Growing racism in Israeli society

On Friday, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that has major implications for the protection of human rights in Palestine under the Israeli occupation that has existed for 57 years, the opinion is based on a request submitted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2022 to the Court to consider the legal consequences of Israel’s policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In the historic ruling, the ICJ found that Israel had committed multiple violations of international law against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories, including, for the first time, highlighting that Israel is committing apartheid, The Court placed the responsibility on all states and the United Nations to end these violations of international law, and the ruling should be a new wake-up call for the United States to end its heinous policy of defending Israeli oppression against Palestinians, and prompts a comprehensive reevaluation in other countries as well.

Israel has always praised that it is an oasis of democracy in the Middle East and that it is a bright spot in a dark environment suffering from ignorance, oppression, tyranny and discrimination. The truth is, however, very different. The Jewish community in Israel, which prides itself on being God’s chosen people, claiming to be the Aryan race that God distinguished over all other peoples, has been found to be discriminating and carrying out racist policies against other members of society.

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These have increased and become more severe with the arrival of successive waves of Jewish migrants across the globe.

They came together united under the banner of a Greater Israel, the Promised Land, but this goal gradually disappeared with the emergence of classism, the spread of racism, and the rise of the individual interests of every class and sect that came to Israel, but did not abandon its original heritage and culture.

Israel, however, is a state that was not established to be a democratic state for all its citizens, but rather to be a state for Jews.

Racism in the occupying entity refers, in the Israeli context, to the racism of Israeli Jews against Arab citizens of Israel and Jewish racism towards various Jewish ethnic communities – particularly against Ethiopian Jews, and historical and current racism against Mizrahi Jews and Jews of colour. Racism against Muslim Arabs in Israel exists in institutional policies, personal attitudes, media, education, immigration rights, housing, social life and legal policies.

Over the 30 years since the Oslo Accords, Israel undermined the prospects for establishing a Palestinian state, which provided it with an internationally approved path to preserve its Zionist settlement sovereignty, In doing so, Israel is demonstrating to the world what the Palestinians have long known: it desires a land without people, and seeks to remain the sole source of authority from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

Israel, the “artificial entity state”, rules through an apartheid system and no longer hides its intention to remain the sole owner of sovereignty.

Apartheid is a result of Zionist settler colonialism that facilitates the uprooting of Palestinians and the movement of settlers onto their properties, as well as the exemplary legal system to consolidate its land grab, In addition, the Zionist conviction that the Jews represent one race and people, regardless of religious inclination or identity, leads to three natural results:  racial self-isolation, racial privacy, racial superiority, and within the legal framework of Jewish nationality grant Jewish persons anywhere in the world more rights than those enjoyed by Palestinians who lived on the land before the state of Israel existed.

Jewish supremacy is not an innate characteristic unique to political hawks, but rather it is an essential feature of the Zionist project that includes the entire Israeli political spectrum. The greatest expression of this was given by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who stressed that Israel is “a national state, not for all its citizens, but only for the Jewish people.”

So there is no Israeli law that guarantees equality, and in 2018, the Israeli Knesset made this clear by approving the Nation-State Law that declared that Jews alone have the right to self-determination, and it was declared that Jewish settlement of all lands is a constitutional obligation.

Assuming international responsibility to dismantle Israeli apartheid means exerting the necessary pressure to dismantle it, and in the meantime the Palestinians will continue the struggle to achieve freedom, as they have done for more than a century, full of hope and conviction in their ability to pave the way towards a future of shared liberation that is far better than everything achieved through efforts of exclusivity and permanent control.

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