Is this Israel’s first apartheid war?
Israeli soldiers operating in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 31 July 2024
Oren Yiftachel writes in +972 on 15 October 2024:
Over the past year, many have argued that the October 7 disaster — the largest massacre of Israeli civilians in the country’s history — was a sign that the status quo of permanent occupation has collapsed. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel had been advancing a policy of long-term “conflict management” to bolster its occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands while containing fragmented Palestinian resistance. This involved financing a “deterred” Hamas, which several Israeli leaders considered to be “an asset.”
It’s true that some aspects of this strategy did collapse in the wake of October 7 — especially the illusion that the Palestinian national project could be crushed, or that Hamas and Hezbollah could be kept at bay in the absence of any political agreements. The notion that Jewish settlement could guarantee security along Israel’s borders and frontiers — a long-standing Zionist myth — was also shattered; beyond the deep trauma and grief suffered by dozens of Jewish border communities, some 130,000 Israelis from more than 60 localities within the Green Line were displaced, and most of them remain so.
Other experts have claimed that Israel’s war in Gaza, and now Lebanon, is void of political strategy for “the day after,” and is fought solely for the sake of Netanyahu’s political survival. But contrary to popular opinion, clear-eyed analysis of the past year shows that Israel continues to promote an unmistakable strategic goal in this war: maintaining and deepening the regime of Jewish supremacy over Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In this sense, the past 12 months might be best understood as Israel’s “first apartheid war.”
While its eight previous wars attempted to create new geographical and political orders or were limited to specific regions, the current one seeks to reinforce the supremacist political project Israel has built throughout the entire land, and which the October 7 assault fundamentally challenged. Accordingly, there is also a steadfast refusal to explore any path to reconciliation or even a ceasefire with the Palestinians.
Israel’s supremacist order, which was once termed “creeping” and more recently “deepening apartheid,” has long historical roots. It has been concealed in recent decades by the so-called peace process, promises of a “temporary occupation,” and claims that Israel has “no partner” to negotiate with. But the reality of the apartheid project has become increasingly conspicuous in recent years, especially under Netanyahu’s leadership.
Today, Israel makes no effort to hide its supremacist aims. The Jewish Nation-State Law of 2018 declared that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” and that “the state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.” Taking this a step further, the current Israeli government’s manifesto (known as its “guiding principles”) proudly stated in 2022 that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all areas of the Land of Israel” — which, in the Hebrew lexicon, includes Gaza and the West Bank — and promises to “promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel.”
This July, the Knesset voted by an overwhelming majority to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state. And when Netanyahu speaks at the UN, as he did two weeks ago, the maps he shows clearly depict this vision: a Jewish state between the river and the sea, with Palestinians doomed to exist on the invisible margins of Jewish sovereignty as second- or third-class residents.
Ironically and tragically, the terror attacks of Hamas and its partners over the past three decades, as well as their rhetoric of denying Israel’s existence and advocating a future Islamic state between the river and the sea, were invoked as a pretext for Israel’s occupation and oppression of Palestinians. The October 7 massacres can thus be criticized not only as criminal and deeply immoral, but also as a “boomerang rebellion” that returns to enact brutal violence on the Palestinian people and severely undermines their just struggle for decolonization and self-determination. Hezbollah’s offensive in the north has added further fuel to the fire of the boomerang rebellion, which in turn burns its perpetrators.
Repress Palestinians, cement Jewish supremacy
Israel has violently dominated, expelled, and occupied Palestinians for over 75 years. But this history of oppression pales in comparison to the destruction wrought on Gazans over the past year — what many experts have termed a genocide.