(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish / Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) October 6, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—On paper, officially, “legally,” both the West Bank and the United States have clear ways that security forces are to bound to be applied from any central governing authority in particular areas, deferring to local forces and limiting the roles of those coming from outside. But as both Israel and the U.S. implode politically on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist pogrom against Israel and the beginning of the even larger mass-killing of Israel’s Gaza campaign, it is important to understand how far from reality this description actually ends up being under the current crises both nation nations face.

Wrecking Boundaries in the West Bank

But in the West Bank, Israeli leaders have long ignored many of these supposed restrictions at will, none more so from the top than extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The West Bank is by far the largest of the three Palestinian territories forming the State of Palestine and occupied during the Six Day-War in June 1967 by the Israel Defense Forces (or IDF, i.e., the Israeli army) and still illegally occupied after all these years (the other Palestinian areas being the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem).  For decades, Israel has illegally colonized these lands and transferred some of its Jewish population illegally to form illegal Jewish settler communities—often of religious fanatics—on Palestinian land, sometimes ethnically cleansing Palestinian communities in the process.   Netanyahu, a champion of the settler movement often nicknamed “Bibi,” has served more time as prime minister than any Israeli, including Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion; indeed, Netanyahu seems willing to do just about anything to maintain power, including repeatedly prolonging the current horrific “war” (a term loosely applied) in Gaza.  Since the 1993 Oslo peace process began, a three-tiered system is supposed to govern whether Israelis or Palestinians hold civil or security authority in the West Bank: Area A (Palestinian security and civil), Area B (Israeli security, Palestinian civil), and Area C (Israeli security and civil).  In reality, Israel treats all areas as if it can do whatever it pleases whenever it pleases: new illegal Israeli settlements in the middle of Palestinian land, abrupt arrests of Palestinian officials trying to exercise their duties, or raids deep into the heart of the most populous Palestinian cities care not what lines on the map say, and the Israeli political and military leaders have also long since stopped caring (Netanyahu himself bragged repeatedly over the years up through the present about killing the Oslo process that even brought these three Areas about).

Your Posse Is Not Legal, Mr. President

In the United States, possible tensions between the civil and military spheres preoccupied the Founding Fathers so much so that there was no official permanent standing army established by the Constitution and George Washington himself was lionized as a hero in the mold of Cincinnatus for stepping down from supreme military power when his duty was done (and as much for that as anything else he ever did, which says a lot).  There was a bold, idealistic, prescient experiment in Reconstruction (1865-1877)—really the last phase of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) over slavery—to bring about multiracial democracy that achieved much relying on the deployment and backing of federal troops before succumbing to white supremacist terrorist insurrections throughout the recalcitrant South.  Some dynamics during Reconstruction in the South in key ways resembled the West Bank in that whites in the South eventually used lawless means to establish control over security forces and courts to create a separate-and-unequal system, violating Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments and laws to instead impose a pre-apartheid apartheid system on newly-freed people in the South that would come to be known as the Jim Crow “legal” system and would take most of a century to dismantle.

Simultaneously, while Reconstruction wound down as a failed experiment, Americans were uneasy about the fact that the newly mighty U.S. military after the Civil War had been used so much in civil affairs in formerly rebel southern states, so the Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 to more clearly define the U.S. civil-military divide, already quite strong without it.  The law further codified that the federal military cannot be used for domestic civilian law enforcement purposes with a few exceptions for special, unique, and extreme circumstances often as laid out in very specific laws.  This law was passed in 1878 shortly after Reconstruction ended by both the House and Senate with comfortable margins and signed into law by then-President Rutherford B. Hayes.  The exceptions allow the president to work around or go over the Act in times of severe emergencies.

While there are some issues of “ambiguity” in the Posse Comitatus Act, the long tradition of taking great care with the use of military forces on U.S. soil in non-war settings is clear and Trump’s domestic military deployments in 2025 are not ambiguous in that his premises for deploying them to begin with were flat-out-false or grotesquely unproven, unsubstantiated assertions (“untethered to the facts,” in federal Judge Karin Immergut’s words from her ruling after an emergency hearing in Oregon late yesterday; for this, permanent caricature and White House Deputy Chief Staff Stephen Miller irresponsibly and dangerously called her actions a “legal insurrection” that aids “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers,” yet another proclamation of open season on the judiciary).  The Trump Administration’s wild claims are contrary to existing publicly available information, with no serious attempts made to counter such information with a proper presentation of demonstrably better or updated information as would be expected under a normal, functioning government.  And though he has far more authority to deploy troops to the District of Columbia, of which I live just outside (so yes, I have seen these illegally deployed forces many times and spoken with them), false premises were still articulated for the DC deployment, so it was still, therefore, illegal before any other considerations are raised (despite raising concerns about the statistics for crime in DC, Trump authorized deployments to the District outside of any federal process to review, challenge, or improve crime statistics reporting in Washington, a common problem many cities confront, and the U.S. Department of Justice only initiated an investigation after Trump’s deployment; any effort to demonstrate any sort of adherence to proper procedure would have seen the investigation happen and conclude far before any military deployment, prove the statistics are clearly false, and demonstrate that officials in Washington were bad-faith and not cooperating or responding to good-faith efforts to obtain cooperation or improve said statistics).

Plenty of scholars have also pointed out that both the intent and context of Posse Comitatus Act and its related laws at the times they were enacted and the spirits with which they have been enforced since are incompatible with Trump’s machinations, not just legally but also constitutionally.  And the main exceptions allowed for and invoked under the 1807 Insurrection Act are for situations totally different than the country finds itself in today: it and precursor legislation saw thirty events in U.S. history result in invocation since 1792, the most recent occurrence for the 1992 L.A. riots. This was notably at the request of California’s governor at the time, the opposite of Trump’s baseless, illegal and unconstitutional deployments there now in 2025.

West Banking America

But the point is, whether in the West Bank of the United States, there are clear restrictions on a.) military forces being deployed in normal circumstances and, even in extraordinary circumstances, b.) when, c.) where, and d.) how they can be deployed.

Yet as noted, for years, Israel and especially Netanyahu have ignored these restrictions whenever they have felt like it and, indeed, have increasingly attacked the idea that these restrictions have any validity whatsoever.  In short, the law is treated as whim, and everyone knows the dirty truth deep down that even some Israelis can admit: the West Bank is an apartheid system, based on religion and ethnicity: ethnic and religious Jews with Israeli citizenship in the West Bank are accorded full Israeli civil rights in the face of Israeli authority, while, in practice, Palestinians (be they Muslim or Christian) have no rights at all and are totally subject to whatever whims and depredations the military rule of the Israeli state and its supporters mete out, up to and including mass vandalism, rampant property destruction, prodigious assaults, orchestrated ethnic cleansing, rarely-punished murders (even of Palestinian-Americans), and indefinite child detention, whether from official government security forces or any number of Jewish settlers engaging increasingly in terrorism with the state’s backing, sometimes far more than tacit.  Even before October 7 in 2023, that year was still the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the Second Intifada that ended in 2005, meaning the deliberate escalation in the West Bank by Israel has little to do with October 7, and settlers have even attacked positions of their own IDF in the West Bank when such settlers feel they are not being given enough impunity, showing their lawlessness knows no bounds.  Essentially, you have rights or not based on who Israeli authorities want to have rights there, and they award them to their side while denying them to the other.  Lines on maps, the law, human rights (for those they deemed unworthy) meant nothing, but rewarding their supporters and punishing their opponents is everything.

What has been the obvious “legal” reality for many years in the West Bank—only intensifying more and more over time both qualitatively and quantitatively and now exploding—is now something Trump wants to recreate for all America, turning the whole country into a Wild West Bank of Lawlessness.

But where for Israel, the divides are relatively simple and easy—Jewish vs. Palestinian—here it’s MAGA against everyone, even sometimes other MAGA (some Trump voters are now seeing friends, coworkers, and family members deported, detained, or arrested, even veterans).  If you are a U.S. citizen supporting what Trump is doing and your family and friends also match this description, you have little to worry about when it comes to this (for now…).  But if you are an immigrant who is undocumented/unauthorized who has no criminal record, a legal non-citizen resident—even one showing up for your own immigration hearing—or a U.S. citizen who is either ready to exercise your constitutional rights to ask questions, protest, and confront what is happening or is just at the wrong place at the wrong time, you are not necessarily protected by the law anymore.  Furthermore, by far the vast majority of the human beings being detained and deported are non-violent and non-criminal, whatever nonsense is claimed to the contrary by whomever in power.  And the masked, large, tattooed, angry individuals newly minted as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents in paramilitary style and other federal fun folks are here to make sure you do not feel safe.  Are you an elected official, including a sitting U.S. Senator, simply asking questions of federal officials?  It does not matter, you can be handcuffed or bodyslammed with the least-protected among us.

Like Netanyahu and too many Israeli leaders in years before, Trump and his similarly extreme, similarly-minded counterparts are hell-bent on erasing, de facto or de jure, the lines the Posse Comitatus Act solidified in the sand on the limits of the use of federal military in a civilian setting, lines for principles clearly enshrined by U.S. Constitution and over two centuries of precedent, principles the Trump Administration is shredding not just in the streets of American cities but even partly also in the waters off the coast of Venezuela.

In seeking to erase legal rules binding the authorization, deployment, and use of federal military forces on U.S. soil in civilian settings (leaving similar jurisdictional mission creep in Venezuela aside), Trump and his MAGA minions with illegal occupation in America are trying to recreate key aspects of the fascist nightmare of the illegally occupied West Bank.  But here in the U.S., this is not based on two warring and competing nationalities and one of those nationalities’ democratically elected leaders pursuing total subjugation at best or actual genocide of the other nationality at worst, broadcast daily for all the world to see and fueled by insane colonialist, imperialist, expansionist fever-dreams based on ancient fantasies and ancient maps, no.  Here in the U.S., Trump is trying to divide Americans on ideological, political, identity, and legal-status lines, lines he will use to award and protect rights for some, deny them to others, still dangle to yet others as ways of obtaining “obeying in advance” or to even explicitly threaten, say, ABC and Disney over a certain late-night host named Kimmy Kimmel.  As JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois fighting back against Trump’s illegal military deployments to Chicago, noted during that drama: “Tyranny requires constant effort.  It breaks, it leaks.  Authority is brittle.  Oppression is the mask of fear.  Remember that,” quoting the amazing antifascist masterpiece that is the Star Wars show Andor.  Yet, we must also remember that, however much Trump and Netanyahu act out of fear of losing power, they are also clearly in the drivers’ seats, consolidating more and more power for themselves in ways the founder fathers of both the U.S. and Israel never intended.

And while there is hardly the level of violence between the sides as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even as political violence in the U.S. may be on the rise, dynamics are between the two have been converging somewhat for some time and make no mistake about it, the key principle is the same: longstanding, binding legal distinctions are melting away in the face of determined illegality, such that the law disappears and factional whim reigns supreme so one side can enforce its will upon the other, tyranny replacing law as the very system.  In short, Trump seeks to create a political apartheid here in the U.S., a West Bank of Left and Right, “evil” and “good,” veering Manichaean and not dissimilar in legal nihilism to the separate and unequal system of Jew and Palestinian (or “Arab,” so much less specific…) in the West Bank’s Nablus but bringing it to New York.

Adding New Meaning to “Executing” the Law

To execute their plans, both Trump and Netanyahu have hosts of extremists willing to unquestioningly nakedly embrace the partisanship of their missions, from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, from U.S. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (all of whom have had their own past issues with illegality or criminal probes well-before 2025: Ben-Gvir and Smotrich being convicted and arrested terrorists, respectively; Bondi in the center of a criminal bribery and obstruction scandal with Trump; and the brotastic Pete Hegseth, well, being brotastic Pete Hegseth…), just to name a few, with far, far too many others alongside.  And these allies have made it clear, sometimes as senior law enforcement officials: if we don’t like you, the law cannot protect you from us and we are coming for you, even for your children.  While in Israel, broadening this behavior to include Israeli Jewish citizens has been far milder than what has been done to Palestinians—even those in Israel with Israeli citizenship but especially those without Israeli citizenship outside of Israel in the actual territories of actual Palestine—Trump and his lawless allies are rapidly casting a far wider dragnet, or at least attempting to do so, advancing on several fronts even as I write this.

Yes, you are witnessing the MAGA Trump Administration’s attempts at illegal jurisdictional jumps dehumanizingly intending to target both directly and indirectly various large swaths of the population in America, illegal deployment by illegal deployment, related measure by related measure, until Trump has created a de facto national federalized police state he can use to prosecute and intimidate his opposition and others deemed undesirable, jurisdictional issues and the law be damned.  They have lost the program when it comes morality, cartoonishly celebrating their roles as oppressors (of certain people) and projecting so publicly for all to see.

Maybe a lot of this should not be surprising, since both men have no problem breaking the law: Trump is an insurrectionist and convicted felon and Netanyahu is currently on trial in three cases in Israel for damning corruption crimes (with Trump, unsurprisingly in true birds-of-a-feather mode, even very publicly pressuring Israel to stop Netanyahu’s trial) in addition to having the International Criminal Court issue a warrant for his arrest in 2024 for war crimes.  Both men are fascists remaking their countries in a fascist image of their former democracies, the actions mentioned herein just some of the examples (I do not use the term “fascist” lightly, but carefully and specifically and with history in mind).

At this point, one really has to wonder if either the U.S. or Israel can still be fairly termed “democracies,” because in key ways, the rule of law is damaged, dying, or dead as both Israel and the U.S.—Bibi and Donnie—continue to feed, rather than restrain, each other’s worst tendencies.

But it is both too easy and too simple to blame just such leaders: voters in both countries could have easily set their countries on different paths—ones that respected the rule of law—and voters in both countries rejected, even if narrowly, the rule of law in favor of Trump, Netanyahu, and the fascism they represent, whether they realize it or not.  And perhaps nothing screams fascist more than violently taking away legal protections for the most vulnerable and defenseless and, in turn, their allies in order to expose the chosen to ever more deprivation and violence at the hands of the same people taking away their rights and protections.

In the current state of Israel’s short history, this could simply mean the end of Israeli democracy.  In the U.S. context, this would be like the success of white supremacist terrorists during Reconstruction in brutally taking away Freedmen’s rights throughout the south, except that Trump is engaging in this massive ripping away of rights not in one region but in the whole country.  2025 may yet be known a watershed year for America, Israel, and Palestine, but only for the most horrific, sad, pathetic, and—perhaps most importantly—most preventable of ways.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 2025 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content, Threads @bfchugginalong) September 20, 2023; see related July 28, 2014 article The Israel-Hamas Gaza High-Stakes Poker Game of Death, October 26, 2015 article Blame Bibi Netanyahu for the Violence First, Then Blame Both the Israeli and Palestinian People, and February 17, 2017 article: Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—Tamir Pardo, a former chief of Israel’s famed foreign intelligence agency called the Mossad, recently flat-out explicitly labeled the Israel governance of the West Bank as apartheid.  Pardo’s use of the term apartheid goes significantly further than other former senior Israeli officials, who have warned of the possibility of Israel becoming apartheid but have not used the term so unequivocally to refer to anything in the here-and-now. 

Israel’s last prime minister to govern Israel from the left (over two decades ago), the Labor Party’s decorated general Ehud Barak, has been warning for over a decade that Israel faces a devolution into apartheid. Israel’s last centrist prime minister, Ehud Olmert of the now defunct Kadima Party, has echoed him.  But the latest Israeli titan to engage in these warnings is hardly a leader of some left-wing human rights-group and did not serve a leftist or centrist government.  Indeed, Pardo is no lefty: he was appointed by the right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself to run Mossad from 2011-2016.  Now, the unlikely Pardo is raising the alarm that some of Netanyahu’s current allies in power are “a lot worse” than even the U.S. Ku Klux Klan.

In Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, it ended up occupying the then-Jordanian-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Egypt-occupied Gaza Strip, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and Syria’s Golan Heights; while Sinai has been returned since U.S. President Jimmy Carter brokered the Egypt-Israeli 1979 peace treaty, Israel illegally occupies East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights today and partially occupies and exercises most of the de facto sovereignty over Gaza still today.  While Egypt never formally tried to annex Gaza during its occupation of it from 1948-1967, its occupation was still not officially endorsed by the United Nations or most nations as a proper de jure authorized occupation.  Similarly, nearly every country in the world rejected as illegal Jordan’s 1950 annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

By the same principles applied to Egypt and Jordan that legally rejected any possibility of those countries unilaterally deciding to indefinitely take over and rule these territories in question that they occupied before they were driven out and defeated by Israel in 1967, today nearly the entire world rejects as illegal Israel’s (partial) annexation and decades-long de facto rule of the territories it still retains and/or controls from its occupations begun in 1967.

And this very much includes the West Bank.

Denying the Reality of or Maintaining Apartheid Occupation in the West Bank Does Not “Help” Israel

Those who claim to be “pro-Israel” or to support it who keep either turning a blind eye to, or outright campaigning for, Israeli colonial imperialism in Palestinian territory are neither “pro-Israel” nor true supporters of Israel but are akin to a friend buying methamphetamine for a meth-addict friend.  The Palestinian territory comprising the West Bank has been recognized by the overwhelming majority of nations since international recognition of Israel and Israel’s birth as a state in 1948 as well as after the territory’s occupation by Israel in 1967 as very much legally not Israel, and Palestinians have by far been the majority population for many centuries in the West Bank and still are in spite of illegal colonial demographic engineering on the part of Israel.  Despite ancient ancestral Jewish ties to the West Bank, as with ancient ancestral ties of many peoples around the world, such ties are not a legal basis for modern unilateral annexation or recolonization, nor the subjugation of current inhabitants; such revanchist claims could result in maps being rearranged all over the world and bloody wars, just as during World War II and the current case with Russia’s colonialist imperialist ambitions today in Ukraine. 

The powerful forces of hubris, power, revanchist expansionism, and cruelty of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank are noted in the words of even prominent now-more-conservative Jewish-Israeli historian Benny Morris:

Israeli thinking [after 1967] was to some degree governed by the notion that the Arabs of the territories, starved of land and resources (primarily water), and denied the possibility of industrial development, would gradually drift away.  Though never clearly enunciated, this was the government’s aim—especially after 1977.  And, indeed, over the decades, a steady trickle of West Bank and Gaza Arabs left their homes to find an easier life abroad…

There was a clear lesson for the inhabitants of the territories and the Palestinian diaspora in these events: Israel intended to stay in the West Bank, and its rule would not be overthrown or ended through civil disobedience and civil resistance, which were easily crushed. The only real option was armed struggle.

(Righteous Victims, 339, 341)

These powerful forces are proving addictive drugs to the very worst of Israeli society, elements who are not just the dregs but have become more mainstream and are firmly in the driver’s seat under Netanyahu’s unprecedented extremist right-wing government.  Those who think the inner turmoil and Israel’s domestic lurch towards extremism are wholly or even mostly separate from Israel’s more-than-a-half-century illegal military occupation and rule of Palestinians and Palestinian land (which I have discussed in detail before) are deluding themselves and their audience: the corrosion of the occupation is intimately intertwined with the corrosion of Israeli society and politics, the corruption of one becoming the corruption of the other.  As Morris writes:

Israelis liked to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an “enlightened” or “benign” occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen.  The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation…

Military administration, uncurbed by the civil rights considerations that applied in Israel, possessed ample measures to suppress dissidence and protest.  These included curfews; house arrest, with resulting loss of wages; judicial proceedings, ending in prison terms or fines—the work of the military courts in the territories, and the Supreme Court which backed them, will surely go down as a dark age in the annals of Israel’s judicial system—or expulsions; administrative detentions, or imprisonment without trial, for renewable six-month terms; and commercial and school shutdowns, usually in response to shopkeepers’ strikes or disturbances by students.  The Israelis could withhold or, alternatively, grant to collaborators, travel permits, commercial or building licenses, family reunion approvals, and marketing and work permits.  Such measures were often used selectively and, occasionally, collectively.  Sometimes whole towns were denied the right to receive visitors from the Arab states, such as Ramallah in the summer of 1968.

…[R]esistance met with quick and brutal repression.  Midnight sweeps and arrests; beatings, sensory deprivation measures, and simple, old – style torture to extract information and confessions; a system of military courts which bore no resemblance to the administration of justice in Western democracies (or, for that matter, in Israel proper); the demolition (or sealing) of suspects’ houses; long periods of administrative detention; and deportations—all were systematically employed.  Most of the measures had been introduced by the British during their suppression of the Arab rebellion of 1936–39 and were still on the statute books in the form of “emergency regulations.”

(341-342) [See my graduate school paper on the British Mandate of Palestine]

Such practices hardly ended then and continue today, as other well-documented sources cited below will amply confirm.

In so casually and harshly denying democracy, freedom, and human rights to the majority of a whole section of people de facto under their control for so long and lying to themselves about these very plain facts and the nature of their “benign” occupation, Israelis over time festered an inevitability that the quality of democracy, freedom, and human rights within their Israel—under international law established firmly behind 1967 lines and properly recognized as the Israeli state by nearly every other nation—would be dragged down and perhaps mortally threatened by the corrosive effects of the actions they have been undertaking for half-a-century so close by in the West Bank with generations of their conscripted citizen-army.  And thus, after more than five-and-a-half decades of militarized apartheid occupation, it is no wonder that the domestic situation within Israel is now unraveling once the people most zealously committed to these very policies in the West Bank came to be running Israel’s domestic affairs as key members of the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history after Israel’s most recent national elections.

A young Jewish Israeli leftist mother I know from my travels in Israel whom I checked in with just recently wrote to me: “My grandparents fled Germany and now I’m trying to get a German passport.  But now the Nazis are in Israel.  I mean, there are some in Germany, but not as many.”  I wouldn’t use the term “Nazi” myself, but fascist, as there is certainly now more than a whiff of fascism in the air there, just like in the U.S. and too many other places, but it is surprisingly common in Israeli political discourse for “Nazi” to be applied as a pejorative.

Palestinian Terrorism Is Not a Justification for What Is Over a Half-Century of Obvious Apartheid

I am sure some Israelis, some American Jews, and some others—including people I know—will not be pleased, will even be upset, at use of the term apartheid here.  To those people, I would state simply the fact that the millions of Palestinians living in Palestine’s West Bank will not be pleased, and are very upset, to a much higher degree, that their actually living under an apartheid legal, political, and social system—the very definition of separate and unequal that would also fit the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow U.S. South for close to a century until the implementation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—constitutes far, far greater actual injury than any perceived injury apologists for Israel feel at the use of the word apartheid to describe Israeli de facto rule of the West Bank. 

The U.S. analogy is particularly useful, because while there are important historical differences—we are talking about freed slaves after the Civil War, their descendants, Hispanic-Americans and other minorities the U.S. who were U.S. citizens but were denied equal rights in officially segregated areas until 1965 in one instance, and the Palestinian people living in the West Bank (and for a very long time and still in many ways in Gaza) who came under military occupation in 1967 and their descendants living there up through today on the other—the legal de facto similarities are undeniable and put them in much the same de facto category (in the West Bank city of Khalil/Hebron, I have seen whole sections of their own city that Palestinians are banned from entering, metal detectors for Palestinians entering the city’s most historic mosque but not for Jewish settlers who converted part of the mosque into a synagogue, and a street where one side is for Jews, the other for Palestinians, where I saw Palestinians—including children—inspected and harassed by Israeli soldiers while just going about their own business).  Israel’s apologists play a semantic and legalistic game that is wholly unconvincing.  Call it West Bank Jim Crow for all I care, but it’s the same kind of system in that two sets of people are defined on the basis of their ethnicity and ancestry as falling into two unequal legal sets of rights, rules, and punishments, the harsher one forced by one set of people upon the other set against their will  and without their consent, giving the people forcing the system on the unwilling far more rights than the unwilling and control over those unwilling, who are subject to brutal, arbitrary, and unfair violence enforcement of this inequality with the full might of security forces and paramilitary wings of the enforcing side’s civilian population, be they extremist Jewish Israeli settlers or the Ku Klux Klan, both of which existed to extragovernmentally enforce supremacist (Jewish or white) rule on the respective unwilling minorities the dominated through violence, intimidation, and terrorism.  These civilian extremists engaging in terrorist violence against the those unwilling to endure separate and unequal apartheid in both countries often have strong supporters and friends in senior levels of the government, as was the case throughout the Jim Crow era in the U.S. and has been the case with the rise and recent rapid expansion of the settler movement in Israel (which for decades has been colonizing illegally occupied Palestinian Arab land with illegal Israeli Jewish settlements and expanding existing ones).  Official support for these settler colonists and the violence some of them perpetuate is most egregiously present in the current Netanyahu-led coalition government filled with right-wing extremists.  Just this year and even in recent months, Israeli’s own security forces’ leaders—including the heads of Shin Bet, the military, and the police—have called recent settler attacks against Palestinians terrorism, as has the U.S. Department of State, yet extremist senior officials in Israel’s government—including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—attacked those making this criticism and/or even praised this settler violence against Palestinians.  Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have themselves been linked in the past to supporting or planning terrorism against Arabs, so this is no surprise.

I can already hear apologists for Israel warming up.  “BUT THE PALESTINIANS”—just stop.  None of the problems with decades of illegal apartheid rule through military occupation—not temporary occupation—are fundamentally about Palestinians’ terrorism and incitement of extremism, which are obviously major problems and threats and legitimate concerns for the Israeli government, which has the right to respond to and act to prevent such violence, up to and including through the use of force, but those legitimate concerns does not give Israel the right to impose apartheid, de facto or de jure, on millions of people for over half a century.  And even the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—Israel’s military—has cited Israeli settler violence against Palestinians as a cause of Palestinian violence against Israelis, just as Morris has made it clear that the occupation and displacement of Palestinians are themselves a breeding ground for violent Palestinian resistance:

The [1967] war and its aftermath of occupation, repression, and expansionism swiftly reignited the tinder of Palestinian nationalism, propelling thousands of young men, especially from among the dispossessed and hopeless of the refugee camps in East Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, into the burgeoning resistance organizations. At the same time, much as the Zionist enterprise had helped trigger early Palestinian nationalism, so the daily contact and friction with Israel and the Israeli authorities inside the territories now reawakened it.

(343)

Rather, these problems with Israel’s system of rule in the West Bank are about Israeli colonial expansionism the status of a people they have occupied and controlled for over fifty-six years now living under rule that is apartheid/Jim Crow—de jure and de facto before the now-failed and moribund Oslo Accords process that began in 1993 and was supposed to jumpstart a path to peace and a Palestinian state (and was sabotaged by Netanyahu, Hamas, and settlers, among others) and still very much de facto since—who are denied anything anywhere near-approximating the legal rights of the citizens backed by and backing the occupying power, which is imposing far inferior legal, political, social, and economic status on these occupied Palestinians without any consent or political representation in the system that is imposing it upon them.  Furthermore, this fifty-six-year occupation is no temporary measure: it has been fifteen years since any serious attempt at negotiations aimed at giving the Palestinians there their own state and sovereignty and since any indication the Israeli government is even willing to consider a change in the legal and political status of the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank.  Between then and now, even after stretches of years of relatively little violence coming from Palestinians in the West Bank, there were still no responses from Israel indicating any serious rewards were being considered for this nonviolence other than more illegal Israeli settlements either expanding or being set up anew on Palestinian land in the West Bank.  In other words, nonviolence was met with more Israeli expansion at Palestinians’ expense, ipso facto discouraging nonviolence and encouraging violence.  This means that both Palestinian violence and Israeli violence is occurring in situation in which the de facto supreme end authority over the entire Palestinian West Bank is one of apartheid Israeli control giving Jews access to the benefits of Israeli civil law and Palestinian the harshness and arbitrariness of Israeli military rule whenever and wherever in the West Bank Israel chooses to implement it, regardless of any lines on a map left over from a broken Oslo system.

Specifically, this means that the violence occurring from the Palestinian side occurs in an atmosphere of Israelis in leadership making several things clear:

• That they will not hold Israeli settlers anywhere near accountable (if at all) for violence and terrorism as they do Palestinians
• That they have no plans to give up their rule or control of any of the West Bank, but, rather, to deepen and expand their presence and freedom of control and action there
• That they have no plans to change the legal or political status of the West Bank or Palestinians there (or are even considering either of these), plan to keep subjugating Palestinians under a deeply inferior status as part of its apartheid system with no attempt to find a way to alter those arrangements, and will defend those excusing this
• That to them the West Bank is simply part of Israel, period (not anything new from top Israeli officials)

The West Bank on official Israeli administrative and political maps is simply “Judea” and “Samaria,” just another two parts of Israel, with no border shown that would indicated that the West Bank is anything apart from the Israeli state.  To some this may seem trivial or moot, but it is not.  I have spoken myself with young Israelis that are not even familiar with the term “West Bank”—only “Judea” and “Samaria”—or even know that the territory is not legally Israel’s, that it is illegally occupying that land, and that virtually the entire rest of the world does not accept it as Israel.  When heart-of-Israeli-leftism Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality and its mayor defied the Israeli Education Ministry’s rules when it became the one school district in Israel to put up maps showing a border between Israel and the West Bank (the Green Line, from the 1949 Armistice ending the first Arab-Israeli war and regarded as Israel’s proper border) last August, this angered many Israelis and officials, with the Education Ministry ordering the roughly 2,000 revised maps in the district to be removed and replaced with maps not showing the border the rest of the world sees on virtually every other map (after checking with a local source, the maps showing the border are apparently still up in Tel Aviv-Jaffa classrooms).  Israel even just objected to the United Nations naming ancient ruins in the Palestinian city of Jericho as a World Heritage site explicitly as being located in Palestine (Palestine since late 2012 is a recognized “State” at the UN, just one with “non-member observer” status along with the Vatican’s Holy See) and objected very much because of that, just the latest that sign Israel intends to indefinitely illegally control all occupied Palestinian land forming all of the West Bank and expects the UN to ignore international law to recognize illegally occupied Palestinian lands as “Judea and Samaria,” as Israel’s and only Israel’s, as Israeli’s to do whatever they see fit with, which the UN will not.  The truth is that any hint at the lack of de jure sovereignty of Israel over the West Bank is met with swift and loud action from various corners of Israeli society and the government.

What this translates into collectively is a denial and blocking of any Palestinian nationalist aspirations in favor of perpetual apartheid.

In short, violence from some Palestinians some of the time cannot reasonably be a justification for fifty-six years of millions of Palestinians living in the legal equivalent of apartheid or Jim Cow, despite the absurd rationale that this should somehow be the case, a rationale Israelis would never accept were the situation reversed—Jewish history, from even before the Roman occupation (I have been to Masada myself and seen firsthand where some ancient Jews went to the most extreme lengths to fight for their freedom) to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, shows Jews are quite capable of violent resistance against abusive occupation—and therefore have no right to impose on anyone else.

Apartheid in the West Bank, but Not Inside Israel

To be clear, it’s no paradise being an Arab citizen within the proper borders recognized under international law and by almost every nation on earth as the territory of the Israeli state (many of them, increasingly by some—but not all—accounts, considering themselves Palestinians, though some not, the last part a dirty secret for many Palestinians that many adamantly refuse to admit).  These Palestinian citizens of Israel, Arab-Israelis, Israeli-Arabs, or Palestinian-Israelis (depending on their personal preference, not on what others would impose on them) suffer discrimination and racism akin to what, sadly, most minorities face in most countries in the world: serious discrimination, under-resourcing, unequal access to or deprivation of key resources, lack of integration, disparities, and even violence, but not apartheid.  That is not to deny the plight of Arab citizens of Israel, it is serious, just as is the case of African-Americans in the U.S. even today, Kurds in Turkey, Muslims in India, indigenous people in Mexico and Brazil, non-ethnic-Russians in Russia, black Africans in Sudan and Tunisia, or Patani Malays in Thailand, just to name a handful of cases.  All are filled with unique histories, but the discrimination is generally some degree of different treatment by the government and society on top of some sort of historical disenfranchisement.  But to label Israel as a state inside its own legitimate, international recognized borders as apartheid dilutes the meaning of that powerful word to the point of making it almost meaningless, such that all those countries I just mentioned would have to also be labeled apartheid, as would nearly every country I the world.  I have not found any country where there is perfect harmony and equality among the majority and minorities, or among the ruling factions and other factions not ruling, and anyone claiming their country does meet the ideal of equality in practices should be viewed with extreme caution as far as taking their understandings of the world seriously.

Apologists come in all forms, but apartheid does not: there are very few systems in recent decades that match with the extreme level of institutionalized, official discrimination that characterized apartheid in South Africa—where the term “apartheid” comes from—until the rise of Mandela (though that system’s legacy still is doing tremendous damage in South Africa today), and one of the only others out there is Israeli rule of the West Bank (I have not taken a deep-dive into this, and maybe I will, but some of the only other examples that come to mind are Myanmar/Burma against its Rohingya population, gender apartheid in Afghanistan, and perhaps approaching apartheid in India’s rule of Kashmir).  Racism is a serious and growing problem all over the world right now, but throwing around “apartheid” as a term casually does no one any favors.  It does not help that the 1973 United Apartheid Convention includes an overly-broad definition that would apply to many countries on the planet, similar to my earlier discussion.  As I have argued that “terrorism” as a word should not simply apply to just any violence or threats with which we do not agree, but specific and extreme forms, so, too, should “apartheid” not be applied to any form of racism or discrimination we do not like, but should only apply to specific and extreme forms.

In an atmosphere of rising bigotry, -isms and -ists worldwide—not least of all in anti-Semitism—there are those who just want to see an end to Israel as a state and any sort of Jewish power or Jewish rule.  These people are not the only one who seek to dismantle the Israeli Jewish-run state, as many Palestinians, understandably, want to see a single democratic State of Palestine run by a majority of Palestinians after refugees would hypothetically return, making Jews a minority in what would formerly have been the State of Israel but would become a democratic Palestine, a “one-state solution,” as opposed to a “two-state solution” of an Israel and a separate Palestine.  But this is an idealist but unrealistic dream that is, practically speaking, simply not going to happen anytime in the even pretty distant future beyond our lifetimes for many reasons I will not get into here.  And in their bias and anger (plenty of that on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, as I have noted), they seek to undermine Israeli in any way possible and apply any negative terms they can to describe Israel, Israelis, and Israeli actions—up to an including “Nazi,” “Holocaust,” and “genocide”—even if they simply do not fit the reality of the situation and are blatant exaggerations (conversely, some Israelis—including Netanyahu himself—trying to link the Palestinian people to Hitler’s Nazis and to call Palestinians “Nazis” is somewhat similarly misguided).  Thus, members of this group wanting to reclaim their homeland and the people driven mostly by sheer ant-Semitism casually throw around the label apartheid for Israel as a state even within Israeli’s 1967 borders, seeking just to use the term to inflict maximum damage and delegitimization on Israel regardless of the facts.

Conclusion: Israel Needs Tough Love from Its Friends or Its Current Insane Trajectory May Doom It

So, while Israel is clearly not an apartheid state, its rule of the West Bank operates under an apartheid regime, to the benefit of illegal Jewish settlers and the detriment of Palestinians, with no end in sight, let alone one contemplated by Israel’s current political leaders.  That a former recent head of Mossad is willing to acknowledge the obvious reality when so many others from the government he was a part of, who are now running Israeli’s government today, and who are part of Israeli society refuse to means this man Tamir Pardo deserves respect for his moral courage, whatever else you think if his career and views.  Much like fascist Trumpists in America, who are hell-bent on maintaining power by gaslighting the public and undermining democracy—twisting or even overthrowing the U.S. constitutional system to support their minority rule and to persecute minorities—those in Israel and elsewhere denouncing Pardo and hell-bent on denying the reality in the West Bank are only propelling Israel further down the descent into fascism in an era that has for years now seen too many nations move in that ominous direction, something I have discussed at great length before.

A militarized apartheid rule of the West Bank continuing for decades more, in which Israelis delude themselves into thinking they are benevolent rulers of a backwards people not deserving equality but whatever is deigned to be thrown their way by Israeli authorities, will not decrease division or authoritarianism inside Israeli, nor will it decrease violence between Israelis and Palestinians, nor improve Israeli’s image around the world or help to reduce a troubling rise in anti-Semitism, nor make Israel safer, more prosperous, or more secure.  If you care about the future of Israel, regardless of how you feel about Palestinians (and I for one have wanted to see freedom, dignity, and a fully sovereign, separate Palestinian state for decades), call out Israel’s mistakes and misdeeds for what they are: call Israeli rule in the West Bank apartheid or Jim Crow.  Israel will not listen to its enemies.  But if enough friends and allies, inside Israel and outside, start calling a spade a spade and correctly use apartheid to describe Israeli rule of the West Bank, it might just jolt Israel from its self-destructive path.

If that does not happen, there may be no hope for saving Israel from undoing its nature as a democratic, Jewish state, from becoming a theocratic or fascist Jewish supremacist undemocratic state—a pariah state like apartheid South Africa before it—from far worse cycles of violence than what is occurring now.  And time is also not on Israel’s side, the self-set, self-destructive time-bombs of its own making primed and ready unless its friends and allies help it to see the light.  But if Israel and its leaders continue on their current course in the West Bank, one of the only things that is certain is that the situation overall will get a whole lot worse for Israelis, Palestinians, and much of the Middle East before there can be any hope, if that, of things getting better.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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