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occupied west bank
Former Mossad Chief Compares West Bank Israeli Settler Violence to That of Nazis During Holocaust
“What I saw today made me feel ashamed to be Jewish," said Tamir Pardo after touring Occupied West Bank.
Apr 28, 2026
Tamir Pardo, the former chief of Israel's powerful Mossad intelligence agency, drew international attention on Monday by saying that what he witnessed during a tour of the Occupied West Bank reminded him of the treatment of the Jewish people during the Holocaust by Nazi Germany in the 1930s ad 40s.
Pardo, who served as Mossad director from 2011 to 2016, expressed sorrow and shame over what he saw, invoking his Jewish family's history.
“My mother was a Holocaust survivor, and what I saw reminded me of the events that happened against Jews in the last century,” Pardo told Channel 13 news. “What I saw today made me feel ashamed to be Jewish.”
Tamir Pardo, former Mossad head, on a tour documenting Jewish settler terror in the West Bank: “My mother is a Holocaust survivor, and what I saw here reminded me of the events of the previous century against the Jews.“ pic.twitter.com/o1eJ9vkhDi
— Etan Nechin (@Etanetan23) April 28, 2026
Observers noted that Pardo's statements—which echo, at least in certain key ways, those of experts and humanitarian advocates who have documented the abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)—would come under harsh rebuke by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) or other pro-Israel hardliners in the United States if spoken by others.
"The former head of the Mossad is comparing the actions of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank to Nazis in the Holocaust," said journalist Mehdi Hasan. "If someone said that in the West they'd be accused of antisemitism under the IHRA definition."
The IHRA definition refers to how the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance articulates antisemitism, a more sweeping definition—one adopted by the ADL and many Zionist political forces in the United States—that equates criticism of the state of Israel or its policies with animus toward or discrimination of the Jewish people. Critics of the IHRA definition, including Jewish scholars and holocaust experts, have said its deployment undermines efforts to confront the real scourge of antisemitism while also insulating Israel from honest and necessary criticism.
“My mother is a Holocaust survivor. What I saw here today recalled the events that happened in the last century”
Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, during a tour tracing illegal settler violence in the occupied West Bank, compared the scenes he witnessed to the Holocaust.
Pardo… pic.twitter.com/rrsQx2CvpW
— TRT World (@trtworld) April 28, 2026
Pardo has spoken out previously about what he regards is an apartheid system in the OPT, including in 2023 prior to the October 7 attacks, but his warnings to curb the mistreatment of the Palestinian population were dismissed by the ruling coalition. In the time since, the situation in the West Bank for Palestinians has deteriorated significantly.
Touring the region with other former members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Pardo warned that the conditions on the ground, where Palestinians live under armed occupation and the near constant threat of settler violence, is setting the stage for a violent reaction similar to what occurred on October 7, 2023 when Gaza militant factions staged a violent assault on Israel.
“To my great regret, what we are seeing today,” said Pardo, “is the next October 7. It will be in a different format, much more painful, because the region is much more complicated."
While he said that Israeli authorities know full well the extent of the settler violence, they choose to ignore it. "The state has chosen to sow the seeds for the next October 7," he said.
Pardo said that what he witnessed in the OPT on Monday "is the existential threat to the State of Israel,” but warned that confronting settler violence, given the amount of backing the far-right settlers have in the current government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, could tear the country apart.
As the Times of Israel reports on his comments:
“If we want, we can correct this, but the price will be very high,” Pardo said. “It can drag the entire country to a place” like the situation in Lebanon, an apparent reference to the civil and political strife in that country, where the Hezbollah terror group uses its military means to assert authority on the country.
“It is very much worth our while not to get there,” he said.
Pardo recalled the late Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who controversially warned that control over millions of Palestinians in the territories would ultimately corrupt Israeli society.
The former spy chief said he used to think that Leibowitz was misguided in his comments, but after witnessing the actions of settler extremists in recent months, he now believes “there was a lot of truth” to what the Israeli philosopher said.
Human rights group have said the intensified assault on Palestinians by settlers and IDF soldiers in the Occupied West Bank since October of 2023 have unleashed a widespread humanitarian crisis and called on the international community to intervene to halt Israel's continued settlement expansion and the abuses on the ground.
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The All Too Ordinary Death of Nasrallah Abu Siyam
What happened to Nasrallah was not unusual; in fact, it was entirely predictable. It reflects a pattern Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank have been forced to live with for decades.
Feb 26, 2026
I’ve grown accustomed to the violence in Palestine; to seeing my brothers and sisters stripped from their homes and taken away from life itself. That violence has always felt close. And yet, with Nasrallah Abu Siyam, it became unmistakable.
Not only was he my age, he was born just miles from my hometown. An American citizen. Living an ordinary life. Dreaming of ordinary things. And still, he was shot and killed by Israeli settlers, simply for helping guard his fam ily’s livestock in the occupied West Bank.
In nearly every way, his life mirrored mine. The only difference was where he stood. And that difference, it seems, was enough.
What happened to Nasrallah was not unusual; in fact, it was entirely predictable. It reflects a pattern Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank have been forced to live with for decades—one in which violence is routine, accountability is absent, and loss is absorbed without consequence.
Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it.
That pattern is clearest in how these moments of violence unfold. In Mukhmas, the village where Nasrallah was killed, a resident described what happened plainly:
“When the settlers saw the army, they were encouraged and started shooting live bullets.”
In other words, the presence of the occupying forces did not interrupt the violence; it emboldened it. This is a reality Palestinians have long understood— that the forces ostensibly tasked with “maintaining order” often function instead as a mechanism for enabling and inflicting violence.
Time and time again, Palestinians are left to bury the result.The scale of that violence is not abstract, nor is it disputed.
Between October 2023 and October 2025 alone, more than 1,100 Palestinians were killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers—229 of them children. That means more than 1 in 5 of those killed were children. In that same span of time, over 10,900 Palestinians were wounded and nearly 21,000 were detained.
And yet, none of this devastation takes place on a battlefield. There is no armed group to point to, no battle to cite. What remains is an occupied territory where civilian death, injury, and detention occur as a matter of policy and practice—not as rare or exceptional events.
By this point, it may sound like a broken record—not just from me, but from years of warnings repeating what the international community has recorded and then promptly ignored. But repetition becomes inevitable when impunity is preserved at every level.
Impunity—that, I must say—does not exist in a vacuum. It is sustained through material support, political protection, and deliberate silence. All of which the United States is deeply embedded in: in the weapons supplied, in the cover extended, and in what goes unsaid. When Americans like Nasrallah Abu Siyam—at least six of them in the past two years—are killed under an occupation supported by US authority, and little is said and less is done, that silence becomes a statement in itself.
Put simply, it is a statement of how Palestinian life—American or not—is weighed, and how little that weight has meant in the political world.
No power should have the authority to dictate which lives are expendable—and which are not. Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it. But again, that failure is not abstract. It has a name, a place, and a date.
This piece was originally published on Substack.
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Don't Be Fooled: The Trump 'Peace Plan' Is Just Genocide Under a Different Name
The genocide in Gaza has not ended, but has taken on a different form.
Jan 18, 2026
The Trump peace scheme is not an imperfect plan that at least ends the genocide in Gaza. It is in fact a new plan to continue the genocide using a different strategy. It poses a mortal threat to the survival of Palestinians in Gaza. However this plan is not being implemented in isolation from the massive Israeli attack on Palestinians in the West Bank, but in conjunction with it. We are now witnessing, not merely a messy and complicated ceasefire in Gaza and stepped up attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Rather, we are witnessing a coordinated 2-pronged attack to destroy the very idea of Palestine. As a result we need to move from targeting the Gaza genocide as separate from what’s being done in the rest of Palestine to a focus on both Palestinian self-determination and opposing ongoing efforts to erase the reality of Palestinians as a people. To repeat: we must now insist on the national rights of Palestinians to live in a Palestine shaped by their own hands – and to counterpose that insistence to the Trump-Netanyahu plans being implemented throughout Palestine to savage Palestinians and destroy their existence as a people.
Gaza
Trump’s peace plan for Gaza is of course absurd. The Palestinians played no role in creating it. The country that has been committing an internationally recognized genocide is now going to “temporarily” occupy more than 50% of the territory on which it has carried out that genocide. And the President of the country who teamed up with Israel to commit that genocide is the Chairman of something bizarrely named the “Board of Peace”. As such he is given the power to oversee all aspects of Gaza’s future including an international “peacekeeping” military force and the appointment of Palestinians he judges should temporarily administer Gaza while Israeli troops directly occupy most of the area. The only party to be disarmed is the Palestinian resistance to the genocide.
On paper there was at least to be a ceasefire. But instead we see the Israeli military killing Palestinians on a daily basis. At the same time they violate their obligation to allow sufficient food, medicine and other basics of life to be brought in to Gaza by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as Israel creates all kinds of barriers to sufficient aid reaching the people. In addition the Israelis have blown up 1500 more buildings in the area of Gaza allotted to them and are taking over parts of Gaza beyond the area given to them in the plan. Nothing gets in the way of Israel doing whatever it wants.
In the ultimate act of betrayal, the United Nations security council has turned over the future of Gaza, not to Palestinians, but to Israel, Trump and his investors. Yet this brute reality is not seen clearly by most of the world. It is now our movement’s job to take on this plan directly and create a counter narrative that explains the continuing genocide and the need to immediately rise up in opposition to it. If the millions of people who rose up against the genocide in the past saw this plan for what it is, instead of seeing it as something that might benefit the Palestinians, they would increasingly roar their opposition.
The West Bank
In the West Bank the escalating violence includes land theft, murders, the expulsion of farmers from their fields, uprooting trees, burning home and cars, and systematic attacks during the olive harvests – a central source of their livelihoods. All this to lay the ground for almost complete ethnic cleansing and a vast expansion of Israeli settlements. The ultimate goal is to turn the West Bank into a part of greater Israel.
Meanwhile thousands of Palestinians from both areas are “interred” in the Israeli Gulag of torture centers where unspeakable conditions are just as bad—or even worse–than those at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
In short, we are seeing a wave of expulsions, arrests and murders by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank in combination with post-ceasefire killings, demolitions and restrictions on food, medicine and shelter in Gaza. The goal of these tactics is the same as that of the genocidal military operations and food blockade during the first 2 years of Israeli rampage that has left Gaza in ruins:The end of Palestine.
We must now shift our focus from Gaza alone to the preservation of Palestine, as Palestinians and their aspirations for freedom are under deadly attack throughout their country. We must educate the public on how the genocide in Gaza has not ended, but has taken on a different form, while Israel’s goal of eliminating the possibility of Palestinian life has broadened to include the West Bank.
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'Fuck ICE and Free Palestine': Hannah Einbinder's Emmy Moment
"I feel like it is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel," said the award-winning actress.
Sep 15, 2025
Hanna Einbinder took home the Emmy for best supporting actress in a comedy on Sunday night. She ended her acceptance speech with a deeply serious message, denouncing President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown across the US and calling for the liberation of the Palestinian people, both in the Occupied West Bank and those suffering daily under Israel's genocidal attack in Gaza.
Einbinder, who plays the character of Ava Daniels in the hit shows Hacks, accepted the award in typical fashion, but before leaving the microphone, "I just want to say: Go Birds, fuck ICE, and free Palestine."
The birds refer to the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles, and ICE is the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since Trump took office in January, ICE has been conducting increasing numbers of high-profile raids and community sweeps in communities across the country.
"Go birds, fuck ICE and free Palestine."
Hannah Einbinder turned her Emmy win for best supporting actress in a comedy into a platform for activism, wearing a red Artists4Ceasefire pin and joining fellow actors on the red carpet calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
In a… pic.twitter.com/PotaFIvpS1
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) September 15, 2025
Einbinder, who is Jewish and wore a red Artists4Ceasefire button on her dress throughout the glitzy award show, was asked about her comments regarding Palestine backstage.
"I thought it was important to talk about Palestine,” Einbinder explained, “because it’s an issue that’s very dear to my heart. I have friends in Gaza who are working as frontline workers, as doctors, right now in the north of Gaza, to provide care for pregnant women and for school children to create schools in the refugee camps. And it’s an issue that’s really close to my heart for many reasons.”
"I feel like it is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel," she added, "because our religion and our culture are such an important and long-standing institution that is really separate to this sort of ethno-nationalist state.”
This is not the first time Einbinder has spoken out on behalf of Gaza and Palestinian rights. Earlier this year, accepting an award from the Human Rights Campaign, she said, "As a queer person, as a Jewish person, and as an American, I am horrified by the Israeli government's massacre of well over 65,000 Palestinians in Gaza."
While accepting an award from the Human Rights Campaign, actor Hannah Einbinder used her speech to strongly condemn the genocide in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/oRWXpTuUO3
— AJ+ (@ajplus) March 30, 2025
"I am ashamed and infuriated," she continued, "that this mass murder is funded by our American tax dollars. It should not be controversial to say that we should all be against murdering civilians. I know that calling for a ceasefire and the release of all hostages begs for the safety, security, and preservation of life of both Palestinians and Israelis."
"I know that my call for a liberated Palestine," Einbinder said, comes from a desire for mutual safety of all people living in the region and I know that my condemnation of Israel's bombardment of Gaza is not despite what I learned in Hebrew school, but because of it."
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Bethlehem Betrays God
How could the Holy Land be considered the holiest of places if its rulers perpetuate violence and injustice?
Jun 22, 2025
As I first arrived in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, I couldn’t help but feel trapped by the gigantic separation wall. Now, every time that I walk through the dreaded checkpoint cutting Bethlehem off from Jerusalem, I feel intimidated by the look of disgust and inhumanity on the faces of many Israeli soldiers that I encounter. Still, my experiences don’t compare to the horrific ordeals that many Palestinians go through on a daily basis at the checkpoints.
Even as someone who doesn’t currently possess the deepest connection to Christianity or any other religion, I acknowledge that there’s something special about the little town of Bethlehem. When visiting the Church of the Nativity, it’s impossible not to be overcome by awe. As the alleged birthplace of Jesus Christ, many people consider Bethlehem to be one of the most important cities in the world. Yet, instead of being a city characterized by peaceful worship, Bethlehem has been devastated by the Israeli occupation. The Israeli occupation has stripped Bethlehem of the holiness that would otherwise define the city.
News coverage is typically diverted toward Palestinian cities either in the Gaza Strip or in other parts of the West Bank, such as Jenin, Tulkarem, and Hebron. True, Bethlehem was covered by major news outlets last Christmas, which highlighted the absence of Christmas festivities and the resulting damage to the city’s economy. However, little attention is paid to Bethlehem’s current status. Last month, several Palestinians had their homes vandalized and were themselves assaulted by Israeli forces in the Kisan wilderness, which is east of Bethlehem. Recently, Israeli forces arrested and raided the homes of two Palestinian brothers in Beit Sahour, a neighboring town. To understand Bethlehem’s current status, I interviewed activists and locals.
“Year after year, the situation [in Bethlehem] has gotten worse and worse,” said Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian scientist, internationally recognized human rights activist, and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize nominee. When I initially entered the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, which Qumsiyeh founded and currently directs, I was greeted by a variety of Palestinian historical artifacts. Qumsiyeh both told me about the centrality of Palestinian society to agricultural development and lamented Israeli colonization. When I asked him about the changes that Bethlehem has been subject to, Qumsiyeh, specifically referring to the last 20 years, stated that the city’s situation has deteriorated rapidly due to “the wall building, the restriction of movement, and the inability for us to even go to Jerusalem.”
The 270,000 Palestinians that live in the Bethlehem Governorate (including around 70,000 refugees), Qumsiyeh went on to state, are limited “to only 15% of the land of Bethlehem, [which is] increasingly surrounded by walls and refugee centers.” Furthermore, Qumsiyeh acknowledged the degradation of Bethlehem’s environment due to Israeli oppression. “There’s increased desertification that’s coming from the area of the Jordan Valley toward here because of Israel’s actions and climate change, which, of course, Israel contributes to climate change because the military produces more greenhouse gases from jet fuel flying to bomb Gaza, Lebanon, and so forth” compared to other countries. Overall, “we have been devastated here,” said Qumsiyeh.
It’s impossible to miss the Christmas House shop on the way to Bethlehem’s Milk Grotto Church, especially since beautiful olive wood carvings are prominently on display. When I asked Jack Giacaman, the shop’s sales/production manager, about life in Bethlehem, he said the following: “The first thing is that you are in a big siege, a big prison called Bethlehem [that is] surrounded by checkpoints and a wall. The feeling that you cannot move itself is a dangerous feeling.” While less common compared to other areas of the West Bank, Giacaman also highlighted the presence of settler violence in the area around Bethlehem. For instance, since the separation wall isn’t completely finished toward the west of Bethlehem, “the settlers are taking the land and preventing people from reaching their farming land.”
In addition, Bethlehem suffers from economic challenges. Outside of the Church of the Nativity, tour guide and retired police officer Ahmad Tannanhe is commonly found. When I asked him about how the city of Bethlehem was doing, Tannanhe responded by stating that while many tourists previously came to the city from around the globe, “because of the war in Gaza, the tourists are afraid to come.” Since Bethlehem’s economy relies on tourism, the city has been devastated. Furthermore, Tannanhe went on, “many workers are also not allowed to work inside of Israel.” Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide within the Gaza Strip, Israel has revoked the work permits of more than 150,000 Palestinians, obliterating their source of income.
When I asked Qumsiyeh how he maintains the strength to continually advocate for Palestinian rights amidst Israeli oppression, he explained to me that resistance isn’t a choice. “You don’t have a choice. It’s not a matter of choice. It’s a matter of what you have to do, what you are born to do because your country is colonized by ruthless, racist colonizers who don’t want you on this land. So, everything you do is a form of resistance. Even being born here is resistance. Resistance is not an option. It’s a way of life.”
Importantly, the suffocation that Palestinians experience due to the Israeli occupation is maintained by American support. Recently, Israeli ministers approved 22 new West Bank settlements, which is the largest expansion in decades. In addition, the Israeli government has both expanded roads going through the West Bank and attempted to legalize isolated outposts, which are illegal under current Israeli law. The American government hasn’t penalized Israel, and it's very likely they won’t. For Giacaman, the United States’ reluctance to punish Israel isn’t surprising. “America is not a free country. It’s a country under the control of Zionists,” said Giacaman.
U.S. President Donald Trump allies himself with radical Christian Zionists and apparently considers himself a “non-denominational Christian.” Yet, if Trump sincerely believed in the teachings of the Bible, he wouldn’t support the manufactured suffering of a city that God entrusted with the birth of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, if Trump truly believed in Jesus Christ’s peaceful teachings, he wouldn’t be complicit with both the genocide that is being carried out by Israel in the Gaza Strip and the oppression of the Palestinian people in general. While God is certainly connected with the people of Bethlehem, current Israeli policy guarantees Bethlehem’s betrayal of God by ensuring that the city no longer exists as a fountain of peace. Instead, Bethlehem is stained by suffering, violence, and oppression.
Ironically, the Holy Land may be undergoing a crisis of holiness. How could the Holy Land be considered the holiest of places if its rulers perpetuate violence and injustice? When I asked about the future, Giacaman issued a pessimistic vision: “I don’t see a future in the Holy Land for any people, [whether they’re] Christian, Muslim, or Jewish…This place is changing into a place of hate, a place of separation. There are no bridges between people. A new crazy Zionist youth is growing. In the beginning, I thought there was an Islamic hatred of Jews, but I now see that Zionists are more dangerous to the Jews than any other thing because [Zionism blinds them]. They are away from God.”
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Settling With Violence in the West Bank
From the very start, violence has accompanied the proliferation of settlements.
Jul 16, 2024
In 1979, I made the first of what would turn out to be decades of periodic visits to Israel and the West Bank. I traveled there for the New York alternative publication The Village Voice to investigate Israel’s growing settler movement, Gush Emunim (or the Bloc of the Faithful). The English-language Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, then reported that settlers from Kiryat Arba, a Jewish West Bank outpost, had murdered two Palestinian teenagers from the village of Halhoul. There, in one of the earliest West Bank settlements established by Gush Emunim, a distant cousin of my husband had two acquaintances. Under cover of being a Jew in search of enlightenment, I spent several days and nights with them.
Gush Emunim: The Origin of the Settlement Movement
Zvi and Hannah Eidels, my hosts, lived in a four-room apartment in the settlement, which jutted out of an otherwise lovely Mediterranean landscape dotted with stone terraces, olive trees, fruit groves, and grape vines. Kiryat Arba flanked the Palestinian city of Hebron and was an eight-minute car drive from Halhoul on which I wrote a separate article about the murder of those two teens.
My initial evening with the Eidels happened to be on the holy day of shabat.
The rush to finish cooking ended just before sundown and 32-year-old Hannah, very pregnant with her sixth child, turned to me. “Do you light?” she asked. For a moment I thought she was asking how I coped with power failures in the American economic twilight. She took me to the 10-by-12-foot living room. Just above a photograph of the spiritual father of Gush Emunim, Rabbi Avraham Kook, a bearded man with a fur-trimmed hat and heavy-lidded eyes, stood a row of candles on a tiny shelf. I suddenly recalled Friday evenings in my grandmother’s apartment in Philadelphia and was unnerved to find myself, an assimilated Jew — an atheist, no less — standing in Kiryat Arba, once again brushing up against Orthodoxy. I nonetheless took the matchbox, lit the candles, and stood there quietly for what I hoped was a decent interval.
Later, Hannah filled me in on her theory of Jewish superiority: all of creation, she assured me, is suspended in a great chain of being. On the bottom: inanimate non-living things. A link farther up: animate vegetation. Then, non-human animal life. Next, animate non-Jews. On the top, of course, were the Jews. “This may shock you,” she said, “but I don’t really believe in democracy. We believe,” she faltered for a moment, glancing at Zvi who was sitting quietly beside us cracking sunflower seeds and spitting the husks expertly onto a plate, “in theocracy. Right, Zvi?” “Not exactly,” said Zvi. “Not a theocracy. The government of God.”
Gush Emunim was both religious and militant. In a curious blend of ultra-Orthodoxy and historically secular Zionism, “the Faithful” claimed as their own some of the territories conquered in the Six-Day War, the 1967 conflict Israel fought against a coalition of Arab states, during which it took the West Bank, which its leaders called “Judea and Samaria.”
“Here began our first place,” one movement leader told me, “in Schechem [Nablus], where Jacob bought a plot of land. Here is the true world of Judaism.”
“Some people think the goal of Zionism was peace,” another Gush activist explained. “That is ridiculous. The goal of Zionism is to construct a people on its land.” But, he continued, “there were moral problems. There were Arabs living here. By what right did we throw them out? And we did throw them out… All the stuff about socialism, about national redemption, may be true, but that’s only one part. The fact is, we returned here because the Eternal gave us the land. It’s ridiculous, stupid, simplistic, but that’s what it is. All the rest is superficial. We came back here because we belong.”
And so began the settler movement, which, to this day, has never ended or stopped taking land from the Palestinians.
The Alon Plan
Even before that Jewish supremacist incursion, Yigal Alon, Yitzhak Rabin’s deputy prime minister, drafted a plan calling for settlements that would extend Israel’s political boundaries to the Jordan River. Such new Jewish settlements would ring Palestinian villages and towns and separate them from one another. In 1979, when I interviewed the mayor of Halhoul, where those two teens had been murdered, he took me to a hilltop, pointed to Kiryat Arba, and said all too prophetically: “The settlements are a cancer in our midst. A cancer can kill one man. But this cancer can kill a whole people.”
Following the Six-Day War, leaders of the Faithful supplied the shock troops for those growing settlements. It was common wisdom then that the situation “on the ground” was changing from month to month in favor of the Israelis. When I first started reporting there, a trip between East Jerusalem and Ramallah took about 20 minutes. However, once settler-only highways had been built and checkpoints put in place for Palestinians, the trip became at least twice as long. Initially, just soldiers posted on the roads, such checkpoints would later be industrialized with footpaths, tunnels, and turnstiles that looked like the ones in the subway system of New York where I later lived. Palestinians were then often forced to wait, sometimes for hours, before being allowed — or not — to proceed to their destinations.
The Israel-U.S. Peace Process
In 1993, a “peace process” was launched in — yes, you could hardly get farther away — Oslo, Norway. It “changed the modalities of the occupation,” as Noam Chomsky put it, “but not the basic concept… [H]istorian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that ‘the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever.’” The U.S.-Israeli proposals at Camp David in 2000 only strengthened that colonialist urge. Palestinians were to be confined to 200 scattered areas. President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed the consolidation of the Palestinian population into three cantons under Israeli control, separated from one another and from East Jerusalem.
From then on, Israel only continued its relentless occupation of Palestinian land. In 2002, it started erecting an enormous barrier wall along the Green Line and parts of the West Bank. At its most dramatic, that wall is a series of 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.
After 1979, every time I traveled to the West Bank I saw new Jewish settlements in formation, with their characteristic red-tiled roofs and white walls. Meanwhile, the Israelis restricted Palestinians from building new homes or even additions to current ones. In the West Bank city of Ramallah, that prohibitive situation has resulted in an uglified city center with ever taller buildings. Today, in photos of Ramallah’s contemporary downtown I can’t even recognize the place I last visited in 2009.
Violence
From the very start, violence has accompanied the proliferation of settlements. In 1979, settlers and soldiers were already terrorizing residents of the Palestinian village of Halhoul and committing violence elsewhere. “A rash of civilian acts of vandalism occurred last spring,” I wrote that year. “Settlers… uprooted several acres of grapevines belonging to farmers from Hebron… Kiryat Arba residents also broke into several Arab houses in Hebron and wrecked them.” A four-year-old boy slipped out of his house during one of the curfews (levied by the Israelis on Halhoul, but not, of course, on Kiryat Arba). That child was then stoned by Israeli soldiers. Five months later, I reported speaking with his mother. She “thrust the child toward me and pointed at a scar that still showed on his forehead. ‘What can we do?’ she implored me. ‘We have no weapons. We are helpless. We can’t defend ourselves.’”
In 1994, an American extremist settler, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinian worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and wounded another 125 of them. He was a supporter of the extremist Kach (Thus) movement founded by American rabbi Meir Kahane. In 1988, that movement and a split-off from it called Kahane Chai (Long Live Kahane) were declared to be “terrorist” in character by the Israeli government. It mattered little, however, since terrorism against Palestinians continued to flourish.
Too Little, Too Late
Forty-five years after my first report on the settlements, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that a farmer in his seventies living in the West Bank village of Qusra, Abdel-Majeed Hassan, had shown him “the blackened ground where his car had been set on fire, the latest of four cars belonging to his family that he said [Israeli] settlers had destroyed.” Six residents of Qusra had been killed in such attacks, Kristof reported, between October 2023 and late June 2024. Israel’s government responded to the October 7th Hamas assault in Gaza by endorsing “more checkpoints, more raids, more Israeli settlements.” Almost duplicating the agonized statement of that Palestinian interviewee of mine in 1979, another Palestinian, an American engineer who had returned to the West Bank, told Kristof, “I’m an American citizen, but if they attack me here, what can I do? They can break my gate; they can kill me.”
His article was entitled “We Are Coming to Horrible Days.” Coming? The horror began over half a century ago. Had the New York Times run similar articles, starting in the late 1970s; had successive American governments not turned a blind eye to what was happening; had Washington not continued funding Israel’s crimes with some $3 billion a year in aid, that country’s land thefts and other crimes on the West Bank could never have continued. In 1979, Israel was already confiscating water from Halhoul and other Palestinian villages, while in the ensuing years you could see swimming pools and lush lawns in the Jewish settlements there, even as Palestinian villages and towns were left to collect rainwater in barrels on housetops.
Twenty-three years after I made my first trip, the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem reported that, in “the first decade following the occupation, the left-leaning ‘Alignment’ governments followed the Alon Plan.” It advocated settling areas “perceived as having security importance” and sparse in Palestinian populations. Later, governments under the far more conservative Likud Party began establishing settlements across the West Bank, not just based on security considerations but ideological ones.
Jewish Supremacy
A word about the attitudes of Israeli Jews. In 1982, I interviewed a group of Israeli teenagers, one of whom, the daughter of Israeli leftist acquaintances of mine, told me that each new generation in her country was more right-wing than that of its parents. On one of several trips to Hebron in those years, I read this graffiti on a wall: “ARABS TO GAS CHAMBERS.” It certainly caught the mood of both that moment and those that followed to this day. For decades, in fact, the cry “Death to Arabs!” could be heard at some Israeli demonstrations. By the time Israel began its genocidal campaign in Gaza in 2023, you could watch videos of Israeli soldiers dancing and chanting “Death to Amalek! (The name Amalek refers to ancient biblical enemies of the Jews.)
Kristof writes that “Israel’s ‘state-backed settler violence,’ as Amnesty International describes it, is enforced by American weapons provided to Israel. When armed settlers terrorize Palestinians and force them off their land — as has happened to 18 communities since October [2023] — they sometimes carry American M16 rifles. Sometimes they are escorted by Israeli troops…The United States is already in the thick of the West Bank conflict… Many settlers have American accents and draw financial support from donors in the United States.”
But keep in mind that this is nothing new. Baruch Goldstein, that infamous mass murderer of 1994, was an American and it was very clear even then that American Jews were among the most rabid of the settlers.
In 2021, fulfilling the prophecy of the very first Israeli settler I ever visited, Zvi Eidels, the Israeli regime established what the human rights organization B’tselem called “a recognition of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
It feels bitter indeed to me to be able to say, “I told you so.” My accounts were largely ignored in those decades when I periodically reported from the West Bank. After all, I wrote for The Village Voice and other non-mainstream publications. The New York Times was largely silent on the subject then and Kristof’s recent telling observations sadly come decades too late. Even as I was finishing this article, Israeli forces were bombing densely populated neighborhoods in the Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps in the northern West Bank. (The Nur Shams brigade, which was an Israeli target, is an armed resistance group affiliated, according to Mondoweiss, with the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.)
Raja Shehadeh, one of Palestine’s greatest writers, recently let me know that even he – whom Israeli forces once recognized as an illustrious person and allowed to travel in relative freedom — fears venturing outside since the settlers are “all over” the West Bank. In a recent Guardian article he wrote: “I spent the last 50 years of my life getting used to the loss of the Palestine of my parents; and… I might spend the remaining years of my life trying to get used to the loss of Palestine in its entirety.”
I’ve known Shehadeh since 1982 and never in all those years had I seen him despair. It’s unbelievably depressing to find him writing this now. All I could write back was: “I’m afraid you may be right.” Sometimes evil does triumph. Israel has now become a largely fascist country with a deeply fascist government and it has been transformed into that, at least in significant part, because my country has profusely underwritten the most malignant developments there, which are still ongoing.
Just as I was finishing this article, in fact, the Associated Press reported that “Israel has approved the largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in over three decades.” That land grab, its account added, “reflects the settler community’s strong influence in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the most religious and nationalist in the country’s history.” Thus have the prophecies of the religious-nationalist Gush Emunim been fulfilled.
[Author’s Note: I am forever indebted to Noam Chomsky, with whom I first became friends in 1964, and whose 1974 book, Peace in the Middle East?, taught me about the realities of Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians. For my first trip, he provided me with the name of a person of great influence, the incomparable Dr. Israel Shahak, as well as of other holocaust survivors opposing Israel’s occupation. Noam Chomsky launched me on the long trajectory of my writing about Palestine from 1979 to this very moment. He is now 95 years old and in Brazil with his wife Valeria, recovering from a stroke. May he be blessed through the ages.]
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Palestinians and the 2024 Democratic Party Platform
Amid the unimaginable suffering in both Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, here's what I told the Platform Committee.
Jul 15, 2024
This week, I submitted testimony on Israel/Palestine to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee. This is my 11th convention and the ninth time I’ve been engaged in discussions regarding the platform, either as a member of the drafting committee, negotiating language with the campaigns, or simply presenting testimony, as I am doing this year.
During these many interventions, I’ve seen some changes made, but all too few on how the platforms address the issue of Palestinian rights. Friends often ask me why I keep coming back—like Sisyphus.
I do so for two reasons. In the first place, it is because Palestinian rights continue to be ignored. Despite the language in our last platform regarding the equal worth of Israeli and Palestinian lives, we continue to demonstrate that we do not see them as equal at all—and so their suffering continues.
Secondly, it is because I want Democrats to win. And what I am seeing is that unless Democrats change direction in the way they deal with Palestinian rights, they are risking losing a sufficient enough number of their voters that it could cost them victory in November.
It is important to consider today’s fraught political environment. The magnitude of the suffering Israel has inflicted on Gaza is horrifying: 38,000 dead, 70% of buildings demolished, infrastructure and medical facilities gone, famine looming, and an entire generation of children traumatized.
We are also seeing mass intersectional mobilization of what are largely Democratic voters who are deeply opposed to the Biden administration’s policies on this issue—this includes a substantial number of Arab Americans and a not inconsequential number of young people, progressive Jews, Blacks, Asians, and Latinos.
Most Americans, and actually most Democrats, never read the platform. However, this year the constituent groups noted above will be watching what language the party puts forward in the platform. In this context it is vitally important to consider their concerns and the consequences of failing to do so.
With this as a backdrop and knowing the process as I do, I offered a few recommendations for language changes as guidance for the platform drafters:
I’m sure the platform will speak about our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security and will be passionate in our condemnation of Hamas terror. But you will fail if you do not passionately acknowledge the immense suffering experienced by Palestinians and our role in fostering Israel’s sense of impunity as they continue to grind up Palestinian hopes and lives and property.
I urge you to recognize the urgency of the moment and the rawness of the feelings of those deeply pained by this tragedy, I ask you to avoid language that seeks to placate without substance—in other words, don’t say things you don’t mean, as you did in 2020 when you included the following quotes in the platform:
- Democrats recognize the worth of every Israeli and Palestinian,’ or
- ‘We support a negotiated two-state solution,’ or
- ‘We oppose any unilateral steps by either side’ (including annexation and settlement expansion).
The same platform that said these things went on to support Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel (when it has been annexed and is a unilateral action; is home to over 200,000 settlers; and is the site in which there continues to be confiscation and demolition, and blocks the creation of a viable Palestinian state).
If you oppose something, it’s important that you mean it. And if you state that something mustn’t be done, there should be consequences when it happens. When red lines are crossed, settlements get built, hospitals get bombed, humanitarian aid is blocked, and our response is nil, we look weak and insincere.
And if we say we want aid to reach Palestinians but then block aid to UNWRA, the only entity that can efficiently administer, protect, and deliver the aid—then we have failed.
With all this in mind, here are some suggestions: be firm in calling for an immediate permanent ceasefire, but add real consequences if either party violates its terms; demand the unimpeded delivery of aid to Gaza; demand an end to settlement expansion, and an immediate end to settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with consequences if they continue; and if you are going to condemn Palestinian incitement and terror, you must also condemn Israeli incitement and terror— whether perpetrated by individuals or the state.
One final note: I first engaged in these platform discussions 40 years ago. At that time, I was warned that the “P” word (meaning Palestinians) couldn’t be in the platform. During the next three decades I tried to get opposition to settlements in the platform.
Well, the “P” word made it a decade later and the 2020 platform for the first-time mentioned our opposition to settlements.
So here’s my challenge for 2024’s platform: call for an end to the occupation; for the adoption of President Clinton’s language “the right of the Palestinian people to live free and independent on their own land”; and make clear that there will be consequences for Israel’s continued violations of Palestinian human rights and international law and conventions.
Those were my suggestions. The ball is now in their court.
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From the River to the Sea, Not a Single Palestinian is Free
Israel has put in place a complex system of laws, policies, and regulations that fundamentally curtail the rights and freedoms of nearly every Palestinian and Arab in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and even among its own citizens.
Mar 25, 2024
Although the slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” has become one of the most controversial protest chants of the day , and numerous students, activists, and political figures, including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, have been penalized and/or censured for merely uttering the slogan, university leaderships and America’s political establishment have yet to seriously engage the policies that have made this slogan a rallying call for a new protest generation. Meanwhile, in January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement that Israel would retain full security control over the entire area west of Jordan did not as much illicit a single response from America’s political establishment.
Ultimately, no matter how we parse the protest slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” or which interpretation we choose, one reality remains: Between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, not a single Palestinian is free. From Israel, to the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), to the Gaza Strip, Israel has put in place a complex system of laws, policies, and regulations that fundamentally curtail the rights and freedoms of nearly every Palestinian and Arab (approximately 7.4 million people) in this territory.
Even among its own citizens, Israel has established different tiers of citizenship, only according full citizenship to its Jewish population. Currently, 67 laws discriminate against the Palestinian and Arab citizens of Israel (Adalah), including laws that authorize Jewish-only screening committees to select land and home purchase applicants based on their “social suitability,” effectively denying applicants on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity. In 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed the Jewish-Nation State Law which reserves the right of national self-determination to its Jewish citizens only, and advocates for the development of Jewish settlement as a national value. Effectively, the law denies the collective rights of 2.1 million Palestinian and Arab Israelis- 21% of its population. The underfunding of Palestinian towns in Israel and employment discrimination against Palestinians and Arabs is commonplace.
Of the 46 Bedouin villages in Israel, home to a population of 200,000 to 250,000 (some of which identify as Bedouin and not necessarily Palestinian), only 11 are legally recognized by the state. “Unrecognized” villages are not included in state planning or government maps, receive almost no state services such as water, sewage electricity, or health and educational services, and cannot obtain building permits to accommodate natural population growth, and are under constant threat of state demolition orders. These communities are regularly at risk of being forcibly removed from their ancestral homes.
June 2024 will mark the 57-year anniversary of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and each year since 1967 has more or less marked a retrenchment of rights for Palestinians living under Israel’s military rule. Collective punishment measures, such as arbitrary and administrative detention (arrest without charge or trial), criminalization of peaceful protest and freedom of expression, curfews, use of tear gas, house demolitions, deportations, and routine disproportionate use of force are everyday features of Israel’s military occupation.
Although in the post-1993 Oslo era, the Palestinian Authority attained limited self-rule in the oPt, Israel has remained in control of airspace, borders, security, movement of people and goods, and registry of the population (source: 40% of terrHuman Rights Watch). Moreover, the legalization of nationalist symbols, such as the Palestinian flag and its colors, and more open political affiliation with the PLO was accompanied by a new crippling system of movement restrictions throughout the territory. In 1993, Israel put in place the first permanent military checkpoint separating Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and imposed a general closure with checkpoints over the Gaza Strip. As of early 2023, there were approximately 645 such movement obstacles in the West Bank, which included 77 full-time staffed checkpoints, 139 occasionally staffed checkpoints, 304 roadblocks, and 73 earth walls (source: UNOCHA). These movement restrictions severely prevent or restrict access to services, main roads, urban centers, and agricultural areas, and have in short devastated the Palestinian economy.
More than 750,000 Jewish Israeli settlers now live in the West Bank. These settlement zones constitute approximately 40% of the territory to which Palestinians have no or minimal access (source: B’Tselem). Israeli Jewish settlers have preferential treatment in every aspect of life from access to natural resources, economic privileges, freedom of movement, to guaranteed military protection and although the settlers are subject to Israel’s civil laws, Palestinians are subject to Israel’s military laws.
After Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in 1980, approximately 372,000 Jerusalem Palestinians became non-citizen permanent residents of Israel. Along with permanent residency status, Israel granted them access to state health insurance and state services, and the right to vote in municipal elections, and unlike Palestinians in the rest of the oPt, they can travel freely throughout the territory. As Israel’s non-citizen permanent residents, however, the Palestinians of Jerusalem are not allowed to vote in national Israeli elections (and more recently Israel decided that they cannot vote in Palestinian national elections as well). The municipality routinely under serves the Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem, resulting in insufficient educational facilities and services and subpar infrastructure, and denies building permits to these communities. The movement restrictions have cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, severing critical organic economic ties, again devastating the economy of Arab East Jerusalem.
Jerusalem Palestinians are required to regularly prove that their “center of life,” or primary residency, is in Jerusalem. Failure to confirm continuous residency leads to the revocation of residency status. Since 1967, Israel has revoked the residency and forcibly displaced more than 14,000 Jerusalem Palestinians (source: B’Tselem).
Israel closed off the tiny enclave that is the Gaza Strip and placed it under complete siege beginning in 2007. Since then, Israel severely restricts the movement of goods and prevents Gaza’s residents from traveling to the West Bank or through Israel, denying most of the population critical medical treatment, and educational and professional opportunities that could only be obtained outside of the Strip. The closure policy has suffocated Gaza’s economy, leading to unemployment rates of approximately 46 percent in 2023, one of the highest in the world, and making 80 percent of the population reliant on humanitarian assistance. The 141 squared mile enclave is best described as an open-air prison, and as I pen this article, Gaza’s captive population is being subjected to Israel’s genocidal war.
Regardless of how we choose to interpret the slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” this is the reality on the ground in terms of freedom for Palestinians, and this article does not even address the daily violence to which Palestinians are subjected. Ultimately if there is any hope for a just resolution to this conflict, two questions will need to be addressed by the the political establishment in the United States: Can Israel’s allies continue denying basic human rights to Palestinians—rights that should be inherent to all human beings? And should Israel remain above international law and the laws of nations that underpin a rules-based order?
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Gaza Will Suffer, But the Palestinian People Will Not Break
The only solution to Gaza is the same solution to the rest of occupied Palestine—a clear understanding that the real problem is not ‘Palestinian terrorism’ or militancy, but the Israeli military occupation, apartheid and unrelenting siege.
Nov 18, 2023
The ongoing discussions on the Israeli military objectives in Gaza are largely focused on whether Israel is planning a long or a short-term military reoccupation of the Strip.
Israelis themselves are fueling this conversation, with 41 percent of Israelis wanting to leave Gaza following the war and another 44 percent wanting the Gaza Strip to remain under Israeli control.
These numbers, revealed in an Israeli public opinion poll conducted by the Lazar Institute and published by Maariv on Friday, November 10, reflect real confusion regarding the legal status of Gaza, even in the minds of Israelis themselves.
In truth, Israel was - and remains - the Occupying Power in Gaza and the rest of Palestine, despite the ‘redeployment’ scheme from the small and impoverished region in September 2005.
Back then, Israelis convinced themselves that they are no longer the occupiers of the Strip and, therefore, are no longer responsible for it, in accordance with international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.
But they are wrong, even if on September 21, 2005, the last day of the redeployment, Tel Aviv declared Gaza a “foreign territory”. Almost exactly two years later, this supposed “foreign territory” was declared a “hostile territory”, thus subjected to the ire of the Israeli military, should it not respect Israeli sovereignty and pose a threat to Israel’s southern borders.
The heated Israeli discussions on occupying or not occupying Gaza after the war are moot; Gaza has never been freed to be reoccupied.
International law, however, is not beholden to Israeli definitions. The United Nations has repeatedly issued statements insisting that Gaza remains an Occupied Territory.
Moreover, the fences and walls separating Gaza from Israel are not internationally-defined border regions, as designated by the armistice agreement established in 1949 between Israel, Egypt and other Arab countries - following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.
So, the heated Israeli discussions on occupying or not occupying Gaza after the war are moot; Gaza has never been freed to be reoccupied.
Whether Israel accepts this obvious logic or not, it matters little, since it is the international legal institutions, namely the UN, the ICJ and others, that have the authority and responsibility to reach and enforce such conclusions.
Still, however, Israel needs to be reminded of a few urgent matters.
One, resuming the siege on Gaza as usual will not resolve Israel’s problems. After all, it was the hermetic siege - where Palestinians were “put on a diet” but not allowed to die, according to senior Israeli government advisor Dov Weisglass in 2006 - which provided the main rationale behind Gaza’s need to resist.
Two, it was that very resistance that forced Israel to redeploy from populated areas in Gaza in the first place, leading to the draconian siege which has been in place for nearly 17 years.
These dates and events are often overlooked by mainstream media because they create an unnecessary inconvenience to the Israeli narrative regarding the war.
In Western media, for example, it is commonplace to highlight September 2005 - though here ‘redeployment’ is perceived as ‘withdrawal’—and October 7, the Hamas attack on southern Israel, as the most significant dates and events deserving attention. While the first is used to exonerate Israel, the latter is used to implicate Palestinians.
But Palestinians, and anyone interested in the true context of this war, should not feel bound to this logic.
Moreover, we should remember that the majority of Palestinians in Gaza are descendants of Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes and villages in 1948. They, rightly, continue to see themselves as refugees entitled to the Right of Return, as enshrined in UN Resolution 194.
Another date worth remembering is June 1967, when Israel occupied whatever remained of historic Palestine: East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.
This event is critical, as it represented an earth-shattering historical shift in Israel’s relationship with Palestinians, who became both victims of Israeli settler colonialism and military occupation.
The Israeli military occupation ushered in a new form of popular resistance in Palestine, where ordinary, oppressed Palestinians confronted Israeli soldiers daily.
The tools of that resistance, from 1967 until 2005, largely relied on civil disobedience, popular strikes, mass protests, and rock-throwing. Yet, that was still enough for the Israeli military to be chased out of Gaza, thus ending the everyday policing of the Strip in exchange for a new stage of military occupation.
If Israel returns to Gaza to stay, the challenge of governing the rebellious Strip will be much more difficult.
On the last day of the Israeli redeployment, tens of thousands of Palestinians took to the streets in central Gaza soon after midnight to confront Israeli soldiers as they evacuated the last military base, east of the Bureij area.
Without prior coordination, the Gaza youth wanted to send a message to the Israeli army that they were not welcome inside Gaza, not even in the last hours of redeployment.
Israelis should reflect on this history.
They should also recall that the Israeli rush to escape Gaza—under the leadership of a notorious military General, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon—took place when Palestinians had no army and a few arms. Their armed resistance consisted mostly of poorly organized militias, backed by the fury of hundreds of thousands of fed-up, occupied, and oppressed Palestinians.
If Israel returns to Gaza to stay, the challenge of governing the rebellious Strip will be much more difficult. Gaza’s population has increased exponentially since 2005. Moreover, the weakest of Gaza’s fighting groups commands thousands of men, ready to fight and die to keep the Israelis out.
Even more important, is that Israel has failed to govern one Gaza, though tried for nearly four decades. If it foolishly decided to return, it would have to contend with two Gazas—a defiant and empowered population above ground, and tens of thousands of fighters below.
The truth is Israel has no military option in Gaza, and those who support whatever military strategy Tel Aviv has in mind, are equally deluding themselves.
The only solution to Gaza is the same solution to the rest of occupied Palestine—a clear understanding that the real problem is not ‘Palestinian terrorism’ or militancy, but the Israeli military occupation, apartheid, and unrelenting siege.
If Israel does not end its illegal actions in Palestine, leading to the freedom, equality, and justice for the Palestinian people, resistance, in all of its forms, will continue unabated.
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What It Means When a Former Mossad Chief Recognizes Israeli Apartheid
No leftist or bleeding-heart liberal, Tamir Pardo is an exemplar of the tough, pragmatic, and somewhat ruthless Israeli tradition of security officials.
Sep 07, 2023
Tia Goldenberg at the Associated Press got the scoop. She landed an interview with the former head of Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, in which he unloaded on the Israeli system of Apartheid.
She quotes him as saying, “There is an apartheid state here. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”
Tamir Pardo, roughly 69, served as the head of Mossad from 2011 to 2016. He is no leftist or bleeding-heart liberal, but an exemplar of the tough, pragmatic and somewhat ruthless Israeli tradition of security officials. He once observed that Mossad is a criminal organization with a license and that is what makes it fun. I suspect the same thing can be said about most external intelligence organizations, including MI6 and the CIA.
Goldenberg added, “Pardo said that as Mossad chief, he repeatedly warned Netanyahu that he needed to decide what Israel’s borders were, or risk the destruction of a state for the Jews . . . Pardo warned that if Israel doesn’t set borders between it and the Palestinians, Israel’s existence as a Jewish state will be in danger.”
What he means is that if the extremists in the current government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu succeed in their goal of annexing the occupied Palestinian territories, they will willy-nilly make 5 million Palestinians Israeli citizens. Taking the land without the people and keeping the indigenous Palestinians stateless is the very definition of Apartheid. The only way to regularize and make legitimate such an annexation would be to give Palestinians citizenship. But if they were added to the nearly 2 million Israelis of Palestinian heritage, that would make about 7 million Palestinian-Israelis versus 7 million Jewish Israelis. Pardo’s point is that Israel would no longer be a Jewish state under those circumstances but a multi-ethnic one, like Belgium or Lebanon.
The Jewish Power and Religious Zionism extremists in the government, I think, hope to chase the Palestinians away to Jordan, creating a large new wave of refugees. I’m not sure, though, that such a thing is possible now, as it had been in 1948 and 1967. Jordan’s army would try to stop it. If such expulsion or “transfer” succeeded, it would likely make Jordan unstable, with highly negative security implications for Israel. And of course, such an expulsion of the Palestinians would be a major war crime that might well lead to sanctions on Israel.
Pardo supports the massive protests that have roiled Israel since January, and which aim to pressure PM Netanyahu to back off his plan to neuter the country’s High Court. Pardo also, like many Israelis, despises the Jewish Power and Religious Zionism zealots who now control key cabinet posts. He said in a radio interview in late July, “Someone took the Ku Klux Klan and brought it into the government.” The someone was of course Netanyahu, as Pardo acknowledged.
He even went so far as implicitly to compare Bezalel Smotrich’s call for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be wiped out to the mass parties of the 1930s, including, presumably, the Nazis.
Pardo seems to think he is asking for a return to pre-1967 normalcy, but what he is really asking for is for Israel to settle down and become an ordinary country instead of behaving like a messianic cause
He said the government’s rules allowing Jewish communities to exclude Palestinian-Israelis were “antisemitic:” “Tomorrow morning, they can’t enter a club, or a locality, or can’t buy a house in a certain area, or have less rights, that is antisemitism for its own sake.” I think his point was that Arabs are also Semites, and were being discriminated against on racial grounds.
Jonathan Shamir at Haaretz wrote, of Pardo’s revelations in his radio interview with Kan, “When Pardo confronted Netanyahu with the fact that Israel ‘rules from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [river] Jordan, and in practice, holds Gaza as the largest open-air prison in the world,’ he said he was never met with any substantive response. ‘His vision [on this issue] is the vision of Smotrich,’ Pardo charged.”
Pardo worried about an exodus of physicians, the hi-tech sector, and academics from Israel, without which, he said, “we won’t have a country anymore” or it will become a third-world state. He also worries about the military and Mossad being weakened by the increasing number of Israeli refuseniks who decline to serve.
Pardo not only had a long career in the Mossad, starting in 1980, but also was detailed to the Israeli Defense Forces for a while, and worked briefly in the tech sector himself. In 2011-2016 while heading Mossad, he came into conflict with Netanyahu over the prime minister’s plans to launch a unilateral attack on Iran without parliamentary approval. On the other hand, Pardo has lobbied the international community hard to stop Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
So he isn’t saying that Israel is an Apartheid state, or that it keeps Gaza as an open air prison, or that the Israeli extremist parties are the KKK because he is a Marxist or has studied intersectionality. He is saying these things because as a former security official, he sees them as dire security threats to Israel.
The problem he points to, however, of not having settled borders and not really wanting them goes back to David Ben-Gurion. As Israel was coming into being in May 1948, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary that the new state, like the US, had no recognized borders. He was implying that it could still grow, just as the US extended west through the nineteenth century under the doctrine of manifest destiny. It is one reason that the claim by Israel apologists that Israel recognized the 1947 UN General Assembly partition plan whereas the Arabs did not fall flat. The Israelis did not really recognize it. They took lots of territory that the UNGA did not award them, and in later years they tried to annex Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, one-tenth of Lebanon, and both the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. They only managed to keep the latter two, but they were clearly attempting to grab as much of their neighbors’ territory as they could get away with. (The UNGA plan, by the way, did not have the force of law, since it was never ratified by the UN Security Council).
That is, Pardo seems to think he is asking for a return to pre-1967 normalcy, but what he is really asking for is for Israel to settle down and become an ordinary country instead of behaving like a messianic cause with an expansionist remit, as it generally has done since its founding.
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