‘Occupation from within’: Legal scholar’s book calls for the razing of Israel’s Jewish supremacy regime
Israeli soldiers gather near a gate to go through an inspection area for trucks carrying humanitarian aid supplies bound for the Gaza Strip, on the Israeli side of the Erez crossing into northern Gaza, on 1 May 2024
Dror Mishani writes in Haaretz on 20 May 2025:
Michael Sfard’s new Hebrew-language book, “Occupation from Within,” is absolutely piercing. Its main argument: The Netanyahu government’s attempt to weaken the judiciary didn’t begin with Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s announcement on January 4, 2023. It began many years earlier with unlawful policies implemented under the very institutions that are supposed to uphold the law.
These policies were supported by most Israeli political movements; they were implemented mainly in the territories occupied in 1967, though not exclusively. These policies aim to establish “a regime in which Jews’ needs are prioritized over those of Palestinians,” essentially a formal system of Jewish supremacy sanctioned and legitimized by law.
As Sfard puts it, “A society accustomed to wielding power over millions and systematically violating the most basic human rights – one that enshrines the supremacy of one group and the subjugation of another – can no longer break free.”
On top of detailing the characteristics of the occupation and its legal mechanisms, “Occupation from Within” is important because of the questions it raises – especially toward the end – about the past and future of this land.
Sfard adds, using a common Israeli expression, “There is no democracy only on Mondays and Thursdays, and there is no democracy in just part of the territory under Israel’s control, especially when the situation is permanent. There is no democracy with an occupation. Above all, there is no democracy with apartheid.”
But the book’s power doesn’t lie in this argument, which has already been expressed by historians, journalists and other writers, and which resonates on the fringes of the protest movement against the judicial overhaul. The book’s power is in its grounding of the argument in legal realities and concrete facts. Sfard is deeply familiar with Israeli law and the reality it creates.
Moreover, the thrust of “Occupation from Within: A Journey to the Roots of the Constitutional Coup” lies in its challenge to anyone who claims to oppose the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. The questions the book concludes with linger long after the last page is turned.
Killing the father figure
Sfard specializes in international human rights law and the laws of war. He has represented thousands of Palestinians “whose homes have been targeted by one of the many arms of the Israeli occupation, ambushed in their fields, beaten on street corners or suffocated by its unyielding choke hold,” as he puts it.
He wrote this book – his fourth – before October 7, 2023, but later added a preface and a final chapter addressing Hamas’ massacre and the war that Israel has been waging in Gaza ever since. In the preface, Sfard explains that he aimed to help Israelis understand the occupation – an objective he achieves with remarkable clarity and thoroughness.
In the third chapter, “What Is an Occupation and When Does It Become an Annexation?” Sfard explains how, after World War II, the international community prohibited the settlement of occupied territories. The goal was to prevent wars from rewarding the victors and to ensure that humanity wouldn’t regress “to what was permissible and commonplace in biblical times, during the Roman Empire, or under Genghis Khan, and now with hydrogen bombs and nuclear warheads.”
Under international law, when a territory with a civilian population is temporarily occupied, the occupying power must prioritize the well-being of the occupied population. Sfard describes how Israel violated this principle immediately after 1967 with the establishment of its first settlements. And over the decades, it has repeatedly breached its obligations as an occupying power.
Sfard outlines the various military, civil and legal practices that sustain this unlawful occupation – practices upheld for decades by every Israeli government and reinforced by the judiciary. His argument makes it clear: We’re all complicit.
“The occupation, and therefore apartheid, is an all-Israeli project,” he writes in one of the book’s most powerful passages. “Our soldiers, rifle in hand, enforce the oppression of millions of occupied Palestinians, often assisting our land-grabbers. Our legal experts craft a dual legal system: One is modern, generous and respectful to Israelis living in the occupied territories, the other is militaristic, dominant and brutal to the Palestinian neighbors.
“Our economy extends into the occupied land, extracting its wealth, plundering its resources and hollowing out its spirit. Our high-tech industry develops tools for surveilling and controlling the occupied Palestinians. Our arms industry uses them as a testing ground, enabling its marketers to sell these innovations around the world as ‘battle-tested technologies.’
“Each of us, day by day, hour by hour, takes part in the dispossession of millions of Palestinians who – like us – were born in the image of God, stripping them of their right to shape their future, pursue happiness and have a say in their own fate.”
Criticism of Israel’s judiciary – the very institution we are now urged to defend in the name of democracy – has a central place in the book. Sfard characterizes the hard-right government’s judicial overhaul as a form of patricide; maybe he’s inspired by Sigmund Freud’s 1939 work “Moses and Monotheism” in which “savages” seek to kill the great father figure. In this case, that figure is the Supreme Court, the body that enabled the establishment of the regime of Jewish supremacy.
While the court occasionally delayed or restrained the occupation, it also granted it legitimacy, transforming it into a project carried out under the guise of democracy, or as Sfard puts it, “within a political framework whose self-image is that of an open and democratic society that respects freedom and equality.”
Sfard also criticizes the protests against the judicial overhaul. He asks why, in the past two years, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in the name of democracy but not against Israel’s violating of the rights of millions of Palestinians. He gives an answer: The dictatorship is now directly threatening the protesters.
“Everyone feared becoming Hassan,” he writes, referring to an everyday Palestinian. “There’s no chance they would agree to become Hassan. Not Hassan or even half a Hassan. That’s why they took to the streets.”
It all started in Auschwitz
On top of detailing the characteristics of the occupation and its legal mechanisms, “Occupation from Within” is important because of the questions it raises – especially toward the end – about the past and future of this land. Some of these questions are asked explicitly, others more subtly.
The first question is raised by Kathleen Peratis, an American civil rights lawyer. After touring the West Bank, she asked Sfard, “Was all of this inevitable? Is this monstrous policy an unavoidable consequence of Zionism?” Or, in Sfard’s words, “Can a state defined as a Jewish nation-state not help but create an apartheid regime?”
Sfard leaves this question open for much of the book, returning to it toward the end. To answer it, he turns to the writings of his grandfather, the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who reflected on the legacy of Auschwitz. According to Bauman, Sfard writes, life after the Holocaust happens in a world forever stained by the possibility of a similar catastrophe taking place. Bauman argues that this anxious existence could become the Nazis’ final poison arrow against the Jewish people. While they failed to incite the world against the Jews, they can still incite the Jews against the world.
For this reason, Sfard tells Peratis with sadness, “Zionism’s pluralistic path was blocked at Auschwitz,” meaning that the regime of Jewish supremacy was born in the extermination camp and was, tragically, unavoidable.
As a psychological portrait of a national psyche, Bauman’s analysis is unquestionably accurate, and Israel’s response to October 7 only confirms it, from framing the massacre as a “second Holocaust” to justifying the devastation in Gaza by comparing it to the firebombing of Dresden.
But was that the only possibility? I find this hard to accept, partly because Sfard’s book, with its rich detail, reveals many moments when individual actors – Supreme Court justices, politicians and common citizens – could have made other choices. Moreover, Sfard himself, like many Jews and even quite a few Israelis, has drawn different lessons from Auschwitz.
More than that, the regime of Jewish supremacy described by Sfard appears to be driven not only by fear but also by contempt and disdain. The roots of the Israeli approach to the Palestinians – from the disregard for their civil and national rights to the indifference to the mass devastation in Gaza – precede the Holocaust and are deeply intertwined with colonial dynamics that Sfard doesn’t explore in his book.
The most important question the book poses – albeit somewhat indirectly – concerns the future of this place. Can it still change, and if so, how should we fight for that?
The answer that emerges is unequivocal and should be addressed to the leaders of all Israel’s opposition movements, most of which have drawn opposite conclusions from the October 7 attack.
I don’t know whether Sfard truly believes, as he quotes poet Leah Goldberg toward the end of his work, that “days of forgiveness and grace” will come. Either way, the book’s path for establishing a genuine democratic regime in Israel is clear: not only to defend the Supreme Court but to break up the regime of Jewish supremacy.
This must be the sole goal of opposition to this government and any that follow: the dismantling of Israel as an ethno-nationalist state, a regime where one people holds supremacy over another. Sfard’s book can serve as a guide for everyone who wants to take part in that struggle.
This article is reproduced in its entirety