by Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho
The author is indebted to Rashid Khalidi and references to his book
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine are noted in the text.
If Israel decides to give full rights to only one ethnic group
and fewer rights to others, it loses its democratic soul —
and with it, I would argue, its Jewish one.
—Jeremy Ben-Ami, The Forward (Jan. 3, 2025)
What began as a terrible trauma and a justified war of defense
turned into a campaign of killing and revenge that has no end.
— Uri Misgav, Haaretz (Jan. 9, 2025)
The Israeli Army has no reason to remain in Gaza,
other than fulfilling messianic settlement wishes.
—837 Parents of Israeli Soldiers
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never
voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
―Martin Luther King Jr.
On January 26, 2005, the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made this statement before the Israeli Knesset (=Parliament): “You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely anti-Zionist. And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God’s green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews — this is God’s own truth.” You may think that this sounds like Martin Luther King, Jr., and it does come from a “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend,” but this has been found to be a forgery.
On October 27, 1969, King was visiting then Harvard Instructor Marty Peretz at his home in Boston. King is reported to have responded to a Black student’s criticism of Israel as follows: “The anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.” Scholars have now determined that this was the source of the forged letter.
King on Palestine (if had lived)
King praised Jewish support for the civil rights movement, and he did support Israel’s right to defend itself in the Six Day War of 1967, for which he urged a quick negotiated settlement. He was also right to criticize the vicious antisemitism that many of us found in the speeches of Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, and others.
I am confident that he would have agreed with me that those who criticize Israel’s various governments are not antisemitic. (That would make, reductio ad absurdum, millions of Jews antisemitic as well.) I also believe, if he lived long enough to see the decades of suffering of the Palestinian people, he would have joined us in calling for justice for the Palestinians in their own land.
Just as the radical Palestinians do, Zionists also use the slogan “from the [Jordan] river to the sea” to reclaim the land of biblical Israel. A Super Zionist map of “Greater Isarel” recently shown on Israeli social media even includes parts of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. This extreme position (antisemitic in a general sense) is one that obviously no international court would ever uphold. In fact, the Palestinian claim has far more legal validity.
King on South Africa’s Apartheid
King spoke out strongly, as early as 1948, against the apartheid (“separateness” of the races) regime in South Africa. He understood why that after the 1960 Sharpsville massacre that took the lives 70 nonviolent protestors, the African National Congress established an armed wing that participated in destruction of infrastructure across the country. King insisted, following Gandhian principles, that nonviolent means such as a world-wide boycott could convince the racist government to reform. We will return to the term apartheid shortly in reference to former President Jimmy Carter.
King on Vietnam
King’s advisers had long exhorted him to speak against the Vietnam War. Finally, in an address at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, King declared that “I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.” When he asserted the “brotherhood of man” goes beyond national allegiances, the undisputed implication is that these words above also apply to the Palestinians and other oppressed peoples of the world.
The 1978 Camp David Accords
Jimmy Carter’s original plans for middle east peace were to reconvene the failed 1973 Geneva Conference where representatives from the U.S., the Soviet Union, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel had met to negotiate. A place for Syria was set but never occupied, primarily because the Syrians insisted on the presence of a Palestinian representative. The U.S. and Israel objected to this provision and this, unfortunately, was case for 20 long years until the Oslo Accords of 1993.
Even when Carter met with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat for 13 tense days in September 1978, he still wanted to include Palestinian issues. As former Carter adviser Stuart Eizenstat explained: “As early as March 1977, Carter had called for a Palestinian homeland (not a state). He told me he saw Palestinians as akin to the Black population of the South, whose discrimination he had witnessed firsthand.” The Camp David Accords ended with no agreement on any Palestinian demands.
Terrorist Menachem Begin
In 1977, before the Camp David talks, Begin and Sadat had a preliminary meeting at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. On July 22, 1946, Begin, on behalf of the Jewish Irgun militia, led a terrorist attack on this hotel and 91 were killed and 47 were injured. Arabs, Britons and Jews were among the casualties. The hotel was the headquarters of the Mandate for Palestine authority as well as the British Army. Begin considered it a legitimate military target and such exceedingly expedient justifications became the rule for Israeli military actions.
Chaim Weizmann, soon to be the first president of Israel, declared: “I can’t help feeling proud of our boys.” The hypocrisy of condemning Palestinian violence with this history of Zionist terrorism is incredible. This act of the Irgun was just one of its many terrorist attacks.
Weizmann was famous for this declaration that the goal of the state of Isarel was to make as “Jewish as England is English” (Khalidi, 40). That end appeared to justify any means to achieve it. Weizmann gives us the simplest and most direct definition of Zionism: taking all of Palestine for the Jews with no rights for the Palestinians.
Israel’s Apartheid Regime
The most controversial writing that Carter ever did was his book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. It received negative reviews across the board, including 14 Jewish members of the Carter Center. In their resignation letter they stated that the book “biased, inaccurate, misleading, and missing key historical facts.” Perhaps Carter should have vetted the manuscript with his closest colleagues.
Carter admitted that some of his words were “completely improper and stupid,” and he apologized for a “terribly worded sentence which implied, obviously in a ridiculous way, that I approved terrorism and terrorist acts against Israeli citizens.” Unfortunately, Carter never published any corrections to the book.
The most contentious issue was Carter’s use of the word “apartheid” and the implication that the Israelis ruled the nation in a way similar to South Africa’s racial regime (1948-1994). I believe, along with many others, that apartheid is indeed the appropriate word.
Even three former Israeli leaders agree that Israel is, or would be, an apartheid state. In 2002, former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair declared: “We established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories.” In 2010, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak stated: “If millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.” In same year former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asserted: “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, we then we have South African-style struggle for equal voting rights.”
On January 3, 2025, Jeremy Ben-Ami, former Clinton adviser, observed that after Israel’s actions in Gaza, “apartheid is increasingly in common use — even by some Israelis and friends of the country, who more and more see the fork in the road Israel faces in the way Carter did. Noting that there are more non-Jews than Jews in the contested areas, Ben-Ami predicts that if a two-state solution is not reached, “millions of non-Jews are going to be permanently deprived of their rights.”
Many Israelis regularly use racist terms for the Palestinians, and one statistic about water distribution in the West Bank is sufficient proof of a state of apartheid. On average each Jewish settler has access to 247 liters every day. West Bank Palestinians survive on 26 liters per day, but their brothers and sisters in Gaza are near death at 3 liters per day.
Human Rights Watch published report 2021 that summarized apartheid in Israel as follows: “Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
In July 2021, a Jewish Electorate Institute poll indicated that 58% of American Jewish voters were against the West Bank settlements and they insisted that the Biden administration suspend all U.S. aid until the expansion stops. The same poll found, significantly, that 25% believed that Israel was an apartheid state and 22% believed that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.
Zionists as Colonizers
The Jews once lived, with few exceptions, in peace with their Arab neighbors for about 1,300 years. Then European Zionists proposed that, with the permission of Britain and with no consultation with the Arabs, that Palestine was their land. (This was true only in biblical times.) The 1917 Balfour Declaration does not mention the Palestinians by name, and it only promised that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
In a speech to an American audience in 1948, Jordanian King Abdulla I concluded with a compelling observation. Britain, France, and the U.S. had refused to take but a few Jewish refugees, but they expected Palestinian Arabs to receive them. The Jewish population of Palestine in 1917 was 6 percent but it grew to 30 percent by 1939.
A common argument goes like this: both the Jews and Palestinians are indigenous to the area, so both have an equal right to the land. The correct parallel, however, is that with British support, European Zionists became colonizers with all the attendant repercussions.
In the early days after the Balfour Declaration a British official admitted that the “British government was not the colonizing power; the Jewish people are the colonizing power” (Khalidi, 52). The British soon realized that they could not control the activities of the Jewish settlers, and that “by the end of the 1930s it was too late change the lopsided balance of forces that had developed between the Jews and the Palestinians” (Khalidi, 53).
The Palestinian Revolt of 1937-39
Palestinian protests were initially met with “white papers” from seven British commissions from 1922 to 1938. None of the recommendations to meet Palestinian demands came to fruition primarily because of Jewish pressure. Initially, the Palestinian leaders ordered a six-month general strike, but, after no response, Palestinian militants led “an unprecedented, country-wide violent” revolt in 1937 (Khalidi, 42).
The result was the 1937-39 War which pitted Palestinian militants against 100,000 British troops supplemented by air force bombers. Khalidi explains the results: “The bloody war waged against the country’s majority, which left 14 to 17 percent of the adult male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled, was the best illustration of the . . . necessity of the use of force for the Zionist project to succeed” (Khalidi, 43). The possession of a single bullet was enough for an Arab to be summarily executed.
Since then, Israel has acted in ways similar to the British colonial policy of divide and conquer. Beginning in the 2000s, Israel favored Islamist Hamas over the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization. That resulted in unforeseen, but devastating, consequences.