As Israeli protestors filled the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in July 2023, the White House relayed its dismay with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul.Footnote1 US President Joe Biden urged Netanyahu to build Israeli consensus. “Aggravated”Footnote2 by an increasingly intransigent prime minister, Biden beckoned none other than Thomas Friedman, who invoked the latter as the last salvation for Israel’s much-touted, and now seemingly fragile, democracy.Footnote3 Israel, Friedman asserted, is lucky to have such a close friend in Biden, but this government, he warned, needs a dose of “tough love.”Footnote4 Another establishment figure, Nicholas Kristof, articulated the “unmentionable,” that perhaps the time had come to phase out the United States’ annual $3.8 billion in aid to Israel.Footnote5 Two days later, Knesset members voted on the “reasonableness standard,” the beginning of the government’s containment of the Israeli Supreme Court.Footnote6 Protestors thronged the streets in a sea of blue and white.
Had the winds of change finally come to Palestine? Hardly. In fact, things are exponentially worse. As establishment figures in Washington, Paris, and London subject us to their handwringing about Israel’s so-called fragile democracy, Palestine and the Palestinians are the ghosts haunting the machine. Anyone who has engaged history or contemporary analysis should know better. But for some, the truth about Israel is hard to face. A spectacle of just how hard it is unfolded in the US House of Representatives in July. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) called Israel a “racist state.” She later qualified her comments, saying she meant to refer to the government and not the state. Jumping over each other to be more loyal than the king, Republican representatives introduced a resolution in the House cementing their support for Israel. Only nine brave lawmakers voted against the measure, with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) reminding her colleagues that the House’s support for apartheid South Africa was equally bipartisan. The remaining 412 elected representatives voted in favor. The resolution read: “the state of Israel is not a racist or apartheid state.”Footnote7
This abject denialism would be funny if its consequences were not so brutal. Apparently, it bears repeating: Israel is not a democracy. It is an apartheid state fueled by the ongoing and unceasing dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. This fact was first put forward by Palestinian civil society organizations in 2005 to launch the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. It took nearly two decades, but legacy human rights organizations—B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International—followed suit.Footnote8 There is no separation between the Israeli state and its military occupation; the two constitute a single apartheid regime.
To understand this singular regime, we should step off the streets of protesting Israelis and turn to the Palestinians. The army’s daily search-and-destroy operations in Palestinian cities and towns in the West Bank have made 2023 the bloodiest for Palestinians in twenty years. Since January, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed two hundred Palestinians, including ninety-nine civilians and thirty-four children.Footnote9 When settlers rampaged through Huwara on February 26, burning parts of the town and attacking Palestinians,Footnote10 many thought it was a turning point. And yet, the attacks increased in intensity and impunity.
In June, after two Palestinians shot four Israelis at a gas station restaurant in the settlement of Eli, dozens of settlers set fire to houses and vehicles in the town of Turmus‘aya.Footnote11 In the midst of this unmasked settler terror, Palestinians resisted, fortifying themselves and their strategies. In response, on July 3, the Israeli regime launched “Operation Home and Garden” in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, a painful repeat of the devastating 2002 invasion that left fifty-two Palestinians dead and the camp partially destroyed. Twenty years later, a thousand Israeli occupation forces backed by US AH-64 helicopters and armed drones attacked Jenin again. They killed twelve Palestinians and wounded over a hundred. One result was the same: scenes of families carrying their possessions as they fled their devastated homes. Yet again, Palestinians everywhere lived and witnessed the ongoing Nakba.
The ongoing Nakba, at the hands of an intimate mutuality between settlers and soldiers, has its iterations in daily life. We saw it on July 11, when settlers and Israeli soldiers forcibly expelled the Sub Laban family from their home of seven decades in the Aqabat al-Khalidiya area of Jerusalem’s Old City; we saw it when settlers broke into Palestinian homes in the villages of Tuba and al-Abid in the South Hebron Hills;Footnote12 we saw it when settlers attacked Palestinian families in the Wadi Qana area west of Huwara;Footnote13 we saw it when Israeli forces poured cement into the water springs of al-Hijrah, south of Hebron, to cut Palestinians off from their lands;Footnote14 we saw it when settlers, under the protection of soldiers, stormed the neighborhood of Bab al-Zawiya in Hebron, implementing a lockdown, closing shops, and preventing Palestinians from reaching their homes;Footnote15 we saw it on July 29, when settlers set fire to fields in the village of Burin, south of Nablus;Footnote16 we saw it in the al-Maarjat area of Jericho, when settlers harassed Palestinians by releasing their livestock into their homes;Footnote17 and we saw it in East Jerusalem, when a child named Shiraz Sa‘u walked through the rubble of her home—a home Israeli forces forced her father to demolish.Footnote18 We see this daily, even if the powers that be attempt to obscure, denigrate, or erase it. It is in this landscape that we must insist on seeing the streets of Tel Aviv and the streets of Jenin as constituting a single political space. It is this landscape that demands that we witness the gaping disparity between the spurious claims to Israeli democracy and the realities of apartheid and settler colonialism.
There was nothing democratic about Israel’s expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, its theft of Palestinian land, its military rule over 1948 Palestinians until 1966, or its military occupation of the West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip since 1967. The idea that Israel is a democracy is only sustainable if Palestine and the Palestinians are erased from the story. This violent erasure is the plan of the current Israeli regime, led by the likes of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the far-right Jewish Strength Party (Otzma Yehudit), and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also the head of the entity within the Israeli Defense Ministry responsible for expanding settlements.Footnote19
Ben Gvir and Smotrich are taking the 2018 Basic Law: Israel - Nation State of the Jewish People to its logical conclusion. That law states, “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.”Footnote20 In Lana Tatour’s words, this law is predicated on the “colonial and racial (and gendered) exclusion and domination of Indigenous peoples—[which] in its different iterations stands at the heart of the Israeli settler-colonial project.”Footnote21 Ben-Gvir and Smotrich aim to realize once and for all the creeping annexation of the West Bank that Israel has been conducting for decades. Indeed, a few days before the “reasonableness clause” passed the Knesset, Smotrich led a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee under the title “The Palestinian Authority’s Takeover of Open Areas.” His “settlement revolution” would “transfer responsibility over the occupied territory from the military to civilian hands, in complete contravention of international law.”Footnote22 As Yasmeen Serhan warns, the right wing’s judicial overhaul furthers “the ultranationalist right’s ambitions of unfettered settlement expansion.”Footnote23
While these aims of Netanyahu’s extremist regime hide in plain sight, other aspects of its policies are harder to conceal. No one can claim that there is anything liberal or democratic about the open hostility of leading members of this government to the rights of women,Footnote24 of the LGBTQ+community,Footnote25 or of secular Jews, and the ways that this rank bigotry is being embodied in law. These troubling developments continue to outrage Israelis and people globally as they witness the Netanyahu regime’s ongoing legislative assault on the Supreme Court. A treasured icon for lovers of Israel, the court has largely enabled Israeli apartheid. At best, it slightly restrained the discriminatory legislation, the naked settler land grabs, and the dispossession of Palestinians that have been essential to Israel’s rule over the Palestinians inside and across the Green Line.
Most opponents of this “judicial coup” continue to willfully ignore Palestinians. Indeed, the very reference to the Palestinian reality is a source of “tension” among protestors in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and beyond.Footnote26 This deliberate writing out of Palestine, the very ground on which the Israeli Supreme Court stands, crystalizes the settler-colonial blindness of Israeli political life—a blindness shared by its allies abroad, including the Biden administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party. For most critics of Netanyahu’s regime, what is bad about its policies is that it harms Israeli Jews, not that it continues and escalates the ongoing Nakba.
How little Palestinians’ rights, and indeed their lives, count is evident in the rampant criminal violence ravaging Palestinian communities inside the Green Line. So far this year, the murder rate in these communities is double that of 2022, which was the highest ever.Footnote27 Local Palestinian mafias, heavily armed with weapons smuggled into the country or stolen from Israeli army arsenals and sold openly, operate with impunity. The police do not crack down on them not just because Palestinian lives are unimportant; these mafias are also known to be intimately linked to the Shin Bet (General Security Services), serving as informers and collaborators for the secret police.Footnote28
Palestinians did not have to wait long to remember the Israeli consensus on apartheid. Just hours after the “reasonableness clause” passed, both the governing coalition and much of the opposition voted in favor of the “Admissions Committee Law” that prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel from living in a long list of towns and villages.Footnote29 According to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, “the racist intention of this law is to allow the establishment and expansion of communities for Jews only.”Footnote30 A few days later, an Israeli court approved the forced eviction of 500 Palestinian Bedouins from the lands in the Naqab on which they have resided for decades; these families must also now pay a fine of over $30,000.Footnote31 Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, indiscriminately branded by Israelis as “terrorists,” are killed with impunity by Israeli settlers and soldiers, while Palestinians inside the Green Line are excluded, marginalized, and subject to murderous criminal elements under the protection of another arm of Israel’s settler-colonial matrix of control.
International powers in Washington, Paris, London, Riyadh, and beyond will undoubtedly keep plugging holes in the increasingly leaky dike of the tottering status quo, whether via another effort to normalize Israel’s apartheid system and integrate it into a largely undemocratic Middle East, or by other means. But the status quo of oppression, violence, and dispossession is unsustainable. Indeed, history shows that colonial counter-insurgency’s achievements are inevitably temporary. In the face of an increasingly vicious Israeli occupation, a politically and morally bankrupt Palestinian political class, and an international community that turns a blind eye to Israeli settler colonialism, a new generation has taken root. In July, even in the midst of daily terror, Palestinian youth and their families celebrated the passing of high school matriculation exams. If settler colonialism is relentless, so too is the Palestinian will to resist, return, and remain.
Sherene Seikaly
Notes
1 Julia Frankel, “Why Is Israel’s Judicial Overhaul So Divisive?,” Associated Press, July 22, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/israel-netanyahu-protests-overhaul-courts-282e2cd18a2340a067625e148ebda41c.
2 Max Boot, “Israel’s Biggest Security Threat Is Benjamin Netanyahu,” Washington Post, July 23, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/23/netanyahu-biden-israel-jenin-west-bank/.
3 Thomas L. Friedman, “Only Biden Can Save Israel Now,” New York Times, July 23, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/opinion/israel-biden.html?searchResultPosition=1.
4 Friedman, “Only Biden.”
5 Nicholas Kristof, “With Israel, It’s Time to Start Discussing the Unmentionable,” New York Times, July 22, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/opinion/israel-military-aid.html?smid=url-share.
6 Amir Tibon, “‘Great Concern’: EU, France, Germany, U.K., React to Netanyahu Government’s Law to Weaken Judiciary,” Haaretz, July 26, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-26/ty-article/.premium/israels-european-allies-echo-american-criticism-of-netanyahus-judicial-overhaul/00000189-8f29-d430-a59b-af29cc7c0000.
7 Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Summer Lee (D-PA), Cori Bush (D-MO), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), André Carson (D-IN), and Delia Ramirez (D-IL) voted against the resolution. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), an advocate of Palestinian rights in Congress, voted present. See, Michael Arria, “Vast Majority of House Dems Back GOP Resolution Saying Israel Isn’t an Apartheid State,” July 19, 2023, https://mondoweiss.net/2023/07/vast-majority-of-house-dems-back-gop-resolution-saying-israel-isnt-an-apartheid-state/.
8 B’Tselem, A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid, January 12, 2021, https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid; Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, April 27, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution; Amnesty International, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, February 1, 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/.
9 Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, “Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Weekly Update 19–26 July 2023),” July 27, 2023, https://pchrgaza.org/en/israeli-human-rights-violations-in-the-occupied-palestinian-territory-weekly-update-19-26-july-2023/.
10 Gianluca Mezzofiore et al., “Israel’s Military Called the Settler Attack on This Palestinian Town a ‘Pogrom.’ Videos Show Soldiers Did Little to Stop It,” CNN, June 15, 2023, https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/15/middleeast/huwara-west-bank-settler-attack-cmd-intl/index.html.
11 Hagar Shezaf et al., “Palestinian Shot Dead as Dozens of Jewish Settlers Torch Homes, Vehicles in West Bank,” Haaretz, June 21, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-21/ty-article/.premium/dozens-of-jewish-settlers-set-fire-to-palestinian-homes-vehicles-in-west-bank-town/00000188-ddba-df52-a79d-ddbbf2310000.
12 Hagar Shezaf, “Israeli Settlers Break into Palestinian Homes Accompanied by Soldiers,” Haaretz, July 25, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-25/ty-article/.premium/israeli-settlers-break-into-palestinian-homes-accompanied-by-soldiers-and-searched-them/00000189-8e19-d5eb-abcb-ffdf8ea00000.
13 Jack Khoury and Hagar Shezaf, “Four Palestinians Wounded in Clash with West Bank Settlers, Health Ministry Says,” Haaretz, July 14, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-14/ty-article/.premium/four-palestinians-wounded-in-clash-with-west-bank-settlers-health-ministry-says/00000189-5336-d481-afbd-5b3669d50000.
14 Quds News Network (@QudsNen), “Watch: The Israeli occupation pours cement into the water springs in the al-Hijrah area, south of Hebron, to block them and prevent Palestinians from using them in agriculture,” Twitter, July 26, 2023, 6:57 p.m., https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1684231413481054209.
15 Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye), “Israeli settlers, under protection from the army, stormed the neighbourhood of Bab al-Zawiya in Hebron on Thursday. The army implemented a lockdown in the city centre closing more than 200 shops in the central market and preventing Palestinians from reaching their homes,” Twitter, July 28, 2023, 11:30 p.m., https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1685024830062800896.
16 Jack Khoury, “Israeli Settlers Set Fire to Palestinian Fields in West Bank, Reports Say,” Haaretz, July 29, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-29/ty-article/.premium/israeli-settlers-set-fire-to-palestinian-fields-in-west-bank/00000189-a250-de97-af9f-eadf83e70000.
17 Younis Tirawi (@ytirawi), “Maarjat, Jericho: Israeli settlers incursed [sic] with their livestock the Palestinian community of Maarjat ‘Milhat family’ and harass the locals by letting their livestock within Palestinian homes there,” Twitter, July 29, 2023, 3:56 p.m., https://twitter.com/ytirawi/status/1685273089834151936.
18 Quds News Network (@QudsNen), Shiraz Sa‘u, a little Palestinian girl now made homeless, inspects the rubble of what was her family home in the the neighborhood of Beit Hanina, occupied Jerusalem, after her father was forced to demolish their own home at orders from the all-Israeli municipality of Jerusalem, today,” Twitter, July 29, 2023, 7:29 p.m., https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1685326771405680640.
19 Jeremy Sharon, “Netanyahu Hands Smotrich Full Authority to Expand Existing Settlements,” Times of Israel, June 18, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-hands-smotrich-full-authority-to-expand-existing-settlements/.
20 Basic Law: Israel-The Nation State of the Jewish People, July 26, 2018, https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/Documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf (unofficial English translation).
21 Lana Tatour, “The Nation-State Law: Negotiating Liberal Settler Colonialism,” Critical Times 4, no. 3 (2021): 577–87, https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-9355305.
22 Roni Pelli, “While Israelis Were in the Streets, Smotrich Unveiled His Annexation Plans,” +972 Magazine, July 27, 2023, https://www.972mag.com/bezalel-smotrich-annexation-revolution/.
23 Yasmeen Serhan, “What Israel’s Controversial Judicial Overhaul Means for Palestinians,” Time, July 25, 2023, https://time.com/6297635/israel-judicial-overhaul-palestinians/.
24 Hamutal Gouri, “Israel’s Government Has Declared a War on Women,” Haaretz, July 23, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-07-23/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israels-government-has-declared-a-war-on-women/00000189-8304-d7f1-abbd-cffdf4610000.
25 Maria Rashed, “Israel’s LGBTQ+Community Fear for Future under Far-Right Government,” Guardian, December 22, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/22/israel-lgbtq-community-fear-future-far-right-government.
26 Serhan, “What Israel’s Controversial.”
27 A similar crime wave involving Jewish-led mafias in major Israeli cities was stamped out in 2003 by concerted action by the police and courts. See, Agence France-Presse, “Crime Wave Grips Arabs in Israel ‘by the Throat,’” Radio France Internationale, January 12, 2022, https://www.rfi.fr/en/crime-wave-grips-arabs-in-israel-by-the-throat.
28 Eliyahu Freedman, “Anger as Violent Crime Soars in Israel’s Palestinian Communities,” Al Jazeera, June 26, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/26/crime-wave-israel.
29 Sami Abou Shahadeh (@ShahadehAbou), “Things are back to normal in the Knesset: Both government & opposition voted in favor of another discriminatory law aimed at preventing Palestinian citizens from living in a long list of towns & villages. They want them purely Jewish,” Twitter, July 25, 2023, 10:04 p.m., https://twitter.com/ShahadehAbou/status/1683916126214840330; Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, “‘Admissions Committees Law’: Cooperative Societies Ordinance-Amendment No. 8,” accessed August 2, 2023, https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/494.
30 Noa Shpigel, “‘Expanding Racial Segregation’: Israel Allows More Towns to Reject ‘Unsuitable’ Residents Under Guise of ‘Social Cohesion,’” Haaretz, July 25, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-25/ty-article/.premium/under-guise-of-social-cohesion-israel-allows-more-towns-to-reject-unsuitable-residents/00000189-8eaf-d430-a59b-afaf6d590000.
31 Amnesty International, “Israel/OPT: 500 Palestinians Facing Forcible Eviction, Displacement, and Segregation,” July 28, 2023, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/07/israel-opt-500-palestinians-facing-forcible-eviction-displacement-and-segregation/.