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israeli apartheid
Palestine And Its Metaphors
Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.
Jun 06, 2025
Metaphors kill. Not with bullets or bombs, but with confusion. They blur what demands clarity. They sentimentalize what should horrify. They distract.
Susan Sontag wrote that the most honest way to understand illness is to strip it of metaphor. To stop saying cancer is an invasion, or tuberculosis is romantic, or AIDS is punishment. Disease is not a morality play. It is a condition of the body. What burdens the sick is not just the illness itself, but the stories society tells about it.
So too with nations. So too with Palestine.
Palestine is not just a land or a people. It has been made into a metaphor. For resistance. For loss. For stubbornness. For martyrdom. For chaos. For terrorism. For hope. For grief. It is everything except what it is: a place where people live, suffer, starve, and die.
Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced.
Turning Palestine into a symbol allows the powerful to avoid the facts. You don’t need to look at checkpoints if you’re talking about “conflict.” You don’t have to name apartheid if you’re debating “disputed territories.” You don’t have to say stolen if you say contested. You don’t have to say killed if you say clash. Metaphor is how power talks about violence without taking responsibility for it.
Palestine becomes intolerable not because of what Palestinians do, but because of what they represent: an open wound that refuses to close, a people who will not disappear. This is why their story must be constantly reframed, misnamed, wrapped in euphemism and myth. Their existence disrupts the fantasy that liberal democracies are just, that settler states are stable, that history is over. And so, the metaphor persists. It buries reality. It protects the liar.
We must refuse to speak in code, refuse to let metaphor do the work of silence. Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.
Palestine resists. That much is true. But once you say it like that—without detail, without names, without time or place—it becomes a slogan. And slogans consume clarity. The world loves the idea of resistance more than the reality. It loves the photo of the boy with the slingshot. It loves the keffiyeh, the flag, the tear gas. It loves the spectacle of defiance. What it does not love is the cost.
It does not love a broken spine from a checkpoint beating. It does not love a family digging their daughter from rubble. It does not love the dull terror of drones. That kind of resistance is not romantic. It’s not metaphor. It’s not poster-ready.
Palestine is trapped in a paradox. Its resistance is admired as long as it stays symbolic—noble suffering, poetic dignity, children throwing rocks at tanks. But when resistance becomes material—when it demands rights, when it takes up arms, when it names its oppressor—it is immediately recast. Now it is extremism. Now it is terrorism. Now the metaphor turns toxic. This is the trap of metaphor: It flatters, and it criminalizes, depending on what power needs.
The powerful don’t fear Palestine because of its military strength. They fear the idea of it. The persistence of it. The fact that something so small, so wounded, so systematically crushed still refuses to submit. Palestine is proof that domination is never total. That’s what makes it dangerous.
And so, the metaphor must be managed. Contained. You can wear the keffiyeh but not name the Occupation. You can say “Free Palestine” on Instagram but not mention Gaza. You can quote Darwish but not talk about bulldozed olive groves. You can mourn the dead but not accuse the killers. In this way, metaphor becomes a leash. It lets you gesture toward justice without ever touching it.
But Palestine doesn’t need symbols. It needs liberation. Not metaphors, no myths needed, only land, water, safety, and return from exile. These are not poetic demands. They are concrete, measurable, and deliberately denied. To really see Palestinian resistance, you must stop calling it resistance. Call it what it is: survival under siege. Organizing under surveillance. Memory under erasure. It’s not metaphor. It’s real life.
Once you frame a people as pathology, you don’t need to justify what you do to them. You only need to call it medicine. And when treatment fails to sterilize the threat, the language escalates. Now the body must be purged. Now the neighborhood is a target. The entire population becomes suspect.
They say Hamas “hides among the population.” But what does that mean in a fenced in strip of land 40 kilometers long, where there is no army base, no safe zone, no separation between life and resistance? The phrase is not a statement of fact—it is a metaphor. And like most metaphors in war, it serves a purpose: to erase the line between fighter and civilian, to turn every man, woman, and child into a potential target. If you can’t see your enemy, then everyone becomes your enemy. The home is now a military site. The hospital, a command center. The school, a shield. “Among the population” doesn’t describe a tactic, it justifies indiscriminate killing. It is how the language of war collapses into the logic of extermination.
But what if the patient isn’t sick? What if the disease is the system choking him? What if the diagnosis is projection? There is no vaccine for settler colonialism. No cure for apartheid—except dismantling it. But if Palestine is spoken of like a disease, its survival will always be framed as a threat.
Power never calls itself by name. It prefers neutral terms. Clinical. Procedural. Empty terms. Palestinians aren’t starved—they face a humanitarian crisis. Their homes aren’t stolen—they’re part of a property dispute. They’re not imprisoned—they’re under security lockdown. Their lives aren’t ended—they’re neutralized. This is not just bad language. It’s policy disguised as grammar.
Words like conflict, clash, cycle of violence—these are metaphors of balance. They suggest symmetry, as if this is a fair fight, as if both sides are equally armed, equally culpable, equally free. But this is not a clash. It is not a cycle. It is a colonizer and the colonized. An occupier and the occupied. The difference is moral. The difference is material. The metaphor erases both.
The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored.
Sontag wrote that when people described cancer as an “invasion,” they were borrowing the language of war to make sense of something terrifying. But when the war is real, and the invasion is actual, language flips. War becomes operation. Invasion becomes security measure. You speak of it like infrastructure. This is how you sanitize occupation.
The wall isn’t a scar across the land—it’s a barrier fence. Settlements aren’t illegal—they’re new neighborhoods. Checkpoints aren’t instruments of control—they’re points of coordination. And Gaza isn’t under siege—it’s self-governed, as if a prison becomes free the moment the guards move outside its walls. Metaphor in this context does not reveal. It anesthetizes.
It allows liberal democracies to wash their hands with language. You don’t need to condemn apartheid if you can call it a complex situation. You don’t have to intervene in ethnic cleansing if you can label it a tragic escalation. You don’t have to listen to the grieving if you describe their pain as incitement. This is not metaphor as poetry. It is metaphor as smokescreen.
The media uses it. Diplomats use it. NGOs use it. Even well-meaning activists get trapped in it, calling for dialogue, for both sides to come together, for peaceful resolution, without ever naming the violence that blocks peace at every turn. But clarity is not extremism and precision is not incitement. To describe things as they are is not radical—it is necessary. There is no symmetry between the boot and the neck. And any language that suggests otherwise is complicity with the boot.
Palestine is not a wound in the Western psyche. It is a mirror of that psyche. And what it reflects is unbearable. The reason the world can’t look at Palestine directly is not because it is too foreign, but because it is too familiar. It shows the West everything it claims to have outgrown: apartheid, racial hierarchy, empire, extermination. Not in the past tense, but right now. Daily. Live-streamed.
Palestine is where the myth of Western moral authority collapses on itself. It’s easy to denounce the crimes of the past: slavery, fascism, genocide, so long as they stay in museums or textbooks. But Palestine breaks the frame. It puts the vocabulary of historical evil in the present tense. It makes Holocaust-committed Europe complicit in a same kind of ethnic cleansing. It makes the U.S., champion of “rules-based order,” the primary funder of impunity. It makes liberalism look like a mask, not a principle.
This is what makes Palestine dangerous—not its resistance, but its clarity.
Palestine exposes the real function of international law: who gets to break it, and who must obey. It exposes journalism’s quiet racism: who gets names and childhood photos, and who becomes “a number.” It exposes the limits of identity politics: how many doors are slammed shut when the oppressed are inconvenient. The metaphor of Palestine-as-problem allows Western institutions to avoid seeing the problem in themselves.
To look clearly at Palestine is to confront questions most people would rather leave buried. What does it mean that the state born from the ashes of the Holocaust has become a jailer? What does it mean that human rights groups whisper what Palestinians scream? What does it mean that the most surveilled, bombed, and besieged population on Earth is asked to behave peacefully, while their occupier is praised for restraint?
Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced. Because if you face it directly—without metaphor, without euphemism—you must admit that the world is not post-colonial. That we live in a global system where some lives are sacred, and others are collateral. Where entire populations can be punished for existing. Where the worst crime is not violence but remembering.
Palestine remembers.
The time for symbols is over. Palestine is not a metaphor. It is not the universal struggle. It is not the world’s conscience. It is not an allegory for Brown resistance, or the dream of return, or the poetry of loss. It is not an Instagram aesthetic. It is not a stand-in for every injustice on Earth. It is a place, with borders and people, a colonial regime, a military occupation, a blockade and a death toll. It is a place where a child drinks from a bomb-cracked pipe. Where a mother sleeps in a school because her house is dust. Where a man counts the names of his dead before checking if his leg is still attached.
To speak of Palestine clearly, we must break the habit of metaphor. We must stop treating it as a narrative arc, a tragedy to be admired from a safe distance. It is not art. It is not history. It is the present, and it is now, as we ourselves live and breathe. We must reject the language of soft avoidance: Say occupation, not “conflict.” Say apartheid, not “dispute.” Say siege, not “border closure.” Say massacre, not “escalation.” Say starvation not “hunger.” Say Palestinian, not “Hamas.”
The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored. This is not metaphor. This is what justice looks like; anything less is a performance.
Sontag understood that metaphor, in the wrong hands, becomes a weapon. It doesn’t soften violence—it smuggles it in. It doesn’t reveal truth—it repackages it in palatable form. She wrote against metaphor to rescue the ill from stigma. We must resist metaphor to stop the disappearance of Palestine.
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The Shame of What We've Done: Assessing Jews' Responsibility for Israel's Actions
A new book by Peter Beinart analyses how the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel's agency in creating the resistance it faces.
Feb 02, 2025
The dominant self-conception of the Jewish story is innocence, repeated persecutions, and then redemption by creation of the Jewish nationalist State of Israel.
This narrative is critically examined in Peter Beinart's new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.
Beinart's book says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel's agency in creating the resistance it faces: "We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history's permanent virtuous victims."
The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in "diaspora" is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel's actions, on campuses and in the streets worldwide.
Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, is now an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, and a New York Times contributor.
He has been in a 20-year progression of seeing, more and more sharply, the "Jewish and democratic" state of Israel as anti-democratic and incompatible with Jewish tradition.
He writes that support for a Jewish state has become "idolatry," permitting endless killing, torture, and oppression of Palestinians "There is no limit. No matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite."
Contemporary Jewish life is filled with that idolatry, he observes: "In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself."
The book attributes the horrors imposed on 2 million human beings in Gaza not only to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but to Jews: "Worshipping a country that elevates Jews over Palestinians replaces Judaism's universal God—who makes special demands on Jews but cherishes all people–with a tribal deity that considers Jewish life precious and Palestinian life cheap."
Beinart is not playing the peekaboo game of saying Jews are not responsible for Israel, and the other half of the time saying Israel is the Jewish State.
He's not saying "all Jews," but fairly saying "representative," "mainstream" Jewish organizations worldwide are now Zionist. Anti-Zionist organizations are dissident.
He observes that many synagogues have an Israeli flag on the bima (platform where the Torah is read) "and a prayer for Israel in the liturgy."
It was predicted and warned about, as the Zionist movement grew, that the effect of creating a Jewish nation-state would be Jews being seen in the light of that state's actions.
The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in "diaspora" is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel's actions, on campuses and in the streets worldwide.
Beinart places the Hamas violence of October 7, 2023 in context, as consistent with the history of suppressed peoples without peaceful means to contest their status, as is seen in slave revolts and anticolonial guerilla wars.
I note that Beinart's thoughts are resonant with what, almost 100 years ago, historian and then-Zionist Hans Kohn wrote of 1929 anti-Jewish riots after 12 years of Zionist colonization in Palestine under British authority:
We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August… They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt… We have been in Palestine for 12 years [since the Balfour Declaration] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the Indigenous people.
Israeli retribution since October 7, 2023 on the 2 million-plus population of Gaza and their means of life—homes, utilities, schools, universities, hospitals—has officially resulted in over 46,000 deaths and innumerable injuries directly from IDF attacks.
The medical journal Lancet estimates deaths as likely much higher, counting "deaths from starvation, disease, or cold."
Most of the population of Gaza was made homeless, huddled in improvised shelters, pushed by IDF warnings from one "safe zone" to another, often then bombed.
Beinart's book is an analysis of Zionist apologetics that are necessary to both regard oneself as moral and defend what Israel has done, from the 1947-49 Nakba—terroristic expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their communities within present-day Israel—to Gaza in 2025.
He denounces dehumanizing, demonizing, Zionist lies about Palestinian resistance: "These claims don't withstand even modest scrutiny. They're less arguments than talismans. They ward off dangerous emotions like grief and shame."
Using the model of the dismantling of apartheid South Africa, he tries to envision what principles could heal Palestine :
The details matter, but they matter less than the underlying principles. Wherever they live together, Jews and Palestinians should live under the same law. And they should work to repair the injustices of the past. The Israelis who were made refugees on October 7 should be allowed to go home. And the Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home. Historical wrongs can never be fully undone. But the more sincere the effort, the greater the reconciliation that ensues.
This would be a radical reconception of Jewish life in Palestine, that in abandoning the role of conquerors, Jews may live as Jewish Palestinians. He makes the point that whites relinquishing apartheid was a more peaceful process for South Africa than having it overthrown.
In the summary chapter of the book, Beinart says Israel's conduct is from a heretical Jewish tendency to believe Jewish people are sacred, rather than people with extra obligations: "So what if a few dreamers in Moorish Spain or the Silesian shtetl [Eastern European Jewish village] consoled themselves with the idea that deep within us lies a special spark of the divine? They didn't have the power to do anything about it."
This self-deification, first proposed by an Israelite named Korach, who challenged Moses' leadership, hadn't mattered as much until the creation of "Jewish" national power: "All that changed with the creation of Israel. Only once Jews control a state with life-and-death power over millions of non-Jews does Korach's claim of intrinsic Jewish sanctity become truly dangerous."
Beinart calls for liberation for Jews from the Zionist doctrine that Jews are only victims, never victimizers: "We can lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world… We can lay down the burden of seeing ourselves as the perennial victims of a Jew-hating world."
More than level of observance or denomination, the question of Zionism is going to be a fault line in Jewish fellowship, Beinart believes:
Remove Jewish statehood from Jewish identity and, for many Jews around the world, it's not clear what is left. But the benefit of recognizing that Jews are not fundamentally different from other people is that it allows us to learn from their experience. Jewish exceptionalism is less exceptional than we think. We are not the only people to use a story of victimhood to justify supremacy.
Israel's perpetual peril is the Arab population it has displaced but not exterminated. They are determined to redeem their birthright to live as freely in Palestine as Jews do.
Instead of conquest, Beinart proposes a model of restraint, cooperation, and respect—along a line of Jewish thinkers from Ahad Ha'am to Judah Magnes to Albert Einstein.
Many of the visions for Jewish settlement in Palestine were universalist and pacific.
In 1927, Zionist writer (and Chaim Weizmann protege) Maurice Samuel mused, in his book I, The Jew, that Jewish civilization "for 60 generations" demonstrated "that neither conquest or oppression was necessary to its survival… a group can survive without mass murder."
Whether trauma or hubris allows Zionists in Israel and elsewhere to trust that model—finding the image of God even in their "enemies"—is the question.
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History Shows Carter Was Right to Warn Against Israeli Apartheid
While the Democratic Party has mostly maintained its pro-Israel stance since the publication of Carter’s 2006 book, his words now appear quite prescient and reflect a growing international consensus.
Jan 05, 2025
The late President Jimmy Carter was not a particularly progressive president, but his exemplary service as a peacemaker and humanitarian since leaving office has resulted in an outpouring of heartfelt tributes following his death at the age of 100 on December 28. During his final years, however, the Nobel Peace Laureate was met with intense criticism for insisting that standards of peace, human rights, and international law should apply not just to countries hostile to U.S. interests, but to U.S. allies like Israel as well.
Particularly controversial was Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which went on to be a New York Times bestseller, in which he argued against Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank, the Palestinian territory seized in 1967 during a war that the international community had hoped would form the basis for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Carter was a liberal Christian Zionist who believed passionately in Israel’s right to exist as a secure homeland for the Jewish people. Like many left and liberal Jewish Zionists, however, he argued that the continued occupation and colonization of the West Bank would make a viable two-state solution impossible, and that Israel would be forced to choose between allowing for democratic governance in all the areas they controlled—meaning Jews would thereby be a minority, and Israel would no longer be a Jewish state—or imposing an apartheid system akin to the one instituted in South Africa prior to its democratic transition in 1994.
Carter was falsely accused of referring to Israel as an apartheid state, when he had explicitly stated otherwise. He was referring only to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the establishment of Jewish-only roads, Jewish-only settlements, and other strict segregation policies do resemble the old South African system.
Since Carter wrote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid 18 years ago, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories has more than doubled, most of them surrounding Palestinian cities and towns in a manner that would make the establishment of a viable contiguous Palestinian state impossible.
In reality, the main objection of Carter’s critics was that he dared criticize the Israeli government, a recipient of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of unconditional taxpayer-funded military equipment from U.S. arms manufacturers.
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid received overwhelmingly negative media coverage following its release. The Washington Post accused Carter of harboring a “hostility to Israel” in part for allegedly failing to note, according to reviewer Jeffrey Goldberg, that the Israeli government “dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements.” In reality, the illegal settlements have continued to expand since 2006, and the Israeli government has reiterated that they are there to stay.
An article in The New York Times about the reaction to the book included a number of quotes from pro-Israel organizations attacking it, while failing to quote a single Palestinian or Palestinian-American source.
The Democratic Party leadership was also hostile to the book. In a rare rebuke by another former president of the same party, Bill Clinton, ignoring Carter’s frequent trips to and extensive knowledge of Israel and Palestine, wrote, “I don’t know where his information (or conclusions) came from” and insisted, “It’s not factually correct, and it’s not fair.”
Howard Dean, then chair of the Democratic National Committee, also voiced his disagreement with Carter’s analysis. Representative Nancy Pelosi, who was about to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, declared, “It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously.” She added, “We stand with Israel now and we stand with Israel forever.”
Former presidents have almost always been granted an opportunity to speak at their party’s subsequent conventions, but in apparent reaction to the book, Carter’s appearance at the 2008 Democratic National Convention was limited to a video clip speaking in praise of nominee Barack Obama and interviewing survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Carter also only appeared in short video clips at the 2012 and 2016 conventions.
In 2022, Joe Biden named Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt to be the U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism. Lipstadt had previously accused Carter of engaging in “traditional antisemitic canards” and compared him to the notorious antisemite and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
But while the Democratic Party has mostly maintained its pro-Israel stance since the publication of the book, Carter’s words now appear quite prescient and reflect a growing international consensus. In 2022, Amnesty International published a 281-page report making a compelling case that Israel practices a form of apartheid toward the Palestinians. Human Rights Watch published a similarly detailed study the previous year reaching the same conclusion. B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, also released an extensive report documenting the Israeli government’s imposition of apartheid. Similar conclusions have been reached by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories. This past July, the International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion, also found that Israel’s ongoing and multiple violations of international humanitarian law constitute apartheid.
A number of Carter’s former critics, including a board member of the Carter Center who resigned in protest following the publication of the book, have since apologized and acknowledged that the former president was correct. No one in the Democratic Party leadership has yet done so.
Indeed, very few of Carter’s critics have been willing to demand an end to Israel’s settlements and segregation policies in the West Bank or acknowledge that these colonial outposts in the occupied territories constitute a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a series of unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Since Carter wrote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid 18 years ago, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories has more than doubled, most of them surrounding Palestinian cities and towns in a manner that would make the establishment of a viable contiguous Palestinian state impossible.
As a result, many Palestinians and others who once supported a two-state solution have concluded it is too late and are now demanding a single democratic state with equal rights for both peoples between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Similarly, increasing numbers of Jewish people in the United States and elsewhere now believe that the Zionist movement has become hopelessly dominated by overt racists, and have renounced Zionism altogether.
Carter warned that the choice before Israel was “peace or apartheid.” The Israeli government and its backers in Washington have chosen apartheid—but people across the world have not given up on the peace Carter envisioned.
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