Israeli Racism In Quotes

Racism towards Muslims is as evil as anti-Semitism, but try to express this simple truth on a partisan Palestinian or Israeli website.

When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says "give me liberty, or give me death," the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad n*****, so there won't be any more like him.

I got a number of very thoughtful responses to the email I sent out last night, most of which I don’t have time to respond to right now. Thanks everyone for the encouragement, questions, criticism. Daniel’s response was particularly inspiring to me and deserves to be shared. The resistance of Israeli Jewish people to the occupation and the enormous risk taken by those refusing to serve in the Israeli military offers an example, especially for those of us living in the United States, of how to behave when you discover that atrocities are being commited in your name. Thank you.

In response to this fatal alliance of savage capitalism in the West with Israeli racism, exclusion and colonial subjugation, the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel presents not only a progressive, anti racist [3], sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil non-violent resistance, but also a real chance of becoming the political catalyst and moral anchor for a strengthened, reinvigorated international social movement capable of reaffirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality and dignity and the right of nations to self determination.

Yet the world, including many in the media, academia, and even diplomacy, seems to accept Palestinian violence as cultural. On the other hand, something different is expected from Israelis. This is cultural relativism bordering on racism. To expect less of Palestinians, regardless of their grievances, is to diminish their humanity.

I believe that it is impossible to understand the current situation in the Middle East if one thinks that there is a territorial Arab-Israeli conflict at hand, when in fact, it is clearly a war of religions that unfortunately has no end in sight. To think that this conflict is about land, occupation, racism, apartheid or any other nonsensical media-based and politically created jargon is to play into the hands of those who for so long have taken advantage of the prevalent ignorance of the majority of the world’s public. Make no mistake, this conflict is a religious one, and although Israel is a secular state, it is its ‘Jewish character’ that has the Muslim world up in arms.

One of those prominent Jewish dissidents was Ronnie Kasrils, who served as the minister for intelligence between 2004 and 2008 under an ANC government. He told the Guardian that the comparison between the two nations wasn’t accidental. “Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity,” he said. “This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was ‘a land without people for a people without land,’ so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.

Prisons are racism incarnate. As Michelle Alexander points out, they constitute the new Jim Crow. But also much more, as the lynchpins of the prison-industrial complex, they represent the increasing profitability of punishment. They represent the increasingly global strategy of dealing with populations of people of color and immigrant populations from the countries of the Global South as surplus populations, as disposable populations. Put them all in a vast garbage bin, add some sophisticated electronic technology to control them, and let them languish there. And in the meantime, create the ideological illusion that the surrounding society is safer and more free because the dangerous Black people and Latinos, and the Native Americans, and the dangerous Asians and the dangerous White people, and of course the dangerous Muslims, are locked up! And in the meantime, corporations profit and poor communities suffer! Public education suffers! Public education suffers because it is not profitable according to corporate measures. Public health care suffers. If punishment can be profitable, then certainly health care should be profitable, too. This is absolutely outrageous! It is outrageous. It is also outrageous that the state of Israel uses the carceral technologies developed in relation to US prisons not only to control the more than eight thousand Palestinian political prisoners in Israel but also to control the broader Palestinian population. These carceral technologies, for example, the separation wall, which reminds us of the US-Mexico border wall, and other carceral technologies are the material constructs of Israeli apartheid. G4S, the organization, the corporation G4S, which profits from the incarceration and the torturing of Palestinian prisoners, has a subsidiary called G4S Secure Solutions, which was formerly known as Wackenhut. And just recently a subsidiary of that just have one more page of notes corporation, GEO Group, which is a private prison company, attempted to claim naming rights at Florida Atlantic University by donating something like $6 million, right? And, the students rose up. They said that our football stadium will not bear the name of a private prison corporation! And the students won. The students won; the name came down from the marquee.

The difficulty Corbyn and his associates have in recognizing and acknowledging antisemitism on the left seems to be rooted in their foundational claim that because being a progressive means being opposed to any form of racism, oppression, or group hate—including antisemitism—therefore, by definition, a true progressive cannot be an antisemite. Their claim runs into trouble when they are confronted by progressive compatriots who include blanket statements about Jews in their excoriation of wealthy capitalists who oppress and exploit the poor, who imply that Jews exert undue influence on the media, who deny that Jews can be the victims of race-based hatred in the same way that people of color are, and who include offensive, hate-filled Jewish stereotyping in their criticism of Israeli government policies regarding the Palestinians.

The boycott in the academic world today against Israelis has its roots, in some measure, in the 2001 United Nations–sponsored Durban World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. There were actually two gatherings in Durban—the official United Nations conference and one sponsored by a group of about three thousand nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The discussion about Israel at both meetings was vituperative and overshadowed all other issues on the meetings’ agendas. The final declaration adopted by the NGO forum laid the groundwork for the BDS movement by equating Zionism with racism and calling for a boycott of Israel.

Israeli hasbara (technically translated as “propaganda” but used to represent all of Israel’s public relations tactics to promote its political positions and its self-identification as a Jewish and democratic state, the “only democracy in the Middle East”). “Israel has a serious racism problem,” Pfeffer writes. “There is a legal and social framework that discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens. For the last 52 years it has been occupying millions of stateless Palestinians who still have no prospect of receiving their basic rights.” He continues, “Acknowledging these fundamental issues has nothing to do with the argument of whether Zionism was a practical and just solution for the historical and genocidal persecution of Jews before 1948. That’s why hasbara is a waste of time. All it does is undermine Israel’s legitimacy. Because real countries don’t have to argue they are legitimate. Hasbara’s one function is to deny Israel is a real country with real problems that need dealing with.” 62

Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity,” he said. “This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was ‘a land without people for a people without land,’ so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.

The world indeed took notice. Global public opinion in the US toward Israel has taken a nosedive since 2001. Liberal and Democratic voters are increasingly skeptical of Israeli actions. Consensus in the Jewish community has become impossible. A survey in 2021 conducted by Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by leading Jewish Democrats, found that 34 percent of Jews agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25 percent agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state,” and 22 percent agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.

Of all the countries benefiting from European civilization, only South Africa and Israel have racial laws that distinguish between rights of different groups of citizens. The Jews were against Hitler's racism, but theirs goes one step further. They determine Jewishness by mother alone. I opposed Zionism initially because I was against any form of nationalism, but I never expected the Zionists to become racists. It makes me feel ashamed in my origin: I feel responsible for the deeds of Israeli nationalists.

The Israeli state as a Jewish democracy to which Palestinian Arabs have always posed a demographic threat was a state born from European empire, cast in the mould of other European settler colonial projects, and it was both fuelled and justified by a history of European racism and antisemitism.

I ask her the most important question anybody has ever asked here or ever will: Did you ever fall in love with an Israeli man? “No. I couldn’t.” Why not? “I am a Palestinian. It is the same as a Jew falling in love with a German Nazi officer.” Would you like for Palestinians and Israelis to solve their conflict by dividing the land into two states, Palestine and Israel? “No. Zionism is racism. As simple as stealing my country, my land, and daring to find excuses for it, trying their best to erase me. Israel has stolen my mother’s dress; they call this dress ‘Israeli.’ They have stolen my food; they call my food ‘Israeli.

the New Atheists echo the neo-conservative myth that “the roots of Muslim rage” are rooted in Islamic culture itself, rather than political issues such as Western imperialism, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, colonial legacy racism, and the oppression forced upon them by U.S. backed autocratic despots.

The translation of these European notions of racial superiority into the Israeli context became evident as soon as the interviewer asked him about the government’s plans for the remaining Palestinian leaders. Interviewer and interviewee giggled as they agreed that the policy should involve the assassination or expulsion of the entire current leadership, that is all the members of the Palestinian Authority—about 40,000 people.

The Black radical tradition calls attention to the anti-Black racism essential to US society and casts doubt on the compatibility of Black freedom and the United States project. After all, the Black presence in what is now called the United States, beginning with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, spans nearly five hundred years. And yet the Black American population has yet to experience civil equality in US society…. Similarly, the prospect of Palestinian freedom explodes the notion of Israeli democracy, showing over the course of the Zionist project that the most basic rights for Palestinians — such as that to return to the homes from which they were expelled — are incompatible with it. The Black-Palestinian intersection then is a powerful one, pointing necessarily to deep critiques of US and Israeli societies and politics, and the transnational systems of power in which they are embedded, leading those who engage with it to revolutionary conclusions regarding both countries and beyond.

In the wake of the 2015 protest, the government formed a commission to stamp out racism; it was led by Emi Palmor, the director general of the Justice Ministry. Its conclusions, submitted in the summer of 2016, were quite damning, finding discriminatory policies and practices that distinguished Ethiopian Israelis from other citizens in fields including education, medical treatment, employment, and army enlistment, as well as policing. In 2015, it said, the percentage of indictments against Ethiopian Israelis was twice as high as that for the general population and four times as high among minors, while the percentage of Ethiopian Israeli minors in detention was almost ten times that of the rest of the population.

This use of the war on terror as a broad designation of the project of twenty-first-century Western democracy has served as a justification of anti-Muslim racism; it has further legitimized the Israeli occupation of Palestine; it has redefined the repression of immigrants; and has indirectly led to the militarization of local police departments throughout the country.

A survey in 2021 conducted by Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by leading Jewish Democrats, found that 34 percent of Jews agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25 percent agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state,” and 22 percent agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.” A 2022 survey by the major pro-Israel lobby group, the American Jewish Committee, confirmed this trend. Nearly 44 percent of young Jewish Americans didn’t feel very connected to Israel and more than one in five millennial American Jews backed one democratic state in Israel and Palestine. Another study in the same year, conducted by Pew Research Center, found that young Americans under the age of thirty viewed both Israelis and Palestinians equally favorably.

Despite this sentiment running through the Jewish community in most of the world, I soon became uncomfortable with both the explicit racism against Palestinians that I heard and knee-jerk support for all Israeli actions. It was like a cult where opposing voices were condemned and cast out. I remember my Jewish friends during my teenage years, who mouthed what they had heard from their parents and rabbis. Few of them had been to Israel, let alone Palestine, but the dominant narrative was based around fear; Jews were constantly under attack and Israel was the solution. No matter that Palestinians had to suffer to make Jews feel safe. This felt like a perverted lesson from the Holocaust.

Prosperous non-white nations such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea would be very desirable destinations for Third-World immigrants, and if those countries opened their borders, they would quickly be filled with foreigners. They keep their borders closed because they know they cannot have the same Japan or Taiwan with different people. Israel, likewise, is determined to remain a Jewish state because Israelis know they cannot have the same Israel with different people. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved tough measures to deport illegal immigrants, calling them a “threat to the character of the country.” Linguistically, culturally, and racially, Japan is homogeneous. This means Japanese never even think about a host of problems that torment Americans. Since Japan has only one race, no one worries about racism. There was no civil rights movement, no integration struggle, and no court-ordered busing. There is no bilingual education, and no affirmative action. There is no tyranny of “political correctness,” and no one is clamoring for a “multi-cultural curriculum.” When a company needs to hire someone, it doesn’t give a thought to “ethnic balance;” it just hires the best person. No Japanese are sent to reeducation seminars because of “insensitivity.” Japan has no Civil Rights Commission or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It has no Equal Housing Act or Voting Rights Act. No one worries about drawing up voting districts to make sure minorities are elected. There are no noisy ethnic groups trying to influence foreign policy. Japanese do not know what a “hate crime” would be. And they know that an American-style immigration policy would change everything. They want Japan to remain Japanese. This is a universal view among non-whites. Those countries that send the largest numbers of emigrants to the United States—Mexico, India, China—permit essentially no immigration at all. For them, their nations are exclusive homelands for their own people. Most people refuse to share their homelands. Robert Pape, a leading expert on suicide bombing, explains that its motive is almost always nationalism, not religious fanaticism. Whether in Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Chechnya, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, or Afghanistan, its main objective is to drive out occupying aliens. It is only Western nations—and only within the last few decades—that have ever voluntarily accepted large-scale immigration that could reduce the inhabitants to a racial minority. What the United States and other European-derived nations are doing is without historical precedent.

Nothing about us without us” is a disability rights slogan that was created by South African disability rights groups in the 1980s. A more recent disability justice slogan I have heard, that I first saw on an image Sins Invalid created in protest of the killing intersections of racism and ableism in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in the summer of 2014, is “To exist is to resist.

Israel’s trials continued in 1975. Backed by the Arab nations, the oil-dependent Europeans, and many of the newly independent states of Africa and Asia, the PLO was granted observer status at the UN, and Chairman Yasir Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly. Only days before his address, he had declared, “We shall never stop until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed. The goal of our struggle is the end of Israel, and there can be no compromise or mediations. We don’t want peace—we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction, and nothing else.”17 Arafat toned down his rhetoric at the UN, but Israelis felt his mere presence there gave legitimacy to calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. Even more disheartening was when later that year the UN passed a resolution equating Zionism as a form of racism. “A great evil has been loosed upon the world,” the U.S. delegate thundered, calling the resolution an “infamous act.”18 The cumulative effect was that the Jewish state was more isolated than at any time in its history before the 1956 war.

This use of the war on terror as a broad designation of the project of 21st-century western democracy has served as a justification of anti-Muslim racism; it has further legitimised the Israeli occupation of Palestine; it has redefined the repression of immigrants; and has indirectly led to the militarisation of local police departments throughout the country.

emergence, Black women were frequently asked to choose whether the Black movement or the women’s movement was most important. The response was that this was the wrong question. The more appropriate question was how to understand the intersections and interconnections between the two movements. We are still faced with the challenge of understanding the complex ways race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and ability are intertwined—but also how we move beyond these categories to understand the interrelationships of ideas and processes that seem to be separate and unrelated. Insisting on the connections between struggles and racism in the US and struggles against the Israeli repression of Palestinians, in this sense, is a feminist process.

The Israel Democracy Institute reported in May 2003 that 57 percent of Israel’s Jews “think that the Arabs should be encouraged to emigrate.” A 2004 survey conducted by Haifa University’s Center for the Study of National Security found that the number had increased to 63.7 percent. One year later, in 2005, the Palestinian Center for Israel Studies found that 42 percent of Israeli Jews believed that their government should encourage Israeli Arabs to leave, while another 17 percent tended to agree with the idea. The following year, the Center for Combating Racism found that 40 percent of Israel’s Jews wanted their leaders to encourage the Arab population to emigrate, while the Israel Democracy Institute found the number to be 62 percent.49 If 40 percent or more of white Americans declared that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians “should be encouraged” to leave the United States, it would surely prompt vehement criticism.

Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law codified Israel’s exercise of national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people”; therefore it excluded indigenous Palestinians from recognition. Anti-Arab racism often underlies the notion that coexistence with Palestinians is impossible due to a falsely assumed endemic and permanent Arab proclivity toward violence against Israelis. Many Palestinians view the expectation that they should normalize Zionism, the very political project that has been driving their oppression for over seven decades now, to be a form of cruelty.

The Israeli state as a Jewish democracy to which Palestinian Arabs have always posed a demographic threat was a state born from European empire, cast in the mold of other European settler colonial projects, and it was both fueled and justified by a history of European racism and antisemitism.