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Israeli Racism Shouldn’t Get a Pass in America
Why isn’t Israel shunned as a pariah nation, as South Africa once was, for denying the human rights of Palestinians and for the immorality of its ethno-supremacist practices?
Aug 10, 2024
In 2013, Justine Sacco, an executive at a New York public relations firm, sent a tweet in which she joked about AIDS among Black Africans. “Going to Africa,” her tweet said, “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” The tweet, which went viral, was denounced as racist and, despite an abject apology, Sacco was fired from her job.
Amy Cooper earned a similar fate. In May, 2020, Cooper was roaming in New York’s Central Park when a male birdwatcher confronted her about her unleashed dog. Cooper then called the police. “There is a man, African American,” she reported, “and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog... please send the cops immediately!” For this racist ploy, Cooper was publicly condemned. She, too, ended up losing her job.
On July 8, 2024, the WRAL (Raleigh, North Carolina) news website ran the headline, “Millions of Tax Dollars Going to a Company Accused of Racism. WRAL Investigates Why the State Still Hasn’t Taken Action.” The headline implies that what’s allegedly going on is wrong and should be investigated, presumably to stop state support for a racist enterprise.
These examples of anti-racist reaction suggest that as a society we’ve reached a point where public expressions of racism, as well as public support for racism, are unacceptable. One offensive joke can get you fired. Yet we now see an egregious double standard being applied in the U.S. when it comes to tolerance of and support for racism.
Imagine a revised version of that WRAL headline: “Billions of Tax Dollars Going to a Country Accused of Racism. Mainstream Media Coordinate Efforts to Investigate Why the Federal Government Still Hasn’t Taken Action.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for it.
The reality is that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are going to a country not only accused of racism, but which, as many see it, was founded on racist premises, still practices apartheid, and whose leaders have for decades made unabashedly racist public statements. That country is, of course, Israel.
Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is a glaring example of the dehumanization that racism entails and the murderous brutality racism enables.
Since October 7, 2023, blatantly racist statements by Israeli leaders have been widely reported. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likened Palestinians to Amalekites, an ancient tribe in Old Testament lore whom Yahweh told the Israelites to destroy—men, women, children, infants, and cattle. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referred to Israel’s assault on Gaza as a fight against “human animals.” Other Israeli officials called for erasing Gaza from the face of the Earth, claiming that no Palestinian civilians are innocent.
Cued by their political leaders, Israeli soldiers have released racist videos on social media celebrating their dominance of Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian homes.
From the top echelons of government to army field units, Israeli racism has been on clear display to the world. These expressions of virulent racism mattered to the International Court of Justice, which took them as evidence of genocidal intent, but they did not seem to matter to U.S. political leaders, except perhaps as instances of bad optics.
Partisans of Israel sought to explain away these expressions of anti-Palestinian racism as uncharacteristic outbursts, products of the rage many Israelis felt in the aftermath of the October 7 attack by Hamas. There is no doubt some truth in this claim; anger conduces to saying hateful things. But the history of anti-Palestinian racism in Israel did not begin in 2023. In fact, it precedes Israel’s founding.
Theodor Herzl, one of the principal architects of political Zionism in the late 19th century, saw the native Arabs of Palestine as “primitive and backward,” according to Israeli historian Avi Shlaim. Herzl expected Palestinian Arabs to be grateful for the prosperity that a Jewish influx would bring to Palestine. Consistent with the ideological fantasies of earlier generations of European colonizers, Herzl imagined that Jews would merit credit for assuming the white man’s burden of civilizing the natives.
Other early Zionists differed in the degree to which they anticipated Arab resistance to the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. But all accepted the principle that it ultimately didn’t matter what the Indigenous people wanted. By use of military force backed by outside imperial powers (Britain; later the U.S.), and through diplomatic sidelining of Palestinian Arabs, Zionists aimed to create the ethnocratic state of Israel, regardless of the conflicting nationalist aspirations of Palestinians.
All this preceded WWII, the Holocaust, and the formal creation of Israel. The forcible displacement of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes and land—what we today would call “ethnic cleansing”—in the 1948 Nakba was largely a matter of putting into practice an idea rooted in political Zionism from the start: The lives, wishes, and well-being of the native Arab population would not be allowed to deter the creation of a Jewish state.
In one sense, little has changed since 1948. Successive Israeli governments have used different levels of violence to quash Palestinian resistance to colonial oppression, but all have adhered to the principle that Israel should be a Jewish state, run by Jews for Jews, with as few Palestinians as possible from the river to the sea. Nor has any Israeli government relinquished the idea that Palestinian desires for freedom and self-determination must be subjugated if necessary for Israel to exist as a Jewish state.
Today, the heir to this racist philosophy is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Over 30 years ago, in his book A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World, Netanyahu slandered Arabs across the board, writing, “Violence is ubiquitous in the political life of all the Arab countries. It is the primary method of dealing with opponents, both foreign and domestic, both Arab and non-Arab.” Netanyahu goes on to call terrorism “the quintessential Middle East export,” saying that “its techniques everywhere are those of the Arab regimes and organizations that invented it.” Projection much?
To be clear, what makes Zionism racist are its implicit assumptions that the desires of Jews to live in freedom, safety, and dignity take precedence over Palestinian desires for the same things; that it is acceptable for a militarily powerful Jewish state to impose its will on a stateless and vulnerable Palestinian group; and that the goal of maintaining a Jewish state trumps the basic human rights of Palestinians.
Anti-Palestinian racism helps to legitimate these ideas and is further reinforced when it is invoked, as by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, to justify violence and the daily humiliation of apartheid. These are not radical observations. In much of the world, outside the sphere of U.S. influence, Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is plain as day, and what I’m saying here would be uncontroversial.
So when other expressions of racism are unacceptable in the U.S. today, why does anti-Arab Israeli racism get a pass? Why isn’t Israel shunned as a pariah nation, as South Africa once was, for denying the human rights of Palestinians and for the immorality of its ethno-supremacist practices?
One answer is that realpolitik rarely bends to morality. As former Secretary of State and Army General Alexander Haig once put it, Israel is like an unsinkable American aircraft carrier in the Middle East, projecting power in a region of great economic importance to the U.S. ruling class. Relative to the larger geopolitical stakes at play in the region, the fate of a stateless Arab minority is not that important, except as a potential source of instability. If this source of instability were somehow made to go away, many U.S. political leaders would be perfectly happy, regardless of the racism embedded in the solution.
Another reason many Americans are willing to tolerate Israeli racism is that the two nations are seen as sharing a similar origin story, one that makes racist crimes forgivable.
Just as European colonists once sought freedom from popes and kings by forging a new nation in North America, Jews sought freedom from pogroms and antisemitism by creating a Jewish state in the Middle East. Yes, some Indigenous people got hurt in the process, and that’s a shame. But this suffering pales when weighed against the benefits America and Israel have brought the world. What’s more, after the Holocaust, Jews have an undeniable claim to seek their own version of Manifest Destiny. So the story goes.
Those who accept this settler-colonial mythos—underscored by biblical fables, post-Holocaust guilt, and devaluing of a racialized Other—may have trouble seeing what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinians as wrong. It will be admitted that maintaining an ethnocratic Jewish state is ugly, even bloody, at times; but the ends justify the means.
Nor should we forget that anti-Arab racism abounds in the U.S. as well as Israel. Americans are thoroughly propagandized to accept the stereotype of Arabs as terrorists, or as Islamic fanatics rooted in a regressive medieval culture. The racist Israeli view of Arabs thus fails to shock in the U.S., fails to shock as it should, because the same view is normalized here. Our “special relationship” with Israel is built in part on this shared infection with the virus of colonial racism.
Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is a glaring example of the dehumanization that racism entails and the murderous brutality racism enables. This is what the world has seen play out in Gaza these last 10 months. There could be no better example, right now, of why Israeli racism should not get a pass in the U.S., nor anywhere, ever again.
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'The Land Theft Continues': Israel Announces Biggest West Bank Seizure in Over 30 Years
The Israel-based activist group Peace Now says "2024 is by far the peak year for Israeli land seizure in the occupied West Bank."
Jul 03, 2024
Human rights defenders on Wednesday condemned the far-right Israeli government's announcement of the largest seizure of Palestinian land—many critics bluntly called it "land theft"—in the illegally occupied West Bank in over 30 years.
On June 25, Israeli occupation authorities unilaterally declared 12,700 dunams, or 4.9 square miles, of land in the Jordan Valley "state lands." Israel's Custodian of the State's Property in the Civil Administration published the declaration on Wednesday. The move supplements previous Israeli land grabs totaling nearly 11,000 dunams (4.2 square miles) in February and March.
Combined, these are the biggest seizures of Palestinian land since the 1993 Oslo Accords.
"Land theft is a component part of colonial genocide as a social process," noted Heidi Matthews, an assistant professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto.
Muther Isaac, academic dean of Bethlehem Bible College in Jerusalem, lamented that "the land theft continues in the West Bank!"
Israel's goal, according to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is to "establish facts on the ground" in service of annexing the Palestinian lands and establishing or expanding overwhelmingly Jewish colonies there. The push comes as more and more countries—nearly 150, according to Palestinian officials—officially recognize the state of Palestine and as Israeli forces continue an assault on Gaza that has been widely condemned as genocidal.
"We will establish sovereignty... first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalize the young settlements," Smotrich said last month, referring to illegal outposts that are newer and smaller than established Jewish settler colonies.
"My life's mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state," he added.
Under international law, all of the settlements are illegal. Most were built on land seized from Palestinians through terrorism and ethnic cleansing during the Nakba, or catastrophe, when more than 700,000 Arabs were expelled during the establishment and consolidation of modern Israel in the late 1940s, and during the conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.
Smotrich and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "are determined to fight against the entire world and against the interests of the people of Israel for the benefit of a handful of settlers who receive thousands of dunams as if there were no political conflict to resolve or war to end," the Tel Aviv-based activist group Peace Now said in a statement Wednesday.
"Today, it is clear to everyone that this conflict cannot be resolved without a political settlement that establishes a Palestinian state alongside Israel," the group added. "Still, the Israeli government chooses to actually make it difficult and distance us from the possibility of peace and stopping the bloodshed."
That bloodshed includes a surge in settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since last October. More than 500 Palestinians—around a quarter of them children—have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers there over the past nine months, according to Palestinian and international agencies.
Protected and sometimes aided by Israeli troops, Israeli settlers have launched multiple deadly pogroms targeting Palestinian people and property in the occupied territories since last year.
These and other previous attacks prompted the Biden administration to impose sanctions on a handful of the most extremist Israeli settlers. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also reverted to classifying Israeli settlements as inconsistent with international law, which was the State Department's position from 1978 until the Trump administration reversed it in 2019.
However, the U.S. remains Israel's staunchest international supporter, providing billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover for Israeli policies and actions that, in addition to occupation and colonization, critics say amount to apartheid and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
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'What Are They Afraid Of?': Columbia Law Review Board Shuts Down Website Over Nakba Article
The author of the 106-page piece said the suppression attempt is "reflective of a pervasive and alarming Palestine exception to academic freedom."
Jun 05, 2024
The Columbia Law Review's board of directors temporarily shut down the prestigious legal journal's website on Monday following its publication of an article arguing for the establishment of the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine to establish and expand the state of Israel—as a novel legal concept.
The Interceptreported that Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and Harvard Law School student, initially tried to publish an article in the Harvard Law Review on the Nakba as a legal concept amid the backdrop of Israel's Gaza genocide and apartheid in the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine. The piece was fully edited and ready for publication when it was canceled. The Nationpublished the essay in November.
Students from the Columbia Law Review (CLR) subsequently reached out to Eghbariah to solicit a new article on the topic. He said he worked with editors for five months on the 106-page piece, entitled "Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept," which was published early Monday morning. The article—which is dedicated to the "victims and survivors of the ongoing Nakba"—"proposes to distinguish apartheid, genocide, and Nakba as different, yet overlapping, modalities of crimes against humanity."
CLR's board of directors—which consists of Columbia Law School faculty and prominent alumni—quickly shut down the entire website over the article. By later Monday morning, the CLR homepage was but a simple, specious message: "Website is under maintenance." The site was still offline on Wednesday afternoon.
"The attempts to silence legal scholarship on the Nakba by subjecting it to an unusual and discriminatory process are not only reflective of a pervasive and alarming Palestine exception to academic freedom, but are also a testament to a deplorable culture of Nakba denialism," Eghbariah told The Intercept on Monday.
Seven editors who worked on the article told The Intercept that board members pressured them to delay or cancel its publication. Some CLR staff toldThe Associated Press that a small group of students said they feared for their careers and even their safety if the article was published.
CLR's board of directors told The Intercept Monday that "we spoke to certain members of the student leadership to ask that they delay publication for a few days so that, at a minimum, the manuscript could be shared with all student editors, to provide them with a chance to read it and respond."
"Nevertheless, we learned this morning that the manuscript had been made public," the board continued. "In order to provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed, we have temporarily suspended its website."
The directors said there has been no final decision on whether to publish the article.
Critics contend that Eghbariah's piece is being suppressed as part of a wider silencing of Palestinian voices and denial of not only Israel's genocide in Gaza but also of the indisputable Nakba and occupation.
"By attempting to erase the Nakba, they have, in fact, made it clearer."
"I don't suspect that they would have asserted this kind of control had the piece been about Tibet, Kashmir, Puerto Rico, or other contested political sites," Columbia Law School professor Katherine Frank told The Intercept.
The Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) called the CLR board's action "a shameful attempt to silence groundbreaking legal scholarship shining light on the catastrophe of Zionism and the ways in which is fragments, displaces, and disempowers Palestinian society."
Others linked the incident to Columbia University's recent violent crackdown on nonviolent pro-Palestine protesters.
"At Columbia, if you publish a law review article about Palestine, they will take down the entire law review website," Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia, said Monday on social media. "If you protest for Palestine, they will shut down the entire campus and direct police to hospitalize you."
In a Wednesday interview on Democracy Now!, Eghbariah lamented "the extent to which the board of directors is willing to go to shut down and silence Palestinian scholarship."
"What are they afraid of? What are they afraid of, of Palestinians narrating their own reality, speaking their own truth?" he asked. "Whose interests is the board of directors serving, going against their students, editors, going against its own staff, throwing them under the bus, manufacturing a controversy about some internal processes?"
"By attempting to silence and censor my scholarship, these two law reviews have actually amplified it," Eghbariah continued. "And by attempting to erase the Nakba, they have, in fact, made it clearer. And still, despite this irony, it feels quite offensive and unprofessional and discriminatory to be faced with such repression."
"I think this repression is really a testament to the Palestine exception to free speech and to academic freedom," he added. "And it's a microcosm of, you know, the broader authoritarian repression we've been witnessing on American campuses in this country."
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