"Last summer I spent ten days traveling the lands under Israeli rule.
What I saw was hauntingly familiar. For as sure as my ancestors were
born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man,
Israel is a state where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish
person. In Israel itself, I met with Palestinians who were nominally
empowered, with the right to vote. But whereas their Jewish countrymen
could pass on their citizenship to their non-Israeli spouses, these
Palestinians could not pass on citizenship to their spouses born a few miles away, in the West Bank or Gaza. Moreover, discrimination against them was perfectly legal. Frequently they were the subject of outright racism, as when Netanyahu warned his country
during the 2016 election that “the right-wing government is in danger.
Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.”
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are packed onto an archipelago of land. There they have enjoyed local elections through the Palestinian Authority. But that authority is still subordinate to Israeli rule,
which Palestinians can neither vote for or against. Meanwhile, their
neighbors, Israeli settlers, enjoy the full benefits of Israeli
citizenship. And then there is Gaza, which had alarmed
human rights advocates and public-health officials well before last
October. For 17 years, the people of Gaza have been trapped by a
blockade that extends across air, sea, and land. Gaza is commonly
referred to as the largest open-air prison in the world, and it is here
that so many American bombs have been dropped.
Israel and its defenders often claim that it is the “only democracy in
the Middle East.” But what I saw was an ethnocracy, where half the
people are first-class citizens, and the other half are something less.
And this is a system sponsored and endorsed by the United States of
America. The endorsement is not contradictory. For most of its history,
America too was an ethnocracy in democratic clothing. The ostensible
triumph over that old system, which we call Jim Crow, is one of the most
uplifting stories America tells itself, one that has been repeatedly
invoked at the DNC. How odd I find it that a people, presently
brutalized by a similar system, whose relatives are being erased by that
system’s wanton violence, are also being erased from the stage."
