bus I will not sit alongside a native." 2 In May 2015, the military commander of the occupied West Bank issued an order that allocated separate bus lines for local Palestinians and Jewish settlers. Upon the instruction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Minister of Defense Moshe Yaa'lon revoked the order the next day. 3 Prima facie, these two acts seem to suggest a salient moral and political difference between the ongoing state of affairs of contemporary Palestine/Israel and what occurred under the apartheid in South Africa. This is all the more so if one considers explicit commitments to civil rights for all Israel's citizenry (which comprises a fraction of the Palestinian people) found in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (1948). 4 Despite national subordination and blatant cases of segregation (especially in zoning and housing) in Israel proper, 5,6 Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel study together in colleges and universities, work together in civilian hospitals and clinics on all levels, dine in the same restaurants, and, indeed, ride on the same buses. It is therefore tempting for some analysts to argue that apartheid South Africa and Palestine/Israel represent two different

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