Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss / July 26, 2023
Israel is a racist state, but American leaders bit their tongues about that for decades. Now Israel’s move against the judiciary will allow the truth to come out, says David Rothkopf.
The Netanyahu government’s destruction of judicial independence has been deeply upsetting to Israel’s Jewish supporters in the U.S. They say there is a long battle ahead for Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state. “It may take a generation,” says one Zionist leader.
One positive of the crisis is that some commentators are saying that the core problem isn’t the rightwing government’s treatment of the courts — it’s Israel’s constitution as a Jewish state, and denial of rights to Palestinians.
Yousef Munayyer writes:
What we are seeing play out today, on both sides of the debate in Israel, is massively shaped by… the state’s relationship with Palestinians. From core existential questions around identity & citizenship to the settler-expansionism that’s reached the governing coalition.
Yair Wallach of SOAS at the University of London makes clear that the Israeli government’s motivation for its judicial moves is to target non-Jews, Palestinians:
The Israeli right’s endgame in this “judicial reform” has been clear from the start: to formalize a theocratically minded Apartheid regime for now, and to pave the way for a mass expulsion of Palestinians later. These are the stakes.
David Rothkopf, former editor of Foreign Policy, has an excellent piece at the Daily Beast arguing that the Israeli government’s action against the courts should end the official American taboo on saying Israel is a “racist state.”
The reforms mean “the end of the US-Israel special relationship,” Rothkopf says. And now that the love affair is over, it’s time for the U.S. establishment to tell the truth about Israel.
As recently as a week ago, only nine people in the U.S. Congress dared stand up to the lie that Israel was not a racist state. This despite decades of denying fundamental human rights to Palestinians in territories over which it asserted power simply because they were Palestinian.
So Rothkopf is standing up for what Rep. Pramila Jayapal said at Netroots ten days ago and then quickly retracted– and that the Congress then condemned, 412-9, with liberal Zionists urging members to reject Jayapal’s description.
Rothkopf says that Israel’s “serial abuses of millions” has gone on for decades because of America. The Israel lobby enabled “ethno-nationalist” Israeli policies by lying about what was happening to Palestinians. And everyone in power in the U.S. bit their tongues:
We must also acknowledge that part of the support for Israel was due to the political influence of its supporters among the American electorate, from Zionist Jews to evangelical Christians …. This was accomplished via multiple means, but among these were the establishment of bright red lines, such as the argument that failing to support the government of Israel’s ethno-nationalist policies was tantamount to antisemitism.
Politicians in both U.S. parties therefore failed to offer sufficient criticism to Netanyahu as he bulldozed Palestinian settlements or changed Israel’s laws to shift the country in a more theocratic direction.
America’s leaders must recognize that the policy of biting their tongues when Israel’s government brutalizes Palestinians‚ or when it has telegraphed its coming attacks on its own democracy—has been a failure.
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman briefly stopped biting his tongue last week. He acknowledged that Palestinians are the core issue when he wrote that the great danger of the Netanyahu government overreach is that it undermines what has been a useful “fiction” for world order: That there’s going to be a Palestinian state. Friedman then acknowledged that it’s one Israeli regime between the river and the sea, and it may have imposed “apartheid” in the West Bank. But so long as we offer lip service to the fictional two-state solution, we can deny those facts.
Adam Shinar, a constitutional law professor in Israel, gets at the issue of Israel’s discriminatory identity on The New York Times op-ed page today. Titled “In Israel, the Worst May Be Yet to Come,” Shinar’s essay says we are seeing an “unraveling of Israel’s basic identity, that of a Jewish and democratic state”:
Across Israel, there is growing alarm about the rise of religion in the public sphere and the privileging of Jewish interests inside Israel and in the occupied territories. In a country that devotes more and more resources to maintain the occupation and the settlements… insisting that the very textural fabric of Israeli society is both Jewish and democratic is becoming less and less convincing.
Liberal Zionists have not abandoned their idealism about a Jewish state.
Though Hadar Susskind of Americans for Peace Now says the government is devoted to Jewish supremacy. “They are clear about their commitment to Jewish Supremacy, and they are clear about their willingness to do anything to cling to power.”
J Street avoids that analysis. In urging the Biden administration to take action to save Israel’s “democracy,” J Street only mentions Palestinians in passing:
[The government’s] agenda will almost certainly include deeply harmful new acts of annexation and expropriation in the West Bank, where they continue to pursue a one-state nightmare of permanent occupation and exclusive sovereignty between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
My response is that the “nightmare” that Israel is pursuing already exists for Palestinians. Israel’s political identity is: We are a Jewish state, the homeland of the Jewish people, a place where Jews have exclusive rights to the land. The brutal discriminatory policies that flow from that identity have fostered Palestinian rage against Jewish ethno-nationalism, as any oppressed people would be enraged.
As Israel’s “matsav”, or problem, goes on for generations without resolution, and Palestinians refuse to give up their demands, and the settlements grow larger and larger, Israeli society has to keep doubling down on the oppression. Government after government is dedicated to Jewish “security” above all other functions, and Israel’s reputation sinks further and further in the West, and defiant Jewish voters turn to more and more fascistic leaders to enforce that security, leaders who don’t want to be reined in by the courts.
Jewish voters in Israel elected the government that just crippled the judiciary. If Israel held another election tomorrow, it’s possible that the government would even go further right, Susie Gelman of Israel Policy Forum said yesterday. The hope that a “center/center left government” would come to power is “somewhat optimistic.”
And when it comes to it, Israel’s Jewish opposition parties side with Netanyahu’s extremist government in enforcing more ugly Jim Crow segregation against Palestinians in the country.
If Palestinians could vote, that would surely change the nature of the government. But most Palestinians under Israeli control cannot vote. Because it’s the Jewish state.
Right now, many liberal Zionists are calling for the Biden administration to take concrete action, including by cutting the billions in aid to Israel.
But Biden’s afraid to do so. The U.S. has expressed concern over the Israeli anti-judicial law, but made clear there will be no consequences.
No, Biden is as committed as ever to a Jewish and democratic state, whatever that means for Palestinians.
Philip Weiss is senior editor of Mondoweiss.net and founded the site in 2005-2006
