Why Pramila Jayapal Was Right to Call Israel a ‘Racist State’

Last Saturday, in what was widely referred to as a “gaffe,” Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash) referred to Israel as a “racist state.” She was responding to pro-Palestinian protesters disrupting a Netroots Nation panel and trying to reassure them that she shared their concerns about Israel’s many violations of the human, civil, and democratic rights of its Palestinian population.

Jayapal was immediately rebuked by all of the top-ranking Democrats in the House—Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar and Vice Chair Ted Lieu. On Sunday, she issued a groveling apology to those who had been “hurt” by her words—but by then it was too late. On Tuesday, the House voted by a crushing bipartisan majority of 412 to 9 for a resolution affirming America’s continuing alliance with Israel and declaring that Israel is “not a racist or apartheid state.”

GOP Seizes on Pramila Jayapal’s Israel Misstep to Split Democrats

That would be news to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem—all of which have used the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Things have gotten so bad in recent decades that more than a third of American Jews under the age of 40 tell pollsters they agree with the statement, “Israel is an apartheid state.”

None of that matters to either Republicans or centrist Democrats. Outside of the House’s tiny “Squad” of Bernie Sanders-aligned leftists, Democratic support for the resolution was all but unanimous. It was a depressing outcome for anyone who might have held out hope that the taboo against recognition of the Palestinian plight had been lifted in mainstream American politics. On this subject, for all Republican and most Democratic lawmakers, 2023 might as well be 1967.

The Merriam-Webster definition of a “gaffe” is a “social or diplomatic blunder” or a “noticeable mistake.” But almost forty years ago the political journalist Michael Kinsley offered a definition that captures cases like the Jayapal Incident perfectly. “A gaffe,” Kinsley wrote in the June 18, 1984, edition of the New Republic, “is when a politician tells the truth.”

Jayapal might not have said that Israel is a “racist state” if not for her politician’s instinct to talk down protesters by presenting herself as being on their side. But what serious argument can be made that Israel isn’t an exclusionary ethnostate?

Several hundred thousand Palestinians were driven out of the country during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence—a process that it’s hard to coherently describe without using terms like “ethnic cleansing.” The children and grandchildren of those 1948 refugees are still denied the right to return to Israel while American Jews are free to immigrate to Israel and become full citizens under the country’s Law of Return.

Most Palestinians who lived within Israel’s post-1948 borders were given Israeli citizenship, although these citizens—unlike Israeli Jews—were kept under martial law from 1949 to 1966. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians who live in these territories have never been granted citizenship. A Palestinian child on the West Bank born the day after that war ended would be a senior citizen today—except that they wouldn’t actually be a “citizen” of the country in which they’ve lived their entire life.

In 1993, Bill Clinton became the first American president to implicitly recognize the legitimacy of at least some Palestinian complaints by hosting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat at the White House to sign the Oslo Peace Accords.

Those accords were supposed to start a process that would lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. That never happened and the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has explicitly stated many times over the course of the last several years that there will never be an independent Palestinian state. And of course he doesn’t want to destroy the “Jewish character” of Israel by giving citizenship to Palestinians on the West Bank.

The plan—officially, according to the prime minister—is for these people to continue to be subject to military rather than civilian law, continue to be denied the right to vote in Israeli elections, and never get a state of their own. What else could you call that but apartheid?

Some supporters of the congressional resolution emphasized that Palestinians who live within Israel’s pre-1967 borders have voting rights, and that there are Palestinian citizens of Israel who serve in the country’s parliament—the Knesset. But I seriously doubt that you could find one of these Palestinian Knesset members who would be willing to affirm that Israel is anything but an apartheid state.

In fact, the Nation-State Law he championed in 2018, which was upheld by the country’s high court in 2021, lays out with no ifs, ands, or buts that “the right of national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” Netanyahu himself explained what meant in 2019. “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” the prime minister wrote. “According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people—and only it.”

Again: What else could you call that but apartheid? Imagine an American or Canadian politician saying that the U.S. or Canada should be a state of only white Christians rather than all of its citizens. Even Donald Trump would call that politician a fascist. But for every Republican and nearly every non-“Squad” Democrat in the House, these realities don’t exist. The decades-long bad joke of a “peace process” and its absolute, official abandonment by the Israeli government might as well not have happened. Four hundred and twelve of the 421 members of Congress who voted on the resolution essentially jammed their fingers in their collective ears and said, “La la la la! I’m not listening!”

Seven of the nine “no” votes were provided by Squad members—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO), and Summer Lee (D-PA). An eighth came from ideologically adjacent Delia Ramirez (D-IL) and the final vote came from André Carson (D-IN)—perhaps not coincidentally, one of only three Muslims—along with Tlaib and Omar—currently serving in the House.

The full enormity of the House’s rejection of Palestinian humanity is underscored by the fact that the dissent wasn’t even unanimous within the Squad—Greg Casar (D-TX) was conspicuously missing from this very short list. And of course Jayapal herself, who started it all, joined almost all of the rest of her colleagues—too spineless even to vote against a resolution implicitly rebuking her.

The Oslo Accords were signed on the White House lawn in September 1993—almost exactly thirty years ago. Netanyahu started openly saying that there would never under any circumstances be an independent Palestinian state and Palestinians would just have to resign themselves to live and die as non-citizen Israeli subjects eight years ago. One after another of the human rights organizations that are treated as authoritative within American discourse when they condemn abuses by countries like Russia and China have lined up in recent years to call Israel an apartheid state. Somehow, though, the stance on Israel of nearly all Democrats, never mind Republicans, is frozen in amber like the fly in Jurassic Park.

Israel’s system of ethnoreligious apartheid, like all systems of oppression, will fall sooner or later. But both of America’s parties seem hell-bent on delaying justice for as long as possible.

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