The Modus Operandi of the Jewish State

Disclaimer: What follows below does not consist of an attempt to explain the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas so much as an exposition of the basic principles which inform the operation of the Zionist project. For an exhaustive and historically-grounded account of the prelude to the war, see Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom (2018). 

“Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”

—Exodus 22:21

Introduction

Among the most valuable accounts of the immigrant experience to emerge from the new millennium is the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Gate A-4” (1). In four dozen lines of free verse, and a mere seven years after the twin towers’ collapse, Nye weaves a thoughtful ode to the American dream through the lens of an encounter she once had with an older woman sharing her ethnicity at Albuquerque International Airport. This encounter (initially brought about by the frustrations of a monolingual flight clerk) later morphs into an informal fete for multiculturalism in which Nye’s elderly companion shares traditional mamool cookies with the rest of the women at her gate without any distinction as to national, cultural, or religious background. Flavor thus dovetails with solidarity, with the upshot that “not a single person…seemed apprehensive about any other person.” Granted, for many such a scenario would probably seem more than a little passé: the lone exception which proves the rule and nothing more. Yet Nye ventures to understand her brush with tolerance as something more than the sum of its parts. In particular, she discerns in it not the impossibility, but rather the promise of a world that anyone can lay claim to—one which, while presently unfulfilled, will never truly disappear. In her words, “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.” Whether this promise will ever see fruition of course remains to be seen. That being said, we can still credit Nye for clarifying to us the first step toward making it real: remembering that it exists at all.

Nevertheless, such a judgement would be misplaced at best and outright malicious at worst. Or so we’re led to believe by Marjorie Gann of the avowedly Zionist Committee for Accuracy in Middle-East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) (2). Per Gann, Nye’s oft-vaunted humanitarian credentials are but a chimera: indeed, the “fig leaf” which serves to mask her “ambiguity about what antisemitism really is.” The evidence Gann adduces for this charge is dubious to say the least. Of Nye’s poem “Before I Was a Gazan,” for example, which recounts the story of a nameless Palestinian boy in the Gaza Strip who returns home to retrieve his math homework only to witness his friends and family perish at the hands of an Israeli airstrike, Gann says the following: “It is likely that this poem (published in 2018) was written in the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge (2014), an action the Israelis launched after a dramatic increase in rocket fire against civilians in the south. Nye’s poems highlight Palestinian suffering, not Palestinian provocations.” Putting aside the question of whether Israel’s 2014 bombardment of the people of Gaza truly was the just desert of “Palestinian provocations,” (3) it strains credulity to suggest that the death of hundreds of civilians can’t possibly be commemorated in its own right absent a full accounting of the transgressions committed by the side that happens to share their ethnicity. Nevertheless, this doesn’t deter Gann from heaping one threadbare extenuation for Israeli war crimes after another. Indeed, so hopelessly mangled is her prose that she eventually finds herself furnishing Nye’s denial of “the millennia-long Jewish claim that God selected them to live in the land of Israel” as proof of the latter’s alleged antisemitic animus. If ever there was a smoking gun, this must surely be it.

In short, Gann’s article is, as so often seems to be the case with Zionist cultural criticism, a risible fraud. As such, virtually nothing is to be gained from engagement with its interminable chain of falsehoods (4). Except one thing, that is. In the conclusion to her attempted character assassination of Nye, Gann makes a seemingly innocuous remark which, despite its pretension to rationality, in fact reveals infinitely more than she could have ever intended:


“On the one hand, Naomi Shihab Nye wants young readers to share her rage at Israel. On the other, she fails to offer any hope of a workable solution. A solution she hints at, in the epigraph to her poem ‘One State,’ is one proposed by Arab intellectual and critic of Israel Edward Said: ‘I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together and sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen.’

‘Sharing the land’ is what the UN offered in 1947 when it voted to partition Palestine—a partition the Arabs rejected (5). But partition is not what Nye is suggesting. The title of her poem, ‘One State,’ envisions a single state in which ‘returned’ Palestinians would outnumber Israelis. That would mean the end of Israel. And that is something Israel will never accept” [emphasis mine].


Gann’s declaration that the numerical eclipse of Israelis by the Palestinian refugees would augur the “end of Israel” merits pause. How exactly would this materialize? One could surely imagine a scenario in which the Palestinians unite to launch an armed overthrow of the Israeli government—but Gann ponders no such hypothetical. Instead, she seems to aver that the very physical presence of the Palestinian refugees—their “outnumbering” Israelis, as it were—would necessarily spell the destruction of Israel. Indeed, if we are to take Gann at her word, then it appears that the Palestinians wouldn’t even have to do anything to seal Israel’s collapse: their bodies alone constitute reason enough for alarm. Such phobic aversion to the presence of another ethnicity would seem to contradict everything Gann (and the Zionist movement more broadly) claims to stand for. As such, this seems like a subject worth probing further. Is it really true (as Gann claims) that Israelis would never accept a diminishment of their demographic status consequent to the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees? The answer to this question is perhaps surprisingly conspicuous. 


Zionism and demographics: a storied dossier 

In the event, Gann (somewhat unexpectedly given her usual disdain for facts) is actually entirely correct. Israeli social, cultural, and political discourse abounds with references to the necessity of guaranteeing the country’s “Jewish character,” by which is meant the demographic majority enjoyed by Israeli Jews since the depopulation of 80% of Palestine’s Arab population from the landmass of modern Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, or Nakba (6). The prolific Israeli-American journalist Larry Derfner left no room for doubt when he articulated this logic in the pages of the Jewish Journal almost 20 years ago:


“[H]owever unjust a Jewish state is to its Arab citizens, if Israel stops being a Jewish state it will start being an Arab state, and I think the injustice to the Jews that would result from that is worse than anything Israeli Arabs [i.e. Palestinian citizens of Israel] have to endure.

… 

And while Zionists are known to argue over what makes a Jewish state, I’d say the absolute minimum, the point every Zionist can agree on, is that it must have a solid Jewish majority” [emphasis added] (7).


Figuring that candor would have been a preferable alternative to self-censorship, Derfner then decided to complement his analysis with a liberal pinch of gratuitous racism:


“Demography is a dirty business. I don’t like dealing with it. I don’t like knowing that if an Arab friend has a baby, I’m of course happy for him personally,—but in the abstract, as a Zionist, as an Israeli thinking about the national interest, I have to say that such a birth is bad news” [emphasis mine].


Though virtually all respectable Zionists (except Derfner, apparently) would refrain from ever endorsing such a position in public, extremely few of them would actually argue against it. Indeed, support for some version of it is telegraphed almost everywhere in the Zionist literature on demographics. One contributor to the popular right-wing Zionist magazine Tablet, for example, casts doubt on whether a hypothetical Israel in which the 2.7 million Palestinians living in the West Bank were granted Israeli citizenship could guarantee “a peaceful consensus around the scope, thrust, and symbols of the country” (the subtext of course being that the determination of such a consensus ought to be left solely or primarily to Israeli Jews) (8). There are several moments when the mask can be caught slipping à la Derfner, however. One was provided a few years ago by Yakov Faitelson in an article he wrote for the neoconservative think tank Middle East Forum entitled “How Israel’s Jewish Majority Will Grow.” Answering his own question, Faitelson matter-of-factly described one half of the relevant demographic equation thusly: “Taking into consideration the continuing decline of the TFR, increasing natural mortality, and the impact of continued mass emigration of young people, the West Bank and Gaza's Palestinian population may reach [i.e. decrease to] 2,594,780 [from a current total of ~5,000,000] in 2065” [emphasis added] (9). Although Faitel’s forecast is unaccompanied by an explicit moral valuation, one can easily divine his opinion regarding the desirability of more Palestinians dying from the syntax of his title (“How Israel’s Jewish Majority Will Grow”). Less mistakable were the remarks of former Israeli finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, speaking with respect to a child welfare reform he had presided over which openly discriminated against Palestinian families in Israel, had the following to say: “Two positive things happened: members of the Haredi [i.e. highly orthodox branch of Judaism] public seriously joined the workforce. And on the national level, the unexpected result was the demographic effect on the non-Jewish public, where there was a dramatic drop in the birth rate” [emphasis mine] (10). Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was even more forthright when he claimed in a 2003 interview that Israel’s principal mission in its dealings with the PLO was to “maximize the number of Jews [and] minimize the number of Palestinians” (11). Where, exactly, he never bothered to specify.

Up to this point, one could be forgiven for assuming that demographic considerations of the sort catalogued above are the exclusive province of the Israeli right. Such an assumption would, however, be fatally mistaken. But don’t take my word for it; consider instead the following remark by the late Amos Oz, noted member of the Israeli literati and self-styled “liberal Zionist,” on the abortive Camp David negotiations held between Israel and the PLO in the summer of 2000:


“Yet the Palestinians said no. They insist on their ‘right of return,’ when we all very well know that around here ‘right of return’ is an Arab euphemism for the liquidation of Israel. Mr. Arafat doesn’t insist on merely the right to a Palestinian state, a right I fully support. Now he demands that the Palestinian exiles [i.e. refugees] should return not only to Palestine, but also to Israel, thus upsetting the demographic balance and eventually turning Israel into the 26th Arab country” [emphasis mine] (12).


Parallel protestations litter the discursive field of the Israeli “left.” Note as an example the demographic verdict of Motti Dotan, a municipal council leader in the northern Israeli region of Galilee and member of the putatively social democratic Labor Party: “If we lose the Jewish majority in the Galilee this is the end of the Jewish state…I would like to imagine a Galilee without Arabs: no thefts, no crimes…we will have normal life” (13). Former Prime Minister, Labor Party member, and informal doyen of the “peace process,” Yitzhak Rabin, struck a similar chord when he brazenly declared in the year of his assassination that, “The red line for Arabs is 20% of the population...I want to preserve the Jewish character of the state of Israel not by name only, but also in action, values, language, and culture” (14). This theme was later echoed by former representative of the “socialist” Meretz Party Yair Golan in an op-ed he penned for the Israeli newspaper of record, Ha’aretz. There, Golan took aim at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The source of his objection, however, had nothing to do with the latter’s manifest illegality under international law or their imbrication in human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territories (15). Rather, and here I’ll allow the piece to speak for itself:


“The annexation of millions of Palestinians, even without Gaza, will bring the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs to about 60:40. How will Israel, the national home of the Jewish people, look with 40 percent of its inhabitants Arab, more than half of them denied civil rights? How will Israel look with 2.6 million more Palestinians, most of them miserably poor in Israeli terms?

…

Anyone who wants the wholeness of the people chooses separation. Anyone who desires a national home for the Jewish people—a state with a solid Jewish majority—chooses separation” [emphasis mine] (16).


The picture that emerges from this and similar samples of Zionist demographic discourse is one in which positions that in any other country would be confined to the very far right of the political spectrum instead enjoy bipartisan approval. Chief among these is the notorious “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that white people throughout the Western world are being “replaced” by a coordinated influx of non-white immigrants from the Global South (now substitute for the following keywords: “Jews,” “Israel,” “Palestinians,” “Palestine”). To be sure, it’s undeniable that support for the theory in the US and Europe is growing at an alarming clip (17). At the same time, however, one would be hard-pressed to find a single prominent left-wing party, organization, or movement in any of these countries which actually assents to its premises (18). In Israel, by contrast, such rhetoric enjoys the explicit mandate of nearly all factions of the political arena save for a fringe minority (one which is unsurprisingly majority-Arab). Here a resort to the data is instructive. According to a recent poll conducted by Pew Research Center, close to half (48%) of Israeli Jews believe their country’s Arab minority should be “transferred” beyond state borders, while three-fourths (76%) agree on the necessity for Jewish citizens to receive preferential treatment over non-Jews (19). This isn’t a novel phenomenon, either. One 1997 survey similarly found that 52% of Israeli Jews would have approved the compulsory transfer of Israeli Palestinians from Israel to a hypothetical Palestinian state (20). Three years later, amid the convulsions of the second great Palestinian uprising or intifada, Gallup found that number had increased to 60% (21). This hysteria reached a fever pitch when in late 2002 the Israeli minister of labor and social affairs, Shlomo Benizri, convened a national “Council of Demography” which counted among its members the country’s most eminent gynecologists and obstetricians (22). Few could have harbored any doubts as to its true intentions.

Considerations of the demographic question also figure prominently in Israeli strategic thinking. Here the foremost authority is Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). Originally founded in response to deficits in Israel’s intelligence system borne out by its dumbfounded response to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the institute’s cachet has only grown in the decades since then:


“In parallel, INSS renown reached new heights…Both in Israel and abroad, the INSS ‘take’ on unfolding events and regional developments became a nearly standard requirement in the domestic and international media, and among Israeli and international strategic thinkers and policymakers. This voice has become a critical component in closed forums among leading policymakers and in the public debate” [emphasis mine] (23).


A brief survey of the INSS’ corpus can thus provide a valuable gauge of what the Israeli government (and, to a lesser extent, people) considers to be its most vexing areas of concern. An obvious contender for broaching this topic is senior researcher Ofir Winter’s ominously titled 2020 memorandum “Existential Threat Scenarios to the State of Israel.” Winter spares no rhetorical flourish in reciting Israel’s many exogenous vulnerabilities: from Iranian attempts at dismantling the Israeli nuclear monopoly to an international boycott which could presage the emergence of a “South Africa-type situation,” it seems that the Jewish state boasts no shortage of risks to its long-term viability. To make matters worse, Israel’s own expansionary pretensions could end up backfiring on it within the imminent future. In Winter’s words:


“By granting citizenship to over 2.5 million Palestinians living in the annexed territory [i.e. the West Bank], as well as to more than 300,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem—in addition to already having nearly a million and a half Arab citizens of Israel—Israel could eventually have a non-Jewish majority, or at least a very significant Arab minority. The loss of the state’s Jewish majority— or the effective majority for the purpose of controlling the state—could lead to a change in the basic nature of the state, especially its Jewish character. The Jewish symbols of the state could be immediately and explicitly altered…while change could also occur gradually by constantly chipping away at these characteristics, to the point that they disappear” [emphasis mine] (24).


As though to preempt critics who would naturally point out that such a prerogative gainsays Israel’s democratic mandate, Winter suggests that the two objectives, far from being contradictory, are in fact complementary:


“In addition, there is also the concern that if the Jewish population becomes a minority, its rights may not be maintained by the Arab majority. This is especially the case, given the absence of a tradition of upholding democratic values in the Arab states, the conduct of the Palestinian Authority (25), and the severe hostility of significant segments of the Palestinian population toward the State of Israel and its Jewish citizens. The outcome could be a state under Palestinian control that does not respect the basic rights of all its citizens and, consequently, does not have a democratic identity” (26).


In Winter’s rendering, then, no constitutional safeguard could possibly defend Israeli democracy from the Arab biological menace. Nor does it cross his mind that any of the authoritarian proclivities he lists are traceable to anything other than pollution of the Palestinian gene pool (hence his lack of distinction between the presumptively culturally Israeli Palestinian citizens of Israel and their counterparts in the occupied territories). In this, his reasoning would have been of a piece with slaveowners in the Antebellum South who argued on identical grounds that the subjugation of the African slave served to constrain his most restive tendencies; the inevitable fruit of this arrangement was a social order that could weather the vicissitudes of subaltern agitation. As W.E.B. Dubois put it:


“It had been insistently and firmly believed by the best thought of the South: (1) that the Negro could not work as a free laborer; (2) that the Negro could not really be educated, being congenitally inferior; (3) that if political power were given to Negroes it would result virtually in the overthrow of civilization” [emphasis mine].


As before, one has only to substitute for the relevant keywords.


Beyond reproach? 

The typical rejoinder (or at least what I would expect it to be as I have yet to encounter any critical reckoning with Zionism’s demographic factor) to this likening goes something as follows: ‘sure, some Zionists who want to prevent the return of the Palestinian refugees are motivated by racism, but what’s wrong with Israel denying entry to a group of people who seek to cause harm to its citizens?’ Putting aside its own thinly veiled racism, this defense fails on two counts—(1): as aforementioned, Israel is equally disturbed by the growth of its own Arab minority as it is by the Palestinian refugees despite the fact that the former engage in virtually zero armed resistance to Israeli rule, (2): sans the Palestinians, Israeli migration law is specifically designed to deter the influx of non-Jews altogether regardless of their geographic provenance. I will exhaustively cover the evidentiary record for both in turn.


Part 1: Trouble on the homefront 

We have already encountered several examples of Zionist demographic discourse about the Palestinian Arabs in toto. But what about the Palestinians of Israel in particular? As it turns out, this is a question that has haunted the Zionist leadership from Day 1. As early as August 1948, for example, one can already observe the first foreign minister of Israel, Moshe Sharett, ruminating on the fate of the Palestinians who had managed to remain within the borders of the nascent Jewish state by that point in the war:


“As for the future, we are equally determined—without, for the time being, formally closing the door to any eventuality—to explore all possibilities of getting rid, once and for all, of the huge Arab minority which originally threatened us” (28).


Though Sharett’s prophecy never came to fruition, the sentiment which undergirded it would enjoy a staying power unmatched by any other doctrine in the history of Israeli statecraft. Hence why:


“[A]s late as the summer of 1950, the village of Ashkelon was still Arab—at least it was until one morning when the soldiers arrived, put all the inhabitants on trucks, took them to the Gaza frontier and, with the help of some shooting in the air, told them to go and join the refugees who had passed that way two years before” (29).


Following a brief lull in the 1960s, this idea later returned with a vengeance in the form of the 1976 Koenig memorandum (30). The brainchild of then-Northern District Commissioner of the Interior Ministry, Yisrael Koenig, this memorandum both articulated the problems afflicting Arab-Israeli society (or, more accurately, Jewish-Israeli society’s relationship to it) at the time as well as policies the State of Israel could have pursued to correct them. Koenig’s memo is divided into five sections, each concerning itself with one dimension of the emergent “Arab problem.” Of these, the section entitled “The Demographic Problem and the Manifestations of Arab Nationalism” merits extended quotation:


“The natural increase of the Arab population in Israel is 5.9 percent annually against a natural increase of 1.5 percent annually among the Jewish population.

This problem is particularly acute in the northern district where there is a large Arab population. In mid-1975 the Arab population of the northern district was 250,000 while the Jewish population was 289,000…In 1974 only 759 Jews were added to the population of the northern district while the Arab population increased by 9,035.

According to this rate of increase, by 1978 Arabs will constitute over 51 percent of the total population of that district.

…

There is ground for serious apprehensions that within the next decade an Arab political and demographic takeover of the Acre and Nazareth areas will occur” [emphasis mine].


As a countervailing blow to these developments, Koenig proposed the following: “expand and deepen Jewish settlement in areas where the contiguity of the Arab population is prominent, and where they number considerably more than the Jewish population; examine the possibility of diluting existing Arab population concentrations" [emphasis mine] (32). Deplorable though these measures may seem to us today, in due time they would come to be implemented—albeit in a piecemeal and ultimately abortive fashion—by successive Israeli governments without incurring so much as a peep from the Western political and intellectual establishment. The ensuing “Judaization” of the Galilee (a region of the Levant which has historically held a firm Arab majority) thus went unregistered as the more gratuitously brutal features of Israeli rule in the occupied territories captured the elan of the international press. Nevertheless, its history is at least as worthy of our attention as either the plight of the West Bank or the martyrdom of Gaza, if only because the former presents us with a “controlled experiment” of Zionist praxis which the latter two by necessity can’t. 

Figure 1: Patterns of Jewish settlement in the Galilee, 1974-1980 (33)

Judaization in the Galilee tended to proceed according to the following operative logic: as urban planners sited Jewish settlements in such a way as to strangulate the region’s many Arab population centers (several of which had been swollen by Palestinians internally displaced during the 1948 war), the growth of the latter was simultaneously stonewalled by the denial of zoning permits for residential and commercial development in Arab villages. Typical of this disposition was the fact that of 105 proposals for Arab development submitted to the state comptroller by 1980, only 18 had been approved (34). Beyond refusal to add to the Israeli Palestinians’ spatial due, moreover, the instrument of subtraction also loomed large. So it was that in the countdown to the new millennium, scores of Palestinian homes and villages were literally effaced from the map and replaced with Jewish settlements. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe—who bore direct witness to these processes as they unfolded in real time—reports the following account:

“Between 1993 and 1996, the authorities demolished more than 2,000 houses belonging to Palestinians (during that same period only 130 such houses were demolished in the Jewish sector). Each such demolition was planned like a military operation. I witnessed several myself: helicopters hovering in the air, the military sealing the area with plenty of heavily armed troops, creating the impression of an attack on an enemy outpost rather than an engagement with citizens of the state. The house’s inhabitants were evicted without due notice and found themselves literally in the street” (35).


Once the land had been sufficiently redeemed of its Arab presence, there arose a need to secure its Jewish character. Given the Israeli government’s prohibition on racial discrimination in the allocation of (most) public amenities, a new modality of rural colonization in Palestine thus had to be invented: the community settlement, or mitzpeh, had as its trademark feature the collectivization of real estate transactions into the hands of homeowners who, in an effective reprise of the racially restrictive covenants which had dominated the US housing market decades earlier, would then proceed to strictly regulate the composition of their communities along arbitrary lines of “sociocultural” (read: racial) fitness (36). Today this discriminatory edifice goes by the euphemism of the “admissions committee," and just a few months ago the Israeli Knesset passed a bill permitting its extension to villages with an upper bound of 700 households (the previous cap was 400) (37).

Yet for all that has been expended by Israeli elder statesmen and exurban settlers alike to turn one of the country’s last remaining strongholds of Palestinian identity into a Jewish enclave, very little has actually come of Koenig’s vision in the near half century since its inception. The lamentations of our not-so-old friend the INSS relay the continued salience of his prognostications among Israeli policymakers today:


“The undermining of the demographic balance in the Negev [a region of southern Israel which is also majority-Arab] and the Galilee poses a geopolitical threat to Israel. This threat is highlighted by international history, which shows that minorities with national awareness and leadership that constitute a majority in their territory will take action to realize national aspirations through the use of demands, violent or peaceful, for autonomy (the Catalans in Spain), or alternatively for being annexed to another country, possibly with a common border (the Crimean peninsula). Consequently, it cannot be ruled out that the Arab society in Israel, which frequently expresses dissatisfaction with the political and social status quo in the country, will utilize the same measures taken by other minorities around the world” (38).

Figure 2: “Demographic balance” of Israel’s Northern District (39)

One is struck by not only the author’s candor in depicting Israel’s Arab minority as a threat to be defused rather than fully-fledged citizens deserving of equal rights, but also his refusal to countenance the idea of simply improving the conditions of a minority group as a means to diminish its affinity for secessionist tendencies. Perhaps this bespeaks something about the true nature of Israel’s uniquely Jewish “democracy.” 


Part 2: Interlopers and interrupters 

Lest one be misled into thinking that the situation of the Israeli Palestinians is somehow sui generis, it bears mentioning that Israel’s demographic crusade has spared no one in its 75 years of operation—including those who have no relation to the Arab world whatsoever (40). Granted, this episode of the Zionist saga was relatively late in coming; after all, it was only in the 1990s that non-Jewish migrant workers started entering the Israeli labor market in large numbers. As a rule, however, their presence on the land was just as equivocal as that of any Palestinian from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, one could argue that their existence was even more precarious given their lack of permanent residency status. Nevertheless, the experiences of both groups were and remain unified by the principle of systemic Jewish supremacy, and as such investigating the latter’s indiscriminate application can shed some light on the raison d’etre of Israel’s demographic obsession (albeit chiefly by revealing what it isn’t).

The formative historical canvas of the Israeli guest-worker regime was the First Intifada of 1987-1993. What had begun as a nonviolent uprising by Palestinians in response to the iniquities of occupation later morphed into an orgy of Israeli bloodletting which left more than a thousand Palestinian civilians dead (including hundreds of children) and several times more injured, disabled, imprisoned, and/or homeless (41). In parallel, the Palestinians launched an admirable (though ultimately abortive) campaign of resistance whose primary arsenal was constituted by boycotts/strikes, makeshift barricades, and rock-throwing (42). In the ensuing fog, some 100 Israeli civilians (the presumptive majority being settlers illegally planted in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip) died (43), a loss which was apparently so grievous as to compel a crackdown on the mobility of Palestinians who had previously commuted between the occupied territories and Israel proper for work. To fill this vacuum, the Israeli government subsequently opened its gates to an unprecedented wave of non-Jewish migrant workers, most of whom originated from countries well beyond the geographic orbit of the Israel-Palestine conflict (44). This latter detail is crucial for what comes next, as it underscores the dissonance between Israel’s desire to maximize the demographic quotient of its Jewish citizens, on the one hand, and its much-rehearsed commitment to protecting the latter from attacks by Palestinian insurgents, on the other. 

Figure 3: Palestinian workers in Israel as a Percentage of the Total Workforce in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (45)

Due to the haste of its creation, the Israeli guest-worker regime borrowed extensively from the legal framework which had hitherto governed the status of Palestinian day-workers in Israel. Among the most important features of the latter was its proscription on the continued presence of Palestinians in Israel after the work day had ended (46). This stipulation later found new life in the 1991 Foreign Workers Law, which sanctioned employers for the provision of overnight lodging to undocumented migrant workers (47). The point of such austerity was to ensure that the size and composition of Israel’s foreign labor force never exceeded the demands of the Israeli labor market (48), and indeed one can readily observe a similar logic at play in guest-worker programs around the world (49). However, there are several notable features of the Israeli guest-worker regime which appear to be decoupled from this macroeconomic imperative. Inter alia, these include: (1): the premature termination of a migrant’s visa in the event of pregnancy, (2): the required transfer of a migrant’s newborn from Israel mere weeks after childbirth, (3): the prohibition of two members of the same family holding a visa to Israel at the same time, and (4): the compulsory repatriation of a migrant if they get married to another migrant (50). Given their total lack of regard for competition in the Israeli labor market, as well as their contrast to the much-vaunted “Law of Return,” which grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew in the world who so desires it along with their immediate family, these policies can be rationally construed as attempts by the State of Israel to minimize the size of its non-Jewish population, whether the latter increases by means of procreation (1-2), chain migration (3), or both (4) (51). The practical face of the Israeli guest-worker regime would appear to vindicate this assumption. Its most ugly manifestation in particular can be dated to 2002, when the Israeli government embarked on a campaign to deport tens of thousands of undocumented migrants from its borders, including untold numbers of children (52). Erstwhile interior minister Eli Yishai was kind enough to spell out the intent of this program in no uncertain terms:

“I want everybody who is not Jewish out of this country. Non-Jewish migrants come here and build churches! They should stay in their own countries. We must reject all migrants who are not Jewish according to the Halacha [the Jewish law]...They cause acculturation and deterioration of the values of the Jewish state” (53).


The open cruelty of the government’s policies provoked an unprecedented furor within Israeli civil society, large segments of which were wont to note the affinity of the former to the Jewish people’s own millennia-long history of persecution (54). In response, the Knesset enacted a one-time amnesty for children of undocumented migrants below the age of 14 and their families in 2006 (55). Despite this apparent lull, however, the dramatic growth of Israel’s undocumented population prompted a resumption of the policy in 2008, by which time the government now sought to ratchet its expulsionary ambitions up an order of magnitude. Ever the wordsmith, Netanyahu attempted to justify the deportation of some 100,000 migrants from Israel over the span of less than five years on the following grounds: “[T]his is a humanitarian problem on the one hand, and a problem of ensuring Israel’s Jewish character on the other. We are committed to doing the right thing even if this does not seem like the right thing in popular public opinion” [emphasis mine] (56). A second bout of protest and concomitant amnesty followed, neither of which did much to alter the fate of most of the affected migrants (57). And despite repeated promises by the Israeli government to improve its conduct toward the undocumented, little seems to have changed in the years since. As recently as 2019, for example, Israeli police arrested and detained an undocumented Filipina woman and her disabled son under the pretext that the former’s visa had expired, just one of 50 migrant families slated for deportation in the summer of that year (58). A few months later, another Filipina family, this time a mother and her 13-year old daughter, Gena, were arrested and imprisoned in a detention facility which had reportedly locked up children as young as one month old (59). Thankfully, Gena and her mother were saved from deportation at the eleventh hour by an upwelling of popular indignation against their treatment by Israeli authorities. Others weren’t so lucky, however. As yet another Filipina victim of Israeli immigration police put it: “My daughter is scared to leave the house…The children are all traumatized. They were raised here and thought they were safe, and they were taken while they slept. Unless their deportations are canceled, none of these children will feel safe” (60). Note that by the endpoint of the sentence you just read, the term “Palestinian” had not appeared once in over 750 words.

Figure 4: The facility where Gena and her mother were held (61)

Cause and effect 

If not “security,” then what actually motivates Israel’s desire to maintain its Jewish demographic majority? Before we can answer this question, it’s important to note that the Zionist movement’s own conception of Jewish “security” is far more expansive than protection from Palestinian terrorism. Rather, it denotes a mechanism whereby Jews can shield themselves from the antisemitic persecution which foreign governments have visited on them since antiquity, namely the establishment of a state in which (a): they constitute a demographic majority, and (b): all other non-Jewish minorities (if any) live on their sufferance. As the Zionist historian Anita Shapira put it, the original point of the Jewish state was “to liberate Jews from the burden of living in the midst of another people,” and relieve them of the obligation, “to take the existence of others in their country into consideration” [emphasis mine] (62). Thus even if a Palestinian newborn or Filipina migrant worker poses no imminent risk to Jewish safety, the presence of both is still to be regarded with suspicion because of the obligation (seen as a peremptory one by all seasoned Zionists) to ensure that the State of Israel remains the exclusive property of its Jewish citizens. At least part of this impulse can be attributed to the vast intergenerational trauma which has afflicted the Jewish people for the better part of their history, and, indeed, which continues to subconsciously inform their ontologization as a people. As one young American Jew recently put it: 


“From the Assyrian Captivity to the destruction of the Second Temple, to the Spanish Inquisition, to the Holocaust, and everything in between, the Jewish people have endured a collective generational trauma of expulsion, degradation, and murder. Due to this long history of persecution, Jews never truly felt safe where they were, taking every instance of supposed security with a grain of salt, and leading generations of Jews to feel an inherent and seemingly inexplicable paranoia and disbelief in the safe and secure” (63).


Given the trans-historical nature of this “seemingly inexplicable” paranoia (it is actually very explicable), the latter doesn’t require the presence of a tangible threat per se in order to be activated. That doesn’t make it any less real, however. Thus despite the fact that the first prime minister of Israel himself, David Ben-Gurion, would later concede in March 1948 that “they [the Palestinians], the decisive majority of them, do not want to fight us, and all of them together are unable to stand up to us, even at the present state of our organization and equipment,” he had nevertheless months earlier lamented that a state in which Jews constituted only 60% of the population, such as the United Nations had proposed in November 1947, would “not even give us absolute assurance that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority” (64). In the wake of the Nakba, this principle received a new stimulus in the form of an impotent and battered Palestinian refugee population whose very existence threatened to undo Jewish territorial gains made during the 1948 war. As with the Judaization of the Galilee, Jewish presence and Arab absence were thus jointly deployed to ratify Israel’s claim to the millions of acres of Palestinian land it had just conquered. To this end, in addition to peopling Palestine’s innumerable ghost towns with Jewish settlers as a means to deter the Palestinians from returning to their homes (65), the Zionist leadership also sanctioned the use of violence against the latter for the sake of brute intimidation. That the purpose of these excursions had little to do with “security” is made abundantly clear by the fact that, per the eminent Israeli historian Benny Morris, “less than 10 per cent of all infiltration [i.e. the attempted movement by Palestinian refugees into Israeli territory] during 1949-1953 was politically motivated or undertaken for terrorist purposes” (66). Indeed, from 1948-1950, the “vast majority” of  Palestinian “infiltrators” were unarmed, and their eventual militarization by 1951 was an explicit “response to Israel's shoot to kill policy along the frontiers,” a policy which, by Morris’ accounting, left somewhere on the order of 5,000 Palestinians dead between 1949 and 1956, the vast majority of them “unarmed ‘economic’ and social infiltrators” (67). One IDF intelligence officer articulated the dilemma then confronting the Palestinian refugees with brutal honesty: “The motives for the infiltration are very powerful and stem from deprivation, hunger…often the infiltrators face a choice between death by hunger and deprivation and possible harm from our forces' fire” (68). Nevertheless, few measures were ever regarded as too extreme by Israeli authorities, for, as Morris astutely observes, “keeping Arabs out was essential in asserting sovereignty,” and, “[i]f Arab shepherds or farmers were given an inch, they would in short order take a mile, and much of the frontier—large sections of which were bereft of Israeli settlements—would be rolled back and restored to de facto Arab possession” [emphasis mine] (69). Small wonder, then, that the senior Zionist leader and first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, would go on to describe the mass exodus of some 80% of Palestine’s Arab population as “[a] miraculous simplification of Israel’s task” (70). In the way of establishing a firm Jewish demographic majority, it was no doubt mission accomplished. And yet this peculiarity in the history of Israeli state building—that the country’s borders were achieved not by international fiat but rather the wholesale removal and sequestration of a refugee population numbering in the hundreds of thousands (now millions)—was never truly resolved. Instead it has gnawed relentlessly at the conscience of the Jewish state ever since its inception, and at no small cost to either Israeli Jews themselves or (if it even needed to be said) the Palestinians. A case in point is the former Palestinian village of Iqrit. First captured by the IDF in November 1948, it was promptly “cleansed” of its Palestinian inhabitants and sealed off from the latter on an indefinite basis. In response, a handful of Iqrit residents appealed their dispossession to the Israeli Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor. Before the court’s verdict could be actualized, however, Israeli forces preemptively captured the former village mukhtar (or head) on Christmas Day and made him watch as a torrent of bulldozers and dynamite industrially demolished Iqrit house-by-house. Whether this date in particular had anything to do with the fact that the vast majority of Iqrit’s residents were Christian, we may never know (71). 

Figure 5: Iqrit before 1948 (72)

Figure 6: Saint Mary’s Church, one of two structures in Iqrit which Israeli forces refrained from destroying in 1951 (the other being the local cemetery) (73)

Following the army’s extrajudicial blitz, the Supreme Court recanted its decision to allow the Palestinians of Iqrit to return to their homeland. And despite repeated attempts by the latter and their descendants to restore the status quo ante, the State of Israel has stubbornly refused to budge so much as a single inch in the years since (both literally and figuratively). The explanation adduced by the late Israeli political scientist Meron Benvenisti for this intransigence is the fear—shared by virtually all sectors of Israeli Jewish society—of setting a “precedent”: Iqrit itself may not be particularly consequential, but its return could potentially prefigure the relinquishment of much or all of the rest of Israel’s territory which was (and, indeed, continues to be) confiscated from Palestinians (74). Benvenisti quotes former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir to the effect that “[i]t is not only considerations of security [that prevent] an official decision regarding Bir'im [another ethnically cleansed Palestinian village] and Iqrit, but the desire to avoid a precedent. We cannot allow ourselves to become more and more entangled and to reach a point from which we are unable to extricate ourselves” (75). One Jewish resident of the Israeli mitzpeh Ein Hod (itself also established on the ruins of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village) was even more frank: “Their [the Palestinians’] having a new hold here would undermine our right to the place and our hold on it. If you accord recognition to what was here before ‘48, you essentially topple the foundation upon which the whole affair rests…the whole affair, the whole state” (76). Little imagination is needed to follow this logic to the conclusion outlined by Gann in her polemic against Nye: “the end of Israel” (77).

Conclusion

The evidence assembled herein enables us to venture the first steps toward a comprehensive theory of the Jewish state. More than anything else, this is a state which is neurotically obsessed with maintaining the demographic supremacy of its Jewish citizens. This obsession manifests in a variety of ways—from attempts to depress the reproductive activity of non-Jews all the way to the latter’s outright expulsion—and it is driven above all by the threat which non-Jewish bodies pose to the state’s Jewish constitution. Such a Jewish constitution is necessary, we are told, because anything less will leave permanently unsolved the world-historic injustice of antisemitism. On the other hand, its unsung role in reifying the conquest of Palestinian land lingers, shaping almost everything the state does while simultaneously hardening the hearts of its colonized victims. Rinse and repeat for 75 years, and one is left with the ingredients for a perfect storm (78).

By now it should be abundantly clear that this dispensation (in addition to being gravely immoral) is far from sustainable. For as long as the State of Israel regards the Palestinians within its territory as an unwanted excrescence, never to rise above a certain maximum “acceptable” percentage (≤20% if Rabin’s word is anything to go by), then there is quite literally no chance of it ever making peace with those in its occupied periphery. Barring a military solution to the conflict, a better alternative would be to abandon the dichotomy of “Jews vs Palestinians” altogether and substitute it with the model: “Israelis (including Palestinian citizens of Israel) and Palestinians (in the occupied territories)”. Such a redefinition of Israeli identity—as belonging not solely to Israeli Jews but anyone with Israeli citizenship, including Palestinians—would surely go a long way in reducing enmity between the two communities (79). It would also occlude the ethnic character of the conflict and recenter its national dimension, thereby creating a bridge between both sides of the Green Line while simultaneously encouraging each (though most of all the Israeli) to recast its claims in the language of democratic rights rather than tribalist prejudice (80). In short, in order for the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” to have any substance whatsoever, the Palestinian component of its Israeli half must first receive its rightful due. If instead it continues to be spat on, crushed under the combined weight of all the bullets, tanks, and electric fences in the world, then it will remain forever repressed; and the repressed, as we well know, must always return (81).

by NEO CHATTERJEE

Footnotes

  1.  Nye, “Gate A-4,” Academy of American Poets, 2008. See also Nye, “Shoulders," 1994, “How Palestinians Keep Warm," 1994, “Kindness," 1995, “Many Asked Me Not to Forget Them," 2011. For a thorough scholarly treatment of the role Palestinian narratives have played—and continue to play—in the struggle against Israeli memoricide, see Masalha et al., An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba (2018).

  2.  Gann, “Naomi Shihab Nye: Maligning Israel for Young Readers," Center for Accuracy in Middle-East Reporting and Analysis, 8 February, 2022. CAMERA’s extensive mendacity in its reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict is documented at length in its corresponding Wikipedia page.

  3.  It wasn’t. See Gaza, ch.10-13.

  4.  Typifying this disposition, Gann accuses the Palestinian political prisoner Lama Khater of having “praised” Hamas for its “evolution” (here she purports to quote Khater) “‘from rock to knife to rifle to explosive vest to rocket and to tunnel.’” Her only source for this claim is an article by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), another militantly pro-Israel press monitoring organization with its own unenviable pedigree of media duplicity (see here). Turning to the linked MEMRI article, we find only the following quote attributed to Khater: “Hamas, which began with no backing in the region, has upgraded its means of struggle from rock to knife to rifle to explosive vest to rocket and to tunnel. The military wing of Hamas went from individuals to a well-structured military, and is the first line of defense in any war or round of conflict with the occupation.” Nothing in this quote signals an espousal of Hamas’ tactics: only description. MEMRI itself refers the reader to an article allegedly authored by Khater posted to the Palestinian news site Palinfo.com. One can’t help but note, however, that they fail to actually link or name it. All that we are given is its date of publication. Entering this date in conjunction with the phrase “Palinfo.com” into Google search engine, one does indeed discover six articles from the site’s English language branch—none of which so much as even mention Khater. 

  5.  For a historically grounded explanation of the manifest injustice of the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine, see Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War On Palestine (2020), ch. 2.

  6.  The decisive role played by Zionist militia in causing the mass exodus of the Palestinians from their homes and villages between 1947 and 1949 has by now been firmly established in the mainstream historiography on the subject. See in particular Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (1987), Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1987), Shlaim et al., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (2001), Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006). Of these, Morris’ treatise is the keystone text (as well as by far the most exhaustive). However, for an argument that Morris discounts the extent to which his own evidence demonstrates the premeditated nature of the Palestinians’ flight, cf. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2003), ch. 3 and “Rejoinder to Benny Morris,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 1992. See also Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought (1992). Incidentally, Morris (an Israeli by birth and committed Zionist) is himself of the opinion that Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute a demographic “time-bomb," that “they are liable to undermine the state,” and that “if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then” [emphasis mine]. See Beinart, “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?," Jewish Currents, 19 April, 2023.

  7.  Derfner, “A Solution to Israel’s Demographic Peril,” Jewish Journal, 21 July, 2005.

  8.  Dellapergola, Tablet, “The Demographic Realities of Annexation,” 15 July, 2020.

  9.  Faitelson, Middle East Forum, “How Israel’s Jewish Majority Will Grow,” 2020.

  10.  Derfner (same guy, strangely enough), “When Zionism is racism: Ron Dermer and Bibi Netanyahu, on the record,” +972, 10 July, 2013. For an explanation of the mechanism whereby the reform in question discriminated against Israeli Palestinians, see “Israel: Cuts in Child Allowance Discriminate Against Palestinian Arab Citizens,” Human Rights Watch, 6 June, 2002. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that article II (d) of the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide explicitly forbids “rulers, public officials, [and] private individuals” from “imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a] group.” 

  11.  Landau, “Maximum Jews, Minimum Palestinians,” Ha’aretz, 1 June, 2020.

  12.  Oz, “The Specter of Saladin,” The New York Times, 28 July, 2000, quoted in Laor, The Myths of Liberal Zionism (2009), p. 28. For a comprehensive refutation of the myth that the failure of the Camp David accords was a result of Palestinian intransigence, cf. Finkelstein, “The Camp David II Negotiations: How Dennis Ross Proved the Palestinians Aborted the Peace Process,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 2007.

  13.  Moshe David, Maariv, 10 September 2008, quoted in Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (2011), p. 257. As an aside, Dotan recently came under fire for having claimed in a radio interview that Arabs shouldn’t swim in Jewish pools. The “apology” he issued in response to the backlash defies parody: “I don’t hate Arabs, but I don’t want them at my pools. I don’t go to their pools, either.” “Official who said Arabs shouldn’t use Jewish pools apologizes to ‘anyone who felt offended’,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 29 July, 2016. 

  14.  Al-Ittihad, “Rabin: The Red Line for Arabs is 20% of the Population,” 1 November, 1995, quoted in Kanaaneh, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (2005), p. 50.

  15.  For a piercing account of the relationship between Israel’s suffocation of Gaza and its colonization of the West Bank, see Gisha - Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, “Area G: From Separation to Annexation - Israel’s isolation of the Gaza Strip and how it serves annexationist goals in the West Bank,” June, 2020.

  16.  Golan, “Greater Israel Means Greater Problems for the Jewish People,” Ha’aretz, 9 July, 2021.

  17.  One recent poll found that upward of two thirds of French citizens express concern about the idea of a “great replacement”. “67% de Français inquiets par l'idée d'un «grand remplacement», selon un sondage,” Le Figaro, 21 October, 2021.

  18.  And it’s obvious why: whereas right-wing politics seeks to naturalize social hierarchy as a springboard for mobilization, the goal of left-wing politics is to unite otherwise disparate groups according to their shared class interests. Taj Ali of the British democratic socialist magazine Tribune furnishes a good example of the latter in an article in which he explains how a renewed labor movement in the UK could sap the power of Tory politicians attempting to scapegoat migrants for the country’s post-Brexit economic malaise. Ali, “Trade Unions Can Beat the Far-Right," Tribune, 27 February, 2023.

  19.  Lipka, “Religion and politics in Israel: 7 key findings,” Pew Research Center, 8 March, 2016.

  20. Zureik, “Demography and transfer: Israel’s road to nowhere,” Third World Quarterly, 2003, p. 621.

  21. Ibid.

  22.  Levy, “Wombs in the service of the state,” Ha’aretz, 9 September, 2002, quoted in Ibid, p. 625.

  23.  https://www.inss.org.il/history/

  24.  Winter, “Existential Threat Scenarios to the State of Israel,” INSS, 2 September, 2020, p. 108.

  25.  A body that draws 75% of its funding from Israeli state coffers. See United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, “Report on UNCTAD assistance to the Palestinian people: Developments in the economy of the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” 6 July, 2015. For a brief account of the role played by Israel in fostering the PA’s hostility to “democratic values," see Fetouri, “How the Palestinian Authority Became a Subcontractor for Israeli Security,” Middle East Monitor, 13 July, 2023.

  26. Winter, pp. 108-109.

  27.  Dubois, Black Reconstruction (1935), p. 587. 

  28.  Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1987), p. 149.

  29.  Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (1978), p. 188. Note that the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon recently made the rounds of the global press as it was one of many settlements targeted by Hamas in its October 7 “Al-Aqsa Flood” offensive. 

  30.  Koenig, “Top Secret: Memorandum Proposal—Handling the Arabs of Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 1976.

  31. Ibid., p. 191, 193.

  32. Ibid., p. 193.

  33.  Falah, “Israeli ‘Judaization’ Policy in Galilee,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 1991, p. 77.

  34. Ibid., p. 79.

  35. Pappe, pp. 211-212.

  36.  The production of this Mediterranean Jim Crow was shepherded by the putatively “non-government” World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency. The tactical benefit of employing these two institutions in particular was that—being contractually beholden to the “Jewish people” as a whole (including those residing outside of Israel) rather than Israeli citizens—their overtly racist practices could easily pass the test of constitutional muster. In this way, developers could marshal a reliable nucleus of Jewish settlers before releasing their properties to the control of community settlements that—while theoretically under the government's orbit—were effectively impervious to anti-discrimination law as a result of their closed management structure. See Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007), p. 126.

  37.  Summers, “Expansion of ‘admissions committee’ law allows more towns to cherry-pick residents,” The Times of Israel, 26 July, 2023.

  38.  Efrati, “The Demographic Threat: Israelis Abandon the Negev and the Galilee,” INSS, October, 2017, p. 102.

  39. Ibid., p. 100.

  40.  The experiences of the Arab Jews who immigrated to Israel throughout the 1950s and 60s are in this respect highly notable. Being Jews, their physical presence was assigned a high premium by an Israeli state which had just recently conquered millions of acres of Palestinian land and was thus in need of a reliable demographic buffer against Palestinian refugees attempting to return to their abandoned homes. On the other hand, being Arabs, their cultural linkages to Israel's aggrieved neighbors were perceived as a major liability, one that would eventually be eliminated through a campaign of intensive cultural reprogramming. See Shohat, "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” Social Text, 1988, p. 12, 24-25. 

  41.  José et al., Disasters and Mental Health (2005), p. 231. 

  42.  Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine (1996).

  43.  “Fatalities in the First Intifada," B’Tselem.

  44.  Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, “Countries of Origin of Migrants in Israel”. 

  45.  “Palestinian Labor in Israel: A Fluctuating Market Subject to Israel’s Interests,” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question. 

  46.  Shamir and Mundlak, “Spheres of Migration: Political, Economic, and Universal Imperatives in Israel’s Migration Regime,” Middle East Law and Governance, 2013, p. 123.

  47.  “FOREIGN WORKERS (Prohibition of unlawful employment and assurance of fair conditions) LAW 5751-1991,” refworld.org, 1 May, 1991 § “Unlawful night lodging.”  

  48. Shamir and Mundlak, p. 124-125.

  49.  See Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (2011).

  50. Shamir and Mundlak, p. 127-128.

  51.  This is a good time to reiterate the point originally made in footnote 11, i.e. “Article II (d) of the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide explicitly forbids ‘rulers, public officials, [and] private individuals’ from ‘imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a] group.’” 

  52.  Shamir and Mundlak estimate on the basis of Israeli government data that from 2003-2004 alone, some 38,000 migrants were deported from Israel, p. 151.

  53.  Maariv, 25 November, 2002, quoted in Kalir, “To deport or to ‘adopt’? The Israeli dilemma in dealing with children of non-Jewish undocumented migrants,” Ethnography, 19 July, 2020.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Shamir and Mundlak, p. 150.

  56.  Nahmias, “The Government Confirmed the Recommendations of the Committee on the Status of Migrant Workers’ Children: Approximately 400 will be Deported,” Nana10 news, August 1, 2010, quoted in Ibid., p.152. 

  57.  Yasour, “The Deportations Began: A Nigerian Woman and Her Infant Daughter were Imprisoned and Deported,” YNET NEWS, 14 March, 2011, cited in Ibid., p. 153.

  58.  Staff, “Immigration agents arrest foreign worker and her Israel-born special needs son,” The Times of Israel, 22 July, 2019. 

  59.  Krupkin, “Israel is arresting undocumented children,” Jewish Currents, 17 January, 2020. 

  60. Ibid.

  61.  Barkan, “A prison for innocent children,” YNET NEWS, 11 December, 2019. 

  62.  Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (1992), p. 170, quoted in Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2003), p. 104.

  63.  Weinberg, “The Connectivity of Jewish Generational Trauma and Tradition. Oy Vey.," the Wildezine, 13 February, 2020. 

  64.  Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (1987), p. 71, 30. 

  65.  From 1948-1953, over 94% of new Jewish settlements in Israel were established on confiscated Arab property. See Bisharat, “Land, Law, and Legitimacy in Israel and the Occupied Territories,” The American University Law Review, 1994, p. 505. 

  66.  Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956 (1993), p. 49. 

  67. Ibid., p. 99, 137.

  68. Ibid., p. 138.

  69. Ibid., p. 124-125

  70. Hirst, p. 143.

  71. Ibid., p. 191.

  72.  “Iqrit— إقْرِت,” Interactive Encyclopedia on the Question of Palestine.

  73.  “Saint Mary's Church in the Greek Orthodox village of Iqrit,” CC BY 2.5.

  74.  Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 (2002), p. 325. 

  75. Ibid.

  76. Ibid., p. 326.

  77.  From an interview he conducted with the Israeli “Custodian of Absentee [i.e. Palestinian] Property,” the English journalist Robert Fisk discovered that, per the custodian, “about 70 per cent” of the landmass of modern Israel “might potentially have two claimants—an Arab and a Jew holding respectively a British Mandate and an Israeli deed to the same property.” See Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, p. 45. Conjecturally, one might argue in addition that the utility of an eternal Jewish demographic majority in Israel is that it creates a political buffer against any attempt by the Israeli Palestinians (along with other non-Jewish Israelis who perhaps don’t share as great a stake in perpetuating Palestinian dispossession as Israeli Jews) to reclaim their homeland while also technically maintaining the principle of ‘one man, one vote.’ Such a theory also explains Israeli apartheid appears so much less harsh within Israel proper compared to South Africa or the occupied territories—the Palestinians can vote, but only so long as their numbers are kept low enough as not to threaten the political monopoly of Israeli Jews. Meanwhile, the 5 million odd Palestinians living under Israeli occupation are denied political rights entirely, made instead to trudge along under the constant fear that they’ll be evicted, beaten, imprisoned, or, indeed, murdered (all too often in that exact order). See Pappe, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories (2017). 

  78.  The obvious referent here is the recent (and, as of the time of writing, ongoing) Israel-Hamas war, one of whose causes was the Israeli government’s decades-long refusal to allow the Palestinians it had expelled to the Gaza Strip in 1948 and their descendants to return to their homes in southern Israel. When in 2018 Gazans attempted to non-violently protest this arrangement, they were culled in the hundreds by Israeli sniper-fire. See “Six Months On: Gaza’s Great March of Return,” Amnesty International, 19 October, 2018. 

  79.  As it turns out, such a redefinition was attempted by Palestinian citizens of Israel in 2006 with the joint publication of the “Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel," in effect a manifesto calling on the State of Israel to abandon its Jewish character and acknowledge its status as “the homeland for Palestinians and Jews” [emphasis added] (11). Though rebuffed by virtually all Israeli Jews, the Vision documents still hold out the promise of a path not trodden—and which awaits exploration yet. 

  80.  We observe this latter tendency often in claims that criticism of the Israeli government constitutes “antisemitism," a nonsensical charge considering (a): millions of Jews do not in fact live under Israeli suzerainty, and (b): millions of non-Jews do. Indeed, to even countenance such a libel perhaps says more about which of its citizens’ interests the State of Israel really has at heart than the person(s) being singled out for censure. On the other hand, assertions that Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians constitutes an “insult” to the Islamic world fall equally flat on the parallel grounds that (a): millions of Muslims do not live under either Israeli, Palestinian, or joint Israeli-Palestinian suzerainty, and (b): all Palestinians are harmed by Israeli settler-colonialism, including Palestinian Christians (see the case of Iqrit cited above). 

  81.  Though the psychoanalytic literature on Zionism is still in its infancy, it has already yielded several valuable insights about the dynamics of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as potential routes (whether psychosocial or otherwise) toward its resolution. See in particular Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (2021). 

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