“Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region” – Senator Joe Biden, 1986. 

“I say this as a lifelong supporter of Israel, my entire career. No one has a stronger record with Israel than I do. I challenge any of you here. I’m the only American President to visit Israel in wartime… But there is no other path that guarantees Israel’s security and democracy. There is no other path that guarantees that Palestinians can live… with peace and dignity…” – President Joe Biden, 2024. 

As far as Democratic presidents go, Joe Biden is perhaps the most pro-Israeli Commander-in-Chief in modern times, having consistently maintained the importance of the Jewish State to American interests in the Middle East, and the above quotes, 38 years apart, are proof of his consistency. 

However, the Biden record does not match his predecessor’s material support for Israel; President Donald Trump granted Israel many of its long-term objectives: 

• Recognising an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel
• Transferring the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv
• Recognising Israeli sovereignty over the resource-rich Golan Heights
• Negotiating the Abraham Accords, disregarding the Palestinian question
• Signing the ‘Trump Peace Plan’ with Benjamin Netanyahu without Palestinian stakeholders
• Cancelling $ 200 million in aid to Palestinians
• Pulling out of the Iran Nuclear Deal 
• Assassinating top Iranian General Qasem Soleimani

The interests of the Jewish State have always been prioritised in Washington, DC. American support for Israel is partly derived from the sense that Israel is a natural ally, not simply on account of close cultural ties but also due to Israel’s status as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. 

With each passing week, American foreign policy in the Southern Levant appears ever more futile. This month, the US has been rebuked in its efforts to prevent a potentially brutal operation in the Palestinian city of Rafah by Prime Minister Netanyahu, stating that he has a “red line”.  

The Israeli Government failed to remove an illegal, ad hoc children’s playground that was intentionally blocking the route for critical aid supplies to the Gaza Strip. Israel’s failure to accommodate faster aid supplies to the region has compelled the Biden administration to approve airdrops of food and essential items into the Gaza Strip.

This near unconditional support to the State of Israel is fascinating, especially considering the evolving nature of the Israeli State as well as the long-celebrated notion of Israel’s character as a Jewish ‘democratic’ state.

National values

While the Israeli Declaration of Independence references the establishment of a democratic state, you will struggle to find a widely accepted scholarship that accedes to this notion of Israel being founded as a ‘democracy’. While it emphasises democratic values such as equality, freedom, and justice, the manner in which the State of Israel came into being cannot be reasonably described as emancipatory of a population, primarily due to the murder of several thousand Palestinians and the displacement of over 700,000 more from their homes in addition to a mass influx of Jewish immigrants, fleeing persecution or seeking refuge post-World War II.

The Jewish ‘nature’ of the State of Israel was emphasised at its founding and in its declaration. In 1950, Israel passed the Law of Return, granting Jews the right to immigrate to Israel and become citizens in accordance with its foundational claim of being a ‘homeland’ for the Jewish people. This law allows anybody with one Jewish grandparent the right to move to Israel and obtain citizenship. 

Conversely, the Israeli Citizenship Law of 1952 deprives Palestinian refugees and their descendants of legal status and the right to return to their homeland. It also defines Palestinians present in Israel as Israeli citizens but without a nationality. 

This 1952 nationality law was controversially amended in 2018 by a Netanyahu Government to further enhance the Jewish character of the State of Israel. 

The amendments established that: 

• In Israel, “the right to exercise national self-determination… is unique to the Jewish people”
• Hebrew would be the official language with Arabic downgraded to “special status”
• Jewish settlements were of “national value”; the State would “labour to encourage and promote its establishment and development”

There is also debate within Israel between secularists and those from Jewish Orthodox communities related to the balance between the Jewish nature espoused by the Israeli State and the democratic values alluded to in its founding documents. There are tensions over the extent to which Jewish religious law or ‘halakha’ should govern the State or influence policy (halakha is the Jewish version of sharia law).

That Israel sustains many democratic institutions and has held regular elections with good democratic processes is generally true. The problem is that it created this democratic rule after a concerted and violent campaign to bring ethno-religious homogeneity to the region, achieving demographic purity by either killing or evicting the native population – the very definition of a settler colony. 

Genocide and apartheid

The words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ are now permanently part of the popular lexicon in relation to the State of Israel. These are unquestionably emotive terms, meant to conjure specific feelings of disgust and distaste. 

Are they justified?

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has considered the charge of genocide through proceedings brought by the State of South Africa against the Israeli Government in December 2023 under the Genocide Convention, alleging that Israel had committed, and was committing, a genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. South Africa requested that the ICJ bring immediate ‘provisional measures of protection’ (a sort of interim order) against the Israeli Government to immediately suspend its military operations in the Gaza Strip. 

The ICJ ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent acts that could be considered genocidal as per the 1948 convention, noting that “at least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza, appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention”.

In considering accusations of apartheid, for the sake of definitions, the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines it as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”. 

The 1998 Rome Statute defines apartheid as inhumane acts of a character that are “committed in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other”. 

Inhumane acts include, among others: 

• Infliction of serious bodily or mental harm
• The infringement of their freedom or dignity or subjecting them to torture or degrading treatment or punishment by arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment
• Legislative measures calculated to prevent participation in the political, social, economic, and cultural life of the country
• The deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of a group by denying them basic human rights, including the right to leave and return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association

Based on such criteria, the following international human rights organisations have documented that Israel’s administration of occupied territories reflect apartheid:

• Al-Haq
• Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights 
• Adalah – The Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel
• Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
• Human Rights Watch
• Amnesty International 

Israel’s own human rights organisation B’Tselem has stated that the “Israeli regime enacts an apartheid regime”. Prominent Israelis themselves have noted the apartheid-like character of the State of Israel. 

• Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wrote in 1976: “If we don’t want to get to apartheid, I don’t think it’s possible to contain, over the long term, a million-and-a-half or more Arabs.” 
• Former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair stated in 2002: “We established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories following their capture.” 
• Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in 2007: “When the two-state solution collapses and we face a South Africa-style struggle for equal voting rights… the State of Israel is finished.” 
• Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak stated: “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish or non-democratic. If millions of Palestinians cannot vote, it is apartheid.”

American writer, journalist, and social critic Ta-Nehisi Coates revealed his own experiences having travelled to the West Bank: “In any sort of opinion piece… about the conflict… there’s a word that comes up all the time and it is ‘complexity’ and its closely related adjective: ‘complicated’... what I expected that I would find was a situation in which it was hard to discern right from wrong, it was hard to understand the morality at play… the most shocking thing was that I immediately understood what was going on over there… 

“...the reality of the occupation became clear… how uncomplicated it actually is… the way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a PhD in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they do not have basic rights… and then declaring that state a democracy is actually not that hard to understand. It’s actually quite familiar to those of us with a familiarity to African-American history.”

South Africa’s great anti-apartheid activist and theologian the late Desmond Tutu stated: “What I observed in Israel when I have visited the occupied Palestinian territories and witnessed the humiliation of Palestinians at Israeli military checkpoints, the inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured, farmers tend their land, or children attend school, this treatment is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and harassed by the security forces of the apartheid Government.”

Hate thy neighbour

There is a deep hatred between communities as expressed and reflected in their actions but also their words and attitudes. You may have read about how Hamas and related organisations indoctrinate children to equate Palestinian liberation with the destruction of the State of Israel, opinions that are regularly reflected in polling.

A 2013 New York Times article noted that the curriculum in the Gaza Strip was deviating from the Palestinian Authority curriculum, using new texts to infuse the next generation with Hamas’ “militant ideology”. Books used by some 55,000 children across the eighth to 10th Grades “do not recognise modern Israel, or even mention the Oslo Peace Accords”.

Jewish American former Democratic Congressman from New York Steve Israel said: “The roots of this generation of Hamas terrorism resides in ideas fomented in Gaza’s education system for decades. While serving in Congress between 2001 and 2017, I studied what goes on in Palestinian schools. I reviewed their textbooks, met with educators and diplomats, and introduced legislation and amendments compelling the Department of State to monitor antisemitism in foreign classrooms. 

“I saw firsthand that a generation of Palestinian children were being taught at an early age to reject living peacefully with Israel… raised on a steady curriculum of violent rejectionism.” 

The European Union has adopted three resolutions condemning the Palestinian Authority for “continuing to teach hate and violence in its school textbooks”. Another textbook, also mentioned in The New York Times piece, “includes references to the Jewish Torah and Talmud as ‘fabricated’”.

In December 2008, during that decade’s Gaza War, then Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni claimed that “Palestinians teach their children to hate us and we teach ‘love thy neighbour’”. 

This is not the case. 

Chants of “Death to Arabs” are widely documented and are popular among the Israeli nationalist or Zionist movements. Every year, on 18 May, Israelis celebrate Jerusalem Day, marking the capture of the ‘old city’ almost 57 years ago; PBS reported chants of “Death to Arabs” during the march through Jerusalem. 

Also heard were “other racist chants” including “Mohammed is dead” and “May your village burn” as well as many young Israelis wearing clothing that identified them as “members of Lehava, a far-right Jewish supremacist group opposing assimilation or romantic relationships between Jews and Palestinians”.

Israeli scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan conducted a major study in 2012 called ‘Palestine in Israeli School Books,’ researching 17 Israeli school textbooks on history, geography, and civic studies. Peled-Elhanan notes that Palestinians are rarely mentioned and when they are, the books teach a “racist discourse”; maps show only the “land of Israel” “from the river to the sea” with no positive cultural or social aspects related to Palestine. 

An article in the Middle East Monitor from 2019 quotes Peled-Elhanan: “All the books represent Palestinians in racist icons or demeaning classificatory images such as terrorists, refugees, and primitive farmers – the three ‘problems’ they constitute for Israel.”

These textbooks do not ignore possible Israeli war crimes entirely, but tend to dilute or justify the violent acts committed. During the Nakba in 1948, there was a widely publicised massacre of a village called Deir Yassin by Zionist militias which Israeli textbooks reference as “horrifying,” but only in relation to the negative image of Israel that the massacre had generated. Peled-Elhanan also suggests that some books justify the Nakba: “The slaughter of friendly Palestinians brought about the flight of other Palestinians which enabled the establishment of a coherent Jewish state.”

Another Israeli scholar Adir Cohen analysed 1,700 Hebrew-language children’s books published between 1967 and 1985. Over 500 of these contained humiliating or negative descriptions of Palestinians; some 250 refer to Arabs as either violent, evil, or as liars. These consistently negative depictions dehumanise Palestinians. 

An Al Jazeera article from December 2023 notes that “Israel has also used the painful memory of the Holocaust to desensitise Israeli children to the suffering of Palestinians and support without question Israel’s treatment of them”.

The Times of Israel reported on the results of a Hebrew University poll of 1,100 Israeli respondents between the ages of 16 and 18: “Nearly half of ultra-Orthodox and national religious Israeli youth expressed hatred toward Arabs… 66% of Haredim [ultra-Orthodox], 42% of religious nationalists, and 24% of secular Israelis expressed feelings of fear and hatred toward Arabs.” 

What the elections and policies in Israel represent in reality is quite striking. Yes, Israel is a democracy, but it is a system of democracy where universal franchise was applied after achieving demographic homogeneity through sheer violence and repression. Israeli nationalists, religious zealots, and Jewish supremacist parties make up the current governing coalition in Israel. 

Religious extremism as a barrier to a reasonable two-state solution is not exclusive to the Palestinian side of the equation. The current Israeli governing coalition is the inconvenient truth at the heart of not just the struggle for a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip but also for any project for a viable Palestinian State. 

(The writer has 15 years of experience in the financial and corporate sectors after completing a Degree in Accounting and Finance at the University of Kent [UK] while also completing a Masters in International Relations from the University of Colombo. He is a media resource-person, presenter, political commentator, and researcher. He also presents an interview show that is available on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and is a member of the Working Committee of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya [SJB]. He can be contacted via email: kusumw@gmail.com and Twitter: @kusumw)