Israel’s Unraveling Myths Are Shaking American Support[1]
Dr. Riad Tabbarah
Israel is not a state of all its citizens… [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.
Benjamin Netanyahu, March 2019 (then Prime Minister of Israel).
One of the unraveling myths that Israel has weaved around itself is that it is a democracy.
The unraveling came gradually and slowly in the face of a stiff and effective official Israeli propaganda, supported by well-endowed pro-Zionist institutions in western countries. But slogans used by this propaganda machine fell one after another. “Land without a people [Palestine] for a people without a land [the Jews]” was one of the earliest of the slogans used effectively by early Zionist leaders, decades before the creation of Israel in 1948. According to this slogan, Palestine was inhabited by a few farmers and roaming Bedouins and the Jewish people would make the desert bloom there and establish a democratic state that will constitute a bridge between east and west. It took millions of Palestinian refugees, caused by the creation of Israel, and several decades, before this slogan died out. The country that was created was the antithesis of democracy, an apartheid state.
That the Israeli system of government is apartheid has been recognized for some time now, even by western scholars and rights organizations. One classic primer on the subject was published in 2009 under the title: “Israeli Apartheid: A beginner’s Guide.” In the central part of the book the author, Ben White, defined the main areas of Israeli apartheid and its contradiction with the Israeli claim of a “democratic state.” A wide literature on the same theme preceded and followed this book.
Last year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) came out with the same apartheid verdict. Its well-documented report, published in April under the title “A threshold Crossed,” was based on research, documentation and field observations of HRW and other rights organizations. It concluded “that the Israeli government has demonstrated an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories]. In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, the report concluded, they amount to the crime of apartheid.
Earlier this year, Amnesty International came out with a similar report entitled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: A Look into Decades of Oppression and Domination.” After detailing the Apartheid practices of the Israeli government, almost since Israel’s inception, the report asks: “Apartheid is not acceptable anywhere in the world. So why has the world accepted it against Palestinians?”
Perhaps the most damning report in this context is the one issued last year by the leading Israeli rights organization, B’Tselem. The report showed that discrimination against Palestinians included, among other things, expropriation of land, denial of citizenship, restriction of movement and limitation of political participation. “B’Tselem reached the conclusion that the bar for defining the Israeli regime as an apartheid regime has been met.” It thus confirmed a statement made a few months earlier by the same organization describing the Israeli system of government: “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”
This consensus of leading rights organizations, international and Israeli, finally reached the United Nations and was echoed in a report last March by the special Rapporteur for the United Nations International Human Rights Organization that confirmed the apartheid situation prevailing in the occupied area of Palestine. The Rapporteur noted that during the last 40 years hundreds of General Assembly and Security Council resolutions indicated that Israel’s annexation of occupied territory was unlawful but no accountability had ever followed. “If the international community had truly acted on its resolutions 40 or 30 years ago,” he added, “we would not be talking about apartheid today.”
It has taken time for these facts to be translated into a change in American (and Western) public opinion towards Israel, but some change has become clear lately, even among the American Jewish population, the mainstay, and most crucial support group, of Israel. A survey of Jewish voters in the United States, commissioned last July by the Jewish Electorate Institute, a group of prominent Jewish U.S. Democrats, and published in the Times of Israel, showed that 25% of the respondents thought that Israel is an “apartheid State”, 22% believed that Israel is “committing genocide” against the Palestinians and 9% of these Jewish voters believed that Israel “has no right to exist.” More meaningfully, these proportions are significantly higher among the younger Jewish voters: 35% thought Israel is an apartheid State, 33% that it is committing genocide and a full 20% that it has no right to exist. The fact that the younger Jewish voters are much less supportive of Israel than the old ones indicates that the process of detachment of American Jews from Israel might well be a long tern phenomenon.
This is important because it affects the attitude towards Israel in the U.S. Congress. Official assistance to Israel approved by Congress has lately amounted to $3.8 billion, practically all in the form of grants to the Israel military. The real amount officially transferred to Israel surpasses this number and is often placed under benevolent contributions to such entities as “the United Israel Appeal” which is passed on to the “Jewish Agency.” Add to this the tens of millions of dollars contributed by private American individuals and institutions as “tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
“In Washington, support for the Palestinian plight is getting louder in Congress,” reported the Washington Post last year. After Gaza-Israel war of May 2021, Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an op ed in the New York Times detailing the miserable life of Palestinians under Israeli blockade and occupation. Many Democratic lawmakers joined in the condemnation of the brutality of Israeli attacks on Gaza, including some who were traditionally pro-Israel. Some lawmakers openly accused Israel of apartheid, echoing the consensus of major rights organizations. “In another era,” reported the Washington Post at the time, “Sanders would have cut a lonely figure among his colleagues.”
This is not to say, of course, that American support for Israel has been upended. Far from that. America is still the unconditional protector of Israel. Its support is not only financial but also diplomatic. The U.S. has used its veto power in the UN Security Council 14 times since 2000, 12 of which were to protect Israel from censure. This is not counting of course the many draft resolutions the US stopped from getting to the floor of the Council for voting. But while American support for Israel remains strong, it has certainly been shaken lately, and the change that is happening in this regard is basic and long term.
