Analysis

The right to live without Arabs

The US Secretary of Justice just said what in a recent White House meeting?

“Blacks are buying apartments in white towns in the South and this is driving white people out of these towns, because they don't want to live with Blacks. One must ensure there are Judges who understand this in the Supreme Court.”

He hasn’t. A US official wouldn’t dare say that today. But replacing “Black” with “Arab” and “white people” with “Jews,” you get exactly what the Israeli Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, said recently to justify his far-right government’s push for judicial “reform.”

“Arabs are buying apartments in Jewish towns in the Galilee and this is driving Jews out of these towns, because they don't want to live with Arabs. One must ensure there are Judges who understand this in the Supreme Court,” Levin said.

This is not some equivalent to a KKK leader in the US or some head of a fringe fascist party in Europe saying this. This is a senior Israeli leader. The closest equivalent are statements by leaders of the defunct apartheid regime in South Africa.

The fact that Levin’s quote tries to hide, though, is that Israel’s Supreme Court has already been for decades a pillar of what B’Tselem calls, “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid.”

The court has consistently rejected demands for full equality of Israeli citizens as that would pose an existential threat to Israel as a Jewish supremacy.

The Supreme Court has approved tens of racist laws that have made 93% of the land within Israel’s pre-1967 borders available only to its Jewish citizens, denying Indigenous Palestinian citizens the right to buy or even lease land in that area.

It has also upheld a law empowering “admissions committees” of Jewish-only settlements built on state land in the Naqab (Negev) and Galilee to filter out Palestinians by rejecting housing applicants if deemed “unsuitable to the community’s social life.”

These committees, which include a representative from the racist Jewish Agency or the World Zionist Organization, are authorized to adopt unique admission criteria for exclusion based on their “special characteristics,” such as having a “Zionist vision.”

Since its creation through ethnic cleansing, Israel has always been a settler colony imposing an apartheid regime against Indigenous Palestinians–a “herrenvolk democracy” for colonial settlers & a brutal tyranny for Palestinians. #DismantleApartheid

For further reading, check out our analysis of Israel’s new far-right government: Unprecedented challenges and opportunities.


SHARE

Stay updated!

Sign-up for news, campaign updates, action alerts and fundraisers from the BDS movement.

Subscribe Now