Israel has voted for genocide and for the ongoing Nakba against Indigenous Palestinians. We call for escalating BDS pressure globally to further isolate Israel’s regime of genocide and settler-colonial apartheid as the most effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice, refugees’ return, reparation, and liberation.
More than three years into its ongoing genocide, or what a leading Israeli human rights advocate has called a “holocaust in Gaza,” Israel has voted for genocidal business as usual against Palestinians. Israeli Zionist parties are sharply divided on social, economic and ideological issues, from how the settler-colony should be governed; how much “independence” the judiciary should enjoy; whether ultra-orthodox Jewish citizens must also serve in the military and share the tax burden or not; etc. Yet, there is near consensus among them on the main elements of the regime of colonial oppression.
On the rightmost end of the spectrum of the Israeli opposition parties sits General Gadi Eisenkot, who is responsible for a long list of war crimes and crimes against humanity, served in Netanyahu’s government for eight months during the ongoing genocide in Gaza, opposes Palestinian statehood, and is the mastermind of the Israeli’s army’s Dahiya Doctrine, which calls for disproportionate force against civilians. On the “leftmost” end of that spectrum is General Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, who has advocated for some of the worst genocidal crimes against Palestinians in Gaza. In an interview on 13 October 2023, for example, Golan said, “First of all, close all the electricity switches to Gaza. I think that in this battle, it is forbidden to allow a humanitarian effort. We need to say to them: listen, until the [captives] are released, from our side, you can die from starvation. It’s totally legitimate.”
Given this genocidal consensus in the Israeli Zionist opposition camp, the chair of Israel’s largest human rights organization B’Tselem has said, “Israel is unleashing a holocaust in Gaza, and it cannot be dismissed as the will of the country’s current fascist leaders alone. … What we are witnessing is the final stage in the nazification of Israeli society.”
A day before the elections, a UN Independent Commission of Inquiry issued a report finding that Israel has continued to commit genocide, extermination and other war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians, highlighting the persistence of these crimes into 2026, despite the “ceasefire.” Israeli media and voters and the mainstream media and governments of the colonial West expectedly ignored the report.
Instead, and given Israel’s unprecedented unpopularity globally, the choreographed obsession of those governments and media outlets with every detail of the Israeli elections has revealed a desperate attempt by the colonial West to erase the above genocidal consensus, to rehabilitate apartheid Israel, to re-present it as a "democracy," albeit a flawed one, and to blame all the genocide and planned extermination "issues" on Netanyahu in order to bury them with the possible burial of his political career.
Indeed, the colonial West, with its media, thinktanks, heads of academic and cultural institutions, etc., wants to distract the global majority from the genocide, especially the growing starvation of hundreds of thousands of our people in Gaza, the escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the genocidal violence in Lebanon, and the wars of aggression on other peoples in the region from Syria to Iran. They want people to forget the International Court of Justice's decisions about Israel's plausible genocide and its entirely illegal occupation and apartheid so as to deflect from their legal obligations triggered by these decisions, including cutting military, trade, diplomatic, academic, cultural and all other relations with Israel that enable its illegal occupation and apartheid.
It is worth mentioning that parties representing Palestinian second-class citizens of apartheid Israel have won an unprecedented number of seats in the Israeli Parliament due to a high turnout that reflected an attempt against all odds to defend Palestinian existence and to resist Israel's ever escalating colonial efforts to drive them out of their lands, jobs, and communities. They predominantly realize, though, that apartheid, regardless how less or more fascist the ruling coalition may be, will still subjugate them. Israel's Zionist settler-colonial regime has always been, since its creation in 1948 through the premeditated destruction of the Palestinian homeland, a system of Jewish supremacy and oppression.
For Indigenous Palestinians, whether second-class citizens of apartheid Israel, living under and resisting its illegal occupation, or in exile denied the right to return, very little will change with the settler colony's possible change of appearance, as the core structures of its genocidal settler-colonial power remain the same.
Our response must be to insist that there will never be any rehabilitation of genocidal Israel in any forum globally and to escalate BDS pressure to isolate its regime of settler-colonial apartheid, just as apartheid South Africa once was. This must include:
- Expelling Israel from the UN and all regional and international fora such as FIFA, Olympics, UEFA, Eurovision, academic and professional associations, European research program Horizon, etc.
- Imposing comprehensive military and energy embargoes.
- Ending all free-trade agreements and cutting all trade, diplomatic, financial, academic, cultural and other relations that enable Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid, as demanded by the ICJ.
- Ending all transactions with Israeli banks and companies.
- Boycotting, wherever feasible, and pushing for exclusion from procurement and investment all companies complicit in Israel’s genocide, apartheid or illegal occupation.
- Escalating academic, cultural and sports boycotts against Israel and all its complicit institutions and “cultural ambassadors.”
As millions worldwide have repeatedly chanted, Palestine frees us all. Israel’s regime of oppression is a threat to humanity, not just Palestinians and peoples of the region. It is a partner of fascist governments worldwide, and its election-rigging and spy technologies are accelerating the erosion of democracy everywhere. Emboldened by Israel’s livestreamed genocide, imperialist powers, particularly the US, are losing their masks and reviving 19th century-style unmasked colonial conquest and resource theft. The hyper spending on militarization and wars means further destruction of the environment and much faster erosion of the welfare state, of social, health and educational services, of democratic rule, of international law and the UN, especially at the expense of the most vulnerable.
Stopping Israel’s genocide, dismantling its regime of apartheid, and holding the entire Israeli regime and its accomplices in crime in the west accountable must therefore be at the center of resisting the might-makes-right era led by Israel and its Western partners in crime. A better world is indeed possible, and today, Palestinian liberation lies at its center.