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IS THIS ISRAEL’S FIRST APARTHEID WAR?  
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Oren Yiftachel
October 15, 2024
972 Magazine [[link removed]]

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_ Far from lacking a political strategy, Israel is fighting to
reinforce the supremacist project it has built for decades between the
river and the sea. _

Israeli soldiers operating in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, July
31, 2024., Oren Cohen/Flash90

 

Over the past year, many have argued that the October 7 disaster —
the largest massacre of Israeli civilians
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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
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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
[[link removed]] 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
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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
[[link removed]]. 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
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“temporary occupation
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and claims that Israel has “no partner” to negotiate with. But the
reality of the apartheid project
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conspicuous in recent years, especially under Netanyahu’s
leadership.

Israeli forces are seen during a demonstration in Beita, occupied West
Bank, July 26, 2024. (Wahaj Bani Moufleh/Activestills)

Today, Israel makes no effort to hide its supremacist aims.
The Jewish Nation-State Law
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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
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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
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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
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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
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what many experts have termed a genocide.

Following Israel’s “disengagement” and 17 years of suffocating
siege over the Hamas-controlled enclave, Gaza came to symbolize in
Israeli eyes a distorted version of Palestinian sovereignty. Hence,
much beyond fighting militants or seeking revenge for October 7,
Israel’s massive bombardment, ethnic cleansing, and obliteration of
most of the Strip’s civil infrastructure — including hospitals,
mosques, industries, schools, and universities — are a direct attack
on the possibility of Palestinian decolonization and sovereignty.

Palestinians at the rubble of a house hit by an Israeli airstrike in
Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, October 2, 2024. (Abed Rahim
Khatib/Flash90)

Under the fog of this onslaught on Gaza, the colonial takeover of the
West Bank has also accelerated 
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the past year. Israel has introduced new measures of administrative
annexation; settler violence
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intensified with the backing of the army; dozens of new outposts
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been established, contributing to the expulsion of Palestinian
communities
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Palestinian cities have been subjected to suffocating economic
closures; and the Israeli army’s violent repression of armed
resistance [[link removed]] has
reached levels not seen since the Second Intifada — especially in
the refugee camps of Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarem. The previously
tenuous distinction between Areas A, B, and C has been completely
erased: the Israeli army operates freely throughout the entire
territory.

At the same time, Israel has deepened the oppression of Palestinians
inside the Green Line and their status as second-class citizens
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intensified its severe restrictions on their political activity
through increased surveillance
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and harassment
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Arab leaders are labeled “terror supporters,” and the authorities
are carrying out an unprecedented wave of house demolitions —
especially in the Negev/Naqab, where the number of demolitions in 2023
(which reached
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3,283) was higher than the number for Jews across the entire state. At
the same time, the police all but gave up
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the serious problem of organized crime in Arab communities. Hence, we
can see a common strategy across all the territories Israel controls
to repress Palestinians and cement Jewish supremacy.

The escalating offensive in Lebanon — which was launched in the name
of repelling Hezbollah’s 12 months of aggression against northern
Israel, but is now growing into a massive attack on all of Lebanon —
and the exchange of blows with Iran apparently herald a new and
regional phase of the war. It is clearly linked
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the geopolitical agenda of the American empire, but it also serves to
distract attention from the deepening oppression of Palestinians.

Another front to the apartheid war is being waged against Jewish
Israelis struggling for peace and democracy. The Netanyahu
government’s continued attempts
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weaken the (already limited) independence of the judiciary
will enable further human rights violations
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augmenting the power of the executive branch, currently composed of
the most right-wing coalition Israel has ever known.

Israeli forces arrest three Palestinians while prevent residents of
the Palestinian village of Az-Zuweidin from grazing on their private
pastures, southern West Bank, May 4, 2024. (Omri Eran
Vardi/Activestills)

We are already seeing the effects of Israel’s descent into
authoritarian rule. The country is overrun with weapons thanks to
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s decision to distribute
tens of thousands of rifles, mainly to supporters of Jewish supremacy
living in the West Bank settlements or border regions. Finance
Minister and de-facto West Bank governor
[[link removed]] Bezalel
Smotrich — himself a hardcore settler — has allocated large sums
of public funds to settler projects
[[link removed]].
And the government has effectively silenced any criticism of
Israel’s criminal war: unleashing severe police violence
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anti-government and anti-war demonstrators, inciting against academic
institutions, intellectuals, and artists, and amplifying toxic and
incriminating discourse against left-wing “traitors.”

A particularly sickening dimension of the apartheid war is the
government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages
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Hamas, whose potential return threatens the government by further
exposing the fiasco of October 7. Equally, their presence in the
Hamas tunnels enables the government to continue its criminal — and
largely ineffective — “military pressure” in Gaza, which
endangers any chance that the hostages will return alive. Thus, by
exploiting the pain and shock of the hostages’ families, the
government ensures that we are faced with an ongoing state of
emergency that precludes the opening of an official investigation into
the negligence that led to the October 7 massacres.

A new political horizon

Looking forward, it is worth remembering that apartheid is not only a
moral abyss and a crime against humanity; it is also an unstable
regime, characterized by endless violence that spares no one, and
far-reaching damage to the economy and the environment. 

Despite the considerable support it receives among Jews in Israel and
abroad, and from the Western governments that scandalously ensure its
impunity
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Israeli regime is far from victorious in its first apartheid war. The
forces opposing it are growing not only among the Palestinians and
neighboring Arab countries, but also among Jews in the diaspora
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wider publics of both the Global North and South. Apartheid Israel has
already lost the moral battle, but losing its international alliances,
trade links, economic prospects, and cultural and academic ties may
force the government to halt its war for Jewish supremacy.

Yet this is not an inevitable outcome. It requires significant global
mobilization to enforce international law, as well as
Jewish-Palestinian partnership that will challenge and rupture the
apartheid order of legal separation, segregation, and discrimination.
The struggle required is civil and nonviolent: similar struggles
against apartheid regimes around the world, such as in Northern
Ireland, the southern United States, Kosovo, or South Africa,
succeeded when they abandoned violence targeting civilians and focused
on civil, political, legal, and moral campaigns.

The struggle also requires a political horizon that will respond to
the persistent failure to partition the land between the river and the
sea. The peace movement “A Land for All: Two States One Homeland
[[link removed]],” a joint Israeli-Palestinian
initiative, has articulated one such vision based on individual and
collective equality. This confederational model
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freedom of movement, joint institutions, and a shared capital, can
offer a way out of the deepening apartheid and help sketch a horizon
toward a future of reconciliation and peace. Only the adoption of such
visions can ensure that the first apartheid war is also the last.

_A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local
Call. Read it here
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_Prof. OREN YIFTACHEL is a researcher of political and legal geography
and a human rights activist._

_+972 MAGAZINE is an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a
group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists. Founded in 2010, our
mission is to provide in-depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from
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_OUR TEAM HAS BEEN DEVASTATED BY THE HORRIFIC EVENTS OF THIS LATEST
WAR. THE WORLD IS REELING FROM ISRAEL’S UNPRECEDENTED ONSLAUGHT ON
GAZA, INFLICTING MASS DEVASTATION AND DEATH UPON BESIEGED
PALESTINIANS, AS WELL AS THE ATROCIOUS ATTACK AND KIDNAPPINGS BY HAMAS
IN ISRAEL ON OCTOBER 7. OUR HEARTS ARE WITH ALL THE PEOPLE AND
COMMUNITIES FACING THIS VIOLENCE. _

_We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The
bloodshed has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to
engulf the entire region. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed
by the army, are seizing the opportunity to intensify their attacks on
Palestinians. The most far-right government in Israel’s history is
ramping up its policing of dissent, using the cover of war to silence
Palestinian citizens and left-wing Jews who object to its policies._

_This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the
past 14 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and
militarism, entrenched occupation and apartheid, and a normalized
siege on Gaza._

_We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need
your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity
of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians
and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the
fight of their lives._

_CAN WE COUNT ON YOUR SUPPORT 
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