From the River to the Sea: There is one Israeli dictatorship [a Free Haifa, 16 November real life expose – originally published in Mondoweiss on 11 November.]
The 4 paragraph ‘verbatim introduction’ only:
Since October 7, dissent inside Israel has been violently put down by the government under the leadership of Itamar Ben-Gvir.
A main achievement of Israeli Apartheid over the years was the division of the Palestinian people. While Jews (and other colonialist settlers of all creeds) may roam freely from the river to the sea and enjoy the whole spectrum of privileges, from free speech to the “right” to expropriate Palestinian land, the native Arab Palestinians are confined to enclaves and divided by different systems of discrimination and oppression, different leaderships and different (illusory) political perspectives.
The semblance of democracy in ‘48 Palestine was a strong weapon in Israel’s propaganda war to claim itself as “basically a democracy,” disturbed only by “temporary occupation” (already 56 years old) of the West Bank and Gaza. The reality for Palestinians in the -48 occupied areas was never democratic: major political parties (al-Ard in the fifties and sixties and the Islamic Movement in the previous decade) were disbanded, and their leaders and activists were persecuted. Systematic ethnic cleansing, home demolition, and land confiscation continued uninterrupted throughout the state of Israel’s 75 years. The participation of some Arab parties in the Zionist Knesset was used internally to constantly incite racist public opinion against them while marketed internationally as proof of Israel’s “lively” democracy.
While estimating what political activity in 48 would not put us behind bars, we are used to speak of the “democratic margins” that are tolerable by the regime. The width of those margins has changed over the years. From 1948 until 1966, Palestinians under Israeli rule were subject to a military regime that was stricter than what was later imposed in the West Bank: you had to ask for special permission from the military governor even to visit your relatives in the next village. Later, when Israel felt it had become a world-class empire, and when Israeli society became more capitalist and more individualistic, these margins expanded gradually, but never to the level that allowed the Palestinians, who are formal citizens of Israel, any real influence over their, or the country’s, fate.