Israel is a small but mighty nation in the Middle East, bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to its west and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Syria to the remaining directions. Behind a facade of progressivism, whether it be a world-renowned vegan culture or its presentation as a haven for pride, (even though homosexual marriage is NOT legal in Israel, along with interfaith marriage) within Israel are integral characteristics far more sinister. Namely Zionism, and its bloody implications that have resulted in the genocide of countless Palestinians, violently created settlements, and worsening right-wing extremism that even threatens the integrity of the Israeli state itself.
I will regrettably have to skip over thousands of years of history to keep this article from being miles long, but the formation of Israel really starts with British occupation, which began in 1918 in the aftermath after World War I. The British had successfully beaten back the Ottomans and ruled over much of their former territory in the post-war era. They were heavily involved in nearby Iraq, where they brutally crushed several nationalist rebellions and operated the lucrative Iraq Petroleum Company. Access to fossil fuel is still a major catalyst for imperialism and violence within the Middle East, over a hundred years later. Before the war had even ended, the British had vocalized their support for a "national home for the Jewish people" in what was known as the Balfour Declaration, despite the fact that the British Mandate of Palestine was overwhelmingly populated by Arabs, mostly Muslim. The British invaders acknowledged their purposeful ignorance of the local people's will and apologized in 1937 and again in 2017, but these apologies were too little, too late. Anyway, the Balfour Declaration, along with other developments, catalyzed Zionism and many Jewish Zionists began pouring into the region. At various points thereafter, both Arab and Jewish insurgent groups attempted to topple the British via force. Shortly thereafter, the British realized the region was a lost cause and fully withdrew. In 1947, the United Nations (UN) passed the Partition Plan for Palestine, allowing two the division of the mandate into two Arab and Palestinian states. A bloody war, known as the The War of Independence in Israel and Nakba among Palestinians, ensued thereafter, resulting in the deaths of thousands on both sides. After Israel's victory over the Arab Liberation Army and other pro-Arab groups, they were almost immediately attacked by neighboring countries: Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and others. The Israelis took land partitioned for the Arab state as war spoils in the aftermath, which has continued to this day in violation of direct UN orders. This point is a major source of anger for Palestinians and the wider Arab community. Since 1948, nearly 6 million Palestinians have fled as refugees because of the violence and ethnic cleansing.
But Israel has not been satisfied with this extra occupied territory. In the years since 1948, Israeli settlers have been encouraged by their state to establish settlements within the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These internationally illegal Israeli settlements are designed to forcefully displace Palestinians, otherwise known as ethnic cleansing, which is a form of genocide. I touched on the illegal settlements and other atrocities when I took the opportunity to address right-wing provocateur Candace Owens at a TPUSA-sponsored event on Clemson's campus in April of 2023. Multiple UN resolutions advocating a two-state solution have been ignored by rogue Israel, as well as its big brother, the United States. This settlement is inherently violent, tearing families away from their home and land. This video, as well as this one, provides graphic detail of what happens to these Palestinian families when settlers invade. Amnesty International found that the settlement program constitutes an illegal transfer of civilians into occupied territory as well as amounting to "pillage", which is prohibited by both the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions as well as being a war crime under the Rome Statute. After the 1993 Oslo Accords between the United States, Palestine, and Israel, settlements expanded from 150,000 settlers to today's 700,000 and counting in the West Bank, with a majority of the West Bank land explicitly in the control of the Israeli government and military.
When it comes to UN resolutions, Israel and America truly find themselves on the wrong side of history at almost every opportunity. It would be dishonest to not designate the two allies as rogue nations. They often land in the tiny minority of nations (if not the only two votes) voting against undeniably positive policy proposals, whether it is to make food a human right, end the Cuban blockade, or one of many other no-brainer resolutions. In 2022, the United Nations condemned Israel more than all other countries combined.
Too often, acknowledgment of Israeli atrocities will immediately be met by something along the lines of "You're anti-Semetic!" in an attempt to prematurely shut down this important conversation, or perhaps out of blatant ignorance or naivety. While I am sure there is occasionally an overlap, anti-Zionists are overwhelmingly not anti-Semites. While anti-Semitism is a real problem even today (such as the Squirrel Hill massacre at a local synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), I fully reject the inclusion of its perverted and misguided ideology in my analysis. Anti-Semitism is morally wrong and detracts from the real issues the international anti-Zionist community has with Israel. This article criticizes Israel because the state is problematic, not because its Jewish inhabitants are bad merely by being Jewish. The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism must be rejected, which I will explain. Anti-Semitism is "opposition to or prejudice towards Jewish people". Meanwhile, Anti-Zionism is the opposition towards the establishment of a Jewish state (and the associated harm for a vast majority of those involved). I fundamentally reject ethnostates, whether they are Jewish, Arabic, or any other ethnicity. Ethnostates are by default racist, by preferring one ethnicity over others and excluding them (if not much worse), as is certainly the case today in Israel. I believe that people within a multiethnic, multiracial, and otherwise diverse state can peacefully coexist with and support each other, such as in the USSR.
I do not like to use the term lightly, but I would consider Israel not only an ethnostate, but also a fascist state. For a comprehensive definition of fascism, consult Umberto Eco's 14 Points of Fascism. Israel has singled out (largely) a single group, the Palestinians, as enemies of the state and refused to give them the same rights under the law as Jews, despite the fact that Palestinian Arabs have inhabited the area that Israel now occupies for countless generations (along with Palestinian Jews). This is the fifth principle of fascism, according to Eco—"The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition." The dehumanizing rhetoric and actions against Palestinians within Israel is unfortunately very widespread. A study by Tel Aviv University found that 83% of Israelis support the "open-fire" policy, in which Israeli soldiers are authorized to lethally shoot unarmed and peaceful Palestian protestors. 95% supported Gaza bombings in 2014. One woman when interviewed was especially forthcoming with her commitment to fascism and genocide, affirming that, "Yes, I'm a little bit fascist." People who feel confident enough to say a quote like that to a journalist are clearly enabled and defended by their violent state, which has time and time again violated international laws, various treaties, and basic human rights with their horrifically violent actions taken against Palestinians and others they deem "unworthy". This includes Ethiopian Jews and others of Ethiopian descent who routinely face discrimination in Israeli society, including in the armed forces.
Civil rights are limited for the few Palestinians within Israel who have not yet been illegally expelled from their homes and homeland. This is explicit apartheid, similar to the pre-Civil Rights United States under Jim Crow or apartheid South African which the white minority ruled over and abused the indigenous Black majority. On March 10, 2022, Israel's parliament passed legislation refusing naturalization to Palestinians within occupied West Bank and Gaza, including if they marry an Israeli. This clear violation of civil rights and morals is only the tip of the iceberg, as Israeli settlers continue to illegally remove Palestinians from their homes by force in areas such as East Jerusalem, in what constitutes ethnic cleansing and genocide. Contrary to manufactured myths attempting to post hoc justify Israeli aggression, Palestinians have inhabited that land consistently for thousands of years, along with some Palestinian Jews, who largely lived in peaceful coexistence. Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha is an excellent resource about this timeline. It is incredibly ironic that Israelis and their imperialist partners (primarily the United States) can provide more justification for, say, a Brooklynite or Parisian inhabiting occupied, ethnically cleansed territory than a native Palestinian, purely on the basis of expanding the "Jewish homeland".
Another denial of civil rights is tied to voting. Israel's status as a representative democracy* has been heavily questioned because Israeli residents of the occupied territories are allowed to vote in Israel's elections, while Palestinian residents are not. Ilan Pappé, an Israeli citizen, Exeter University professor, and director of the Exeter's European Centre for Palestinian Studies, touched on this lack of democracy in an interview: "No, Israel is definitely not a democracy. A country that occupies another people for more than 40 years and disallow them the most elementary civic and human rights cannot be a democracy. A country that pursues a discriminatory policy against a fifth of its Palestinian citizens inside the 67 borders cannot be a democracy. In fact Israel is, what we use to call in political science a herrenvolk democracy, its democracy only for the masters. The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is useless and meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the State, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level from official legislation through governmental practices, and social and cultural attitudes, Israel is only a democracy for one group, one ethnic group, that given the space that Israel now controls, is not even a majority group anymore, so I think that you’ll find it very hard to use any known definition of democracy which will be applicable for the Israeli case." Even the roads are segregated among ethnic lines. Many roads in the West Bank do not allow any Palestinians, and freedom of movement for Palestinians is severely restricted. Former African National Congress Chairperson Baleka Mbete said after visiting Palestine that the “Israeli regime is not only comparable, but far worse than Apartheid South Africa.”
*Capitalist bourgeois "democracies" like those of Israel and the United States are not actual democracies that represent the will of the people, but for the sake of comparison with peer countries, I will assume that they are.
The US state is very complicit in Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and the systematic killing of Palestinian people, among other tragedies already mentioned. The American government, as well as many private corporations, funds and provides military equipment for Israel to continue its fascist mission. The American state also repeatedly vetoes UN resolutions condemning Israeli treatment of Palestinians. The US has interests here for several reasons.
One reason is fairly simple: the desire to uphold American hegemony via economic and military force. In this case, Israel is important as one of the few nations in the Middle East (along with similarly violent Saudi Arabia, who is committing genocide against Yemenis) that is willing to act as a conduit for the will of American elites/ultra-wealthy. I say the elites/ultra-wealthy because average Americans clearly do not benefit in any way by the American state sending a copious amount of deadly weapons for another country to commit violence. It is the same case with the war in Ukraine. Israel is within proximity to historical American enemies such as Iran, and can help Americans flex their military might. In return for being a puppet state, America has heavily armed and otherwise financially supported the Israeli state from its inception in 1947. Since the end of World War II, the United States has contributed more military aid to Israel than any other country. Under a memorandum of understanding signed in 2016, the U.S. is expected to provide the country with $3.8 billion per year, or around 20% of Israel's defense budget, from 2018 to 2028. Israel ranked 9th globally for arms exports in 2022. The American military industrial complex enjoys this special relationship, as selling more deadly weapons to Israel means more profits for their investors and CEOs. I do not think Israel would have achieved statehood for any significant period of time without American support. The United States gives billions of dollars every year to the Israeli regime; virtually all of which is specifically for the Israeli military. The American state has pools of Palestinian blood on its hands because of its unwavering support for the Israeli state.
Another American interest has to do with religious convictions. Certain American Christians, primarily Fundamentalist Evangelicals, believe that Jews are God's chosen people (despite the fact that Jews do not put their faith in Jesus Christ and according to the Bible will be "eternally separated from God"). Evangelical Christians constitute an influential voting bloc, voting disproportionately relative to their size, and thus heavily impact elections. These individuals and church organizations believe that the establishment of a fully Jewish Israeli state will usher in a final battle involving all the nations within Israel, followed by the return of Jesus Christ, Armageddon. Even though their God is assumed to be in control of everything, for some reason they feel the need to preemptively launch the end times. Strange. Because of this fervor, they heavily lobby the government to support the Israeli regime, organize expensive cultural-religious trips to Israel to experience the area where some Biblical events supposedly took place, fund PACS such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and engage in other forms of Zionist activism. However, these zealots leave out the understood consequence that a vast majority of Israel's inhabitants would inevitably be slain in this "final battle". They ultimately do not actually care about the Jewish people, but rather see them as fodder to achieve their selfish religious goals, in which "true Christians" will reportedly "ascend to heaven", leaving the rest of humanity to suffer through seven years of post-Armageddon horror. Ironically, these groups ignore the small yet notable Arab Christian population that has existed within Palestine for countless generations who are also subject to Israeli violence and discrimination. Other reasons for the US to support Israel exist, but for sake of conciseness I will not discuss them here.
The Israeli Defense Force, or the IDF, indiscriminately attacks Palestinians, including journalists, medics, and even children. One recent high-profile IDF murder involved the shooting of American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was slain by the IDF during an Israeli raid of the Jenin refugee camp despite wearing obvious journalist credentials. Unfortunately, Western capitalist media refused to correctly attribute the death to the IDF because that would have created optical problems for the Israel-supporting ruling class of America. Instead, they carefully amended the language describing the death, attempting to paint the Israeli shot as a "phantom bullet", clouding any potential blame on the Israelis. This pattern repeats itself liberally. More than 50 Palestinian journalists alone have been killed by Israel since 2001. Many others have been wounded, which is forbidden under Article 79 of the Geneva Convention. Moreover, the Israeli high court codified the practice of targeting unarmed and peaceful Palestinians, saying that every single protestor, including children and medics, "posed an imminent threat". The results of this practice have predictably been deadly for thousands of Palestinians. Israel also illegally uses chemical weapons against civilians. These chemicals routinely lead to seizures, passing out, and even death if not properly treated. The IDF sometimes target medics, such as Razan Al-Najjar, who was intentionally shot by the IDF while attempting to rescue wounded Palestinians (previously shot by the IDF despite peacefully protesting) near the Israeli border. Again, she was clothed in obviously medical attire. Not only does this practice violate international law, but it also violates Israel's own Manuals on the Laws of War (1998). Israeli state behavior is sadly ironic considering that many of the same people whose recent ancestors were killed or otherwise persecuted by Nazi Germany are either supporting or actively participating in an ongoing genocide against the Palestinians.
Palestinians are prevented from leaving their own land (freedom of movement) because of the Israeli land, air, and sea blockade. The IDF is ordered to shoot on site at anyone attempting to flee Gaza by land or foot. Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, are effectively treated as animals, trapped in an Israeli cage with no way to get out. Most Palestinians just want their homes and communities back, but Israelis keep intentionally destroying remaining Palestinian structures and preventing Palestinians (often via lethal force) from returning. This photo article captures the grim of reality of Palestinians being trapped within their own homeland, a highly militarized, racist, and restrictive environment under the Israeli occupation. Yet again, Israeli's denial of freedom of movement for Palestinians contradicts international law. Israeli forces calculate the minimum number of calories to keep those in the Gaza Strip alive and allow just enough food to be shipped in to keep Palestinians in a constant state of near starvation. Construction materials are prohibited in the blockade, which keeps Gaza cities in many places literally reduced to rubble because of the frequent Israeli rocket attacks. Occasionally, Hamas or other Palestinian groups will launch retaliation rockets, but most are symbolic and do not even begin to approach the death toll of Israeli state and settler violence towards Palestinians. Palestinian paramilitary retaliation is usually justified (but certainly not in all cases) as defense in the face of brutal oppression and Israeli state terrorism, and is far less deadly than Israeli violence. Zionists may argue that Palestinians democratically elected violent groups like Hamas (a group which admittedly has many explicitly reactionary views) to lead them, but maybe Israelis should not have sowed the seeds of radicalization by brutally committing a barrage of atrocities against multiple generations of Palestinians. Also, the Israelis intentionally funded and supported Hamas to delegitimize secular and leftist organizations struggling for liberation. Desperate people sometimes resort to desperate measures, and this is certainly the situation for Palestinians today.
So far, I have not discussed the implications of state Zionism for those within Israel, especially Jewish Israelis. But this is an important component that is routinely ignored by Western media. The Israeli political landscape is dominated by far-right parties such as Likud (32/120 Knesset seats) and Religious Zionism (7/120 Knesset seats) who openly advocate for further settlement expansion and violence against Palestinians of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. The current Minister of National Security, Ben-Gvir, had a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. Ben-Gvir has personally taken part in the settlement process of Eastern Jerusalem, at one point threatening Palestinian residents with a firearm and advocating violence against them. The current Israeli administration, led by Benjamin Netanyahu and Isaac Herzog, is the most far-right one since its founding. That is astounding considering the far-right and fascist politics that have historically dominated Israel's affairs. However, they are so far right that they have angered many more "liberal" Israelis, mainly concerning judicial backsliding, in which judiciary power has been greatly reduced in 2023. This has alarmed many Israelis, fearing the consolidation of power by the ruling politicians, and thus tens of thousands of Israelis around the country have protested in the streets since this legislation was first proposed in January of 2023. It officially passed in July. It is ironic that a large proportion of Israelis feel prompted to be angry now, after Palestinians have been suffering to a far greater degree under the thumb of Israeli occupation for decades. The militaristic Israeli state is also bad for the Jewish Israeli people in addition to Palestinians: military service is compulsory for men (32+ months) and women (24+months), which greatly reduces individual freedom and exposes Israelis to potential injury or death while serving, delaying them from pursuing their dreams and puts them at higher risk of being injured or killed.
It should go without saying that not every Israeli agrees with their state. Many Israelis campaign against Israeli apartheid, genocide, settlement, and other human rights violations. These activists include certain Jewish religious sects and organizations such as B'tselem and a group of over a thousand progressive Israelis called "Israelis Against Apartheid". The group stated, "As individuals who belong to the side of the oppressor, and that have tried for years to shift public opinion in Israel in order to change the foundations of the current regime, we have long come to the conclusion that it is impossible to change the Jewish supremacist regime without external intervention." Israeli advocacy for the oppressed within the belly of the beast is deeply meaningful and brave.
In recent years, the American state has yet again escalated tensions within Israel and Palestine. In 2019, President Trump brazenly declared American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, in spite of international law asserting the United Nation's special administration of Israel as a corpus separatum. But Democrats are just as complicit as Republicans. It is a two party corporate duopoly after all, and the political establishment's identical position on Israel shows it. Under the most recent administration, President Biden reaffirmed American critical support of the Israeli state, stating "And as I affirmed to Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday, America’s commitment to Israel is firm and it is — it is ironclad." This past summer, in an appalling waste of time, Congress voted 412 to 9 that Israel is not an apartheid state. Instead of using their time to materially improve the position of working class Americans (such as making housing or healthcare more affordable) suffering in the socioeconomic precarity of late capitalism, both Republicans and Democrats united to virtue signal while denying reality. The American state displays no sign of stopping its defense of the genocidal ethnostate any time soon.
What can we do? The first step, of course, is education. Hopefully this article has been informative and thought-provoking to those who have read. For further research, I recommend the documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom by the Empire Files. On Instagram, several accounts are dedicated to anti-Zionism from a Palestinian perspective, including @paliroots, @Palestinianyouthmovement, and @landpalestine. Perhaps consider joining a protest in one of the larger American cities, as the thousands who advocated for Palestine (and denounced Israeli atrocities) did in 2021. Finally, I would like to end with this hopeful quote from Assata Shakur: "Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them."
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