Israel Is Destroying the Fantasies of Liberal Zionism

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives to attend the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, on February 12, 2023. (Ohad Zwigenberg / POOL / AFP)

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Jerusalem in late January came during a period of notable violence and political upheaval throughout Palestine. But most of the anodyne comments Blinken made during his trip could have been made at just about any time in the past 30 years.

“I underscored the ironclad U.S.-Israeli relationship, our commitment to Israeli democracy & security,” Blinken tweeted with total banality after meeting with Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid. He was equally hollow after his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, praising the two-state solution and adding, “Anything that moves us away from that vision is—in our judgment—detrimental to Israel’s long-term security and its long-term identity as a Jewish and democratic state.”

It’s business as usual, in other words. The situation on the ground, however, is anything but.

To begin with, Israel has recently intensified its assault on Palestinian life. It has stepped up its demolition of Palestinian homes, its deliberately terrifying midnight raids on Palestinian families, and its brutalization of Palestinians at checkpoints, in schoolyards, in olive groves, and on pastoral hillsides. And the soldiers of its occupation army have been shooting to kill Palestinian men, women, and children at a rate of more than one every single day so far this year. A recent update by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, covering the period from December 20, 2022, to January 9, 2023, documents the killing or wounding of 399 Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces; the demolition of 69 Palestinian-owned structures (and the resulting displacement of 70 Palestinians); 31 attacks on unarmed Palestinians by heavily armed Jewish settlers; and 202 Israeli raids into the West Bank. All this in just three weeks—and not counting the recent incursion into Jenin, in which Israeli troops killed nine more Palestinians (a 10th victim later succumbed to injuries) and inflicted massive damage to homes and infrastructure; or a later raid into Jericho in which Israeli soldiers killed another five Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s new and much more explicitly racist Israeli government is poised to amplify all of these forms of violence even further. In response to a Palestinian reprisal attack at an illegal Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem which left several Israelis dead, there were renewed promises to demolish the family homes of Palestinian attackers, arrest or expel their family members, and carry out other forms of collective punishment.

Such actions correspond to existing Israeli policy. (They are also all flagrant violations of international law.) In that sense, nothing is different about the present moment. What has changed, however, is the Israeli state’s disavowal of the convenient forms of denial and mystification underpinning the myth of what is so often called its “liberal democracy.” And that is a problem for many liberal and leftist elites in Europe and, above all, the United States—because they have clung to those myths for decades to justify their unwavering support for Israel. With the Israeli government revealing the state’s political nature more nakedly than ever, liberal supporters of Zionism are at last being confronted with a reality that they have tried for so long to deny.

The reaction in liberal US circles to the new Netanyahu government has been telling. Representative Jerry Nadler and Senator Bob Menendez, both liberal Democrats and long-standing supporters of Israel, expressed distress and concern at recent developments. California Representative Brad Sherman, another liberal, warned that the formation of the new government “is corrosive to support in the Democratic caucus.” The editorial board of The New York Times—another bellwether for liberal US support for Israel—similarly warned that the “ideal of democracy in a Jewish state is in jeopardy,” and that the United States should “do everything it can to express its support for a society governed by equal rights and the rule of law in Israel.” Even Times columnist Tom Friedman, long one of Israel’s most outspoken US defenders, raised the alarm. “Israel,” he wrote in a recent piece, “is on the verge of a historic transformation—from a full-fledged democracy to something less.”

If Friedman and the rest are wrong, however, and no such transformation is about to take place, it’s not because Israeli democracy is secure—it’s because it was never truly there to begin with (or was never accessible to everyone subject to Israeli rule, which amounts to the same thing).

Liberal self-deception around Israel has been much more challenging since at least 2018. That’s when the Israeli parliament passed the Jewish Nation-State Law, which, as one of the state’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws, made formal and explicit many of the forms of racial discrimination against non-Jews that had hitherto been informal and implicit (as of 2017, 65 Israeli laws contained direct or indirect forms of discrimination against Palestinians). Doubling down, Netanyahu’s recently installed government took power with a formal policy declaration that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel.” The latter is a Zionist expression referring to all of historical Palestine: that is, the pre-1967 Israeli state plus the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

Racism doesn’t get any more explicit than this. If people of one ethnicity—or one racial group, to use the language of international law—constituting approximately half of those living in the territory in question have an exclusive claim to it, the other half of the population is, by definition, altogether deprived of rights.

There’s a word for such a political arrangement—and it’s not democracy. It’s apartheid.