Despite a great deal of advocacy for this or that liberal cause, there is one matter of contention where a large portion of Tufts students have decided they dare not direct their critical gaze: the Zionist character of the state of Israel. It would be unheard of for a Tufts student to openly advocate, for instance, minimizing the minority presence on campus, but every day we are faced with students who openly avow their desire to bolster the Israeli occupation, as if it were an article of secular faith. In the American Jewish community, this is the one taboo, the one question on which we must remain silent on the pain of ostracism. We are forbidden from addressing the obvious incongruity of a "Jewish and democratic state," the mistaken idea that a state that legally defines itself on the basis of a particular ethno-religious identity can be a democracy for those who do not hail from this group.
Contrary to the claims of those arguing against our purpose in holding Israeli Apartheid Week at Tufts, Israel is not a "state of all its citizens." Israel retains an anachronistic 19th century model of citizenship: It defines itself not in terms of the people actually residing within its ever-expanding frontiers, but on the basis of a specific ethno-religious group, no matter where they might reside on the planet. Therefore, of the roughly 13 million people between the river and the sea who fall under the de facto or de jure rule of the Israeli state, only about 6 million enjoy the "full menu of rights," as Desmond Tutu remarked in 1985 regarding the South African apartheid regime.
Some five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip live in Bantustans under the ultimate control of Israeli military authorities, deprived of all forms of political, economic and social rights in a regime the South African Human Sciences Research Council described as "colonialism and apartheid." In the West Bank, Palestinians are confined to non-contiguous cantons comprising less than 17 percent of their territory by a "matrix of control" that consists of illegal Jewish-only settlements, Jewish-only roads, over 500 checkpoints and other obstacles to movement, as well as the "Separation Barrier," running four times as long as the Berlin Wall and three times as high, built almost exclusively on Palestinian land. Likewise, in Gaza, Palestinians are subject to a state of indefinite siege in which Israel controls all exits and airspace, constricting the flow of people and goods, resulting in what many NGOs term a "humanitarian crisis."
However, as the internationally respected Russell Tribunal on Palestine observes, this "institutionalized regime of domination" of the Palestinian people does not miraculously stop at the green line. Indeed, "Palestinian citizens of Israel, while entitled to vote, are not part of the Jewish nation as defined by Israeli law and are excluded from the benefits of Jewish nationality and subject to systematic discrimination across the broad spectrum of recognized human rights." The 1.5 million Arab Israelis, comprising one-fifth of the population, are systematically marginalized by the state, deprived of a whole host of basic rights, ranging from family unification to land ownership, by over 20 discriminatory laws, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel. Under the Absentee Property Law of 1950, most of the land belonging to expelled Palestinian refugees, comprising over 90 percent of the total land and property in 1947, was formally confiscated by the new Israeli state and placed under the purview of the quasi-governmental Jewish National Fund, tasked with managing it on behalf of world Jewry. Today, this land remains effectively off-limits to Palestinians, who are excluded from settling in the plethora of new towns and suburbs by "admissions committees" charged with excluding residents deemed "socially incompatible," such as Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews, same-sex couples and other "undesirables." This apartheid is not the outcome of the recent far-right turn of the Israeli state under Netanyahu, but is inscribed into the very founding laws of the state.
The flipside of this system of oppression of Palestinians, no matter where they reside, is the cult of Jewish exceptionalism. Nowhere is this unabashed worship of Jewish privilege more apparent than in the Taglit Birthright-Israel program, which provides Jewish youth with a free trip to the Holy Land. It was in fact my own experience on Birthright that opened my eyes to the dark legacies of colonialism and racism lurking below the surface of Zionism.
Editor's note: the following portion refers only to Faragon's experience.
Apartheid was the name of the game in my Birthright experience, determining the sites we did and did not see, the voices we heard and didn't hear, the unrelenting use of massive historical trauma to justify the production of yet more violence and oppression. Take the name, even. The notion that I, a secular, privileged college student whose ethnic affiliations hardly extend beyond "New Yorker," have more of a right to visit a land than the descendants of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to me seems more than a little outrageous. My Birthright trip granted me privileges most Palestinians in the occupied territories couldn't even dream of: from Tel Aviv night clubs to access to Jerusalem. But the most appalling privilege it sought to confer on me was that of ignorance, of not knowing the material conditions of the occupation, of not having to find myself face-to-face with a checkpoint or a bulldozer coming at last-minute's notice to raze my house, the uprooting of olive trees from my backyard. There is only one word to describe these two wildly divergent realities existing side-by-side in the same small strip of land: apartheid.
Beautiful as it was, the Tel Aviv skyline concealed a much darker reality, and it was there that I first got the sense that democracy and Jewish exceptionalism can never go hand in hand. As Jews of conscience, we cannot subscribe to this fantasy any longer. Israel was founded on the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 indigenous Palestinians. It is time for us, to the extent that we are intellectually honest, to accept this historical truth, which has been scrupulously confirmed by Israel's own "New Historians." Israel's precious "Jewish majority" and consequent ethnocratic political character were achieved and are subsequently maintained through the de jure exclusion of historic Palestine's indigenous population through ethnic cleansing, colonialism and military occupation.
The stakes are high, even on our campus. Anyone who dares to challenge this basic premise of a "Jewish state" is rapidly demonized as an anti-Semite who seeks the destruction of the State of Israel. Yet if demanding a state provide its citizens with full equality regardless of ethno-religious affiliation means the "end of Israel," then what does that say about Israel? Is a Jewish political entity really worth preserving if its existence entails the sacrifice of democracy and equality? The lines are drawn and the choice is clear: Zionism or democracy. Israel can either retrench as an apartheid state and international pariah, or it can recognize that the land between the river and the sea has always been one country, opting instead to establish a secular democracy in which Jews and Palestinians can finally coexist as equals.
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Cory Faragon is a senior majoring in English. Lucas Koerner is a sophomore majoring in sociology and Spanish. Both are members of Students for Justice in Palestine.
