Israel Is an Apartheid State ‘From the River to the Sea’
By Alan Singer
Pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses denouncing Israeli genocide in Gaza are condemned as antisemitic for chants like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” For a long time, rightwing Israel governments have gotten a free pass for pursuing a similar goal, a Jewish apartheid state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
In the May/June 2023 issue of Foreign Affairs, four noted American Middle Eastern scholars, Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, and Marc Lynch of George Washington University and Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, published an article “Israel’s One-State Reality” based on a book they edited The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine? (Cornell University Press, 2023). Lynch and Telhami were recently interviewed for his New York Times podcast by Ezra Klein where they reasserted their thesis in light of the October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and the brutal Israel response.
The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine? and the Foreign Affairs article argue that “Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and people are subject to radically different legal regimes and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste. Policymakers and analysts who ignore this one-state reality will be condemned to failure and irrelevance.” Israel is an apartheid state with “relations of superiority and inferiority between Jews and non-Jews across all the territories under Israel’s differentiated but unchallenged control.”
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Source: Daily Kos
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Alan Singer is the director of Secondary Education Social Studies Teaching Learning Technology at Hofstra University and the author of Class-Conscious Coal Miners. Blogs, tweets, essays, and interviews present his views and not those of the university.