Zionist racism and Palestinian dehumanization are the foundations of Israel’s moral character

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, envisioned a racist Jewish state as a “civilizing” outpost of Europe in Palestine —  implicitly superior to the “barbaric” indigenous population.  

  

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

From its earliest formulations in late‑19th‑century Europe, Zionism imagined a political order in historic Palestine built around the supremacy of one ethnonational group—Jews. Over the decades, that vision hardened into a state structure that one Israeli human rights organization—B’Tselem—has described as a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Other groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and numerous scholars of genocide and settler colonialism have concluded that Israeli governance across all of historic Palestine constitutes apartheid, and in the eyes of some genocide scholars an unfolding genocidal process.

This is not a claim about Judaism or Jewish identity. It is a claim about state power, ideology, and structures of supremacy. And it is a claim increasingly made by courageous Israelis who defy the powerful interests of a state committing genocide.

Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard captured this internal reckoning with painful clarity when he said, “I look at these young people who are poisoned with racism and hatred, and at some of their elders, who are their spiritual mentors and implant in them toxic notions of Jewish supremacy… How did we produce from among us the replicas of our persecutors?”

Sfard’s question is not rhetorical. It is a diagnosis of a society shaped by decades of occupation, settlement, and ethnonational fear—one in which Jewish supremacy and dehumanization of Palestinians has become normalized, even valorized.

Zionism’s racialized and fascist foundations

Zionism emerged in the same intellectual climate that produced European colonialism, racial hierarchy, and the early currents of ethnonationalism that would later culminate in fascist movements. Theodor Herzl, the movement’s founder, envisioned a racist Jewish state in Palestine as a civilizing outpost of Europe. In Der Judenstaat and Altneuland, Herzl described the future Jewish society as modern, rational, and European—implicitly superior to the “backward” native population.

Herzl’s writings repeatedly framed Palestinians not as a people with political rights, but as an obstacle to be managed, displaced, or subordinated to the Zionist agenda. His admiration for European colonial models—particularly British rule in South Africa—reveals a worldview steeped in racial hierarchy.

Critics and scholars have argued that Herzl’s political imagination contained proto‑fascist elements, including: a belief in demographic engineering; a vision of a homogenous ethnonational state; a hierarchical worldview that placed European Jews at the apex; and a willingness to subordinate or remove indigenous populations.

These elements do not make Herzl a fascist. But they place him within the intellectual family of European racial nationalism, a genealogy that later fed into the fascist ideologies that dominated Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. If one removes the Jewish identity component, Herzl’s framework shares structural similarities with other European ethnonationalist movements of his era—movements that came to dominate politics in Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Portugal.

This is not an accusation of personal malevolence but a recognition that Herzl’s political imagination was shaped by the dominant ideologies of his time, namely settler colonialism, racialized progress, and ethnonational exclusivity. These ideas later crystallized into policies within the Zionist movement that promoted Jewish demographic dominance and territorial control over Palestinian rights.

The making of a supremacist regime

The Nakba of 1948—marked by mass displacement, village destruction, and the permanent exclusion of over 750,000 Palestinian refugees—was not an aberration but a foundational moment. Laws such as the Absentee Property Law ensured that Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed could never return to their homes, while their land was transferred to Jewish ownership.

After 1967, the occupation entrenched a dual legal system, one where Israeli settlers in the West Bank lived under Israeli civil law, enjoyed full political rights, and received state protection, while Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land seizures, and arbitrary detention. B’Tselem concluded in 2021 that this constitutes “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” effectively making Israel an apartheid state.

Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossed reached the same conclusion, documenting policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic and political dominance through land control, movement restrictions, and discriminatory laws.

Along with a similar report by Amnesty International in 2022, these claims of Israel being an apartheid state are not fringe interpretations. They are the assessments of leading human rights institutions, and are supported by research by human rights scholars.

Dehumanization as policy and culture

Supremacy is sustained not only through laws but through dehumanizing language. Israeli political leaders have long deployed rhetoric that erases Palestinian identity and strips Palestinians of their humanity. They rarely refer to Palestinians as “Palestinians” at all, choosing instead the generic term “Arabs,” a deliberate linguistic move that denies a people their name, their history, and their nationhood. This erasure is reinforced by explicit dehumanization. Senior officials have repeatedly used language that casts Palestinians as subhuman or inherently threatening. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked notoriously described Palestinian children as “little snakes,” even calling for the killing of Palestinian mothers to prevent future generations. Such rhetoric is not incidental; it is part of the ideological machinery that makes domination thinkable and violence permissible.

Such language is not merely hateful—it is functional. It prepares the public to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, and large‑scale military assault.  Also, settler violence, often carried out with impunity and the support if Israeli authorities, reinforces this logic. Sfard’s comparison of extremist settlers to the Ku Klux Klan is not hyperbole but a reflection of vigilante terror used to enforce ethnic hierarchy.

This dehumanization has intensified during Israel’s repeated assaults on Gaza over the years. By mid‑November 2023, Holocaust and genocide scholars—including Marion Kaplan, Omer Bartov, and Barry Trachtenberg—warned that Israel’s actions risked or constituted genocide. Their warnings were grounded in patterns familiar from other cases of forced displacement, destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass killing, and rhetoric invoking biblical annihilation narratives.

Holocaust survivors and descendants have echoed these warnings, arguing that the dehumanization of Palestinians mirrors patterns they recognize from their own histories. Their testimony cannot be dismissed as it is rooted in lived experience and scholarly expertise.

For decades, Israel enjoyed near-total impunity in the international legal system. That era is ending. Cases before the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court have forced a global reckoning with the legal and moral implications of prolonged occupation and systemic discrimination. Some Holocaust scholars who initially defended Israel’s actions in Gaza have since gone silent. Their earlier support for state violence—rather than for the universal principles of human rights—reveals a troubling willingness to subordinate anti‑racist commitments to ethnonational loyalty.

As critics have noted, this silence is a betrayal of the very lessons the field of genocide studies was created to uphold.

Parallels between Zionism and white supremacy

We must also confront the fact that Zionism, as practiced by the Israeli state, shares structural parallels with white supremacy. Both are systems of domination built on similar foundations. Each constructs a superior in‑group understood as uniquely entitled to land, sovereignty, and political power. Each justifies the dispossession of an Indigenous or subordinate population through narratives of civilizational advancement or historical destiny. Both rely on demographic engineering to secure permanent control, deploy stories of cultural or racial superiority to legitimize exclusion, and normalize segregation, unequal citizenship, and the systematic denial of rights. These are not incidental similarities. They reflect the underlying architecture of two regimes organized around maintaining the dominance of one group over another.

In the United States, “manifest destiny” justified the displacement of Indigenous peoples. In Israel, the Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide while denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. Academic work in Holy Land Studies and other journals describes Zionism as a racial regime that reproduces whiteness through land control and exclusion of Arabs and non‑European Jews.

A society shaped by ethnosupremacy

Haaretz has documented how Jewish supremacy has fractured Israeli society itself, empowering extremist settlers and far‑right movements that now dominate national politics.  The Oslo era did not moderate these forces, it entrenched them. Settlement expansion accelerated, Palestinian territory fragmented into disconnected enclaves, and the logic of domination became normalized. Jewish self‑determination has been transformed into a system of supremacy that denies Palestinians equivalent rights.

This is not a fringe view. It is increasingly the consensus among scholars of settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnonationalism. Recognizing the supremacist structures embedded in Israeli governance does not diminish Jewish suffering or deny the trauma of antisemitism. It does not delegitimize Jewish collective identity or aspirations for safety. But it does demand a reckoning with the reality that no people can secure their freedom by denying another’s.

Ending the occupation, dismantling apartheid structures, and recognizing Palestinian political and human rights are not acts of hostility toward Jews. They are acts of fidelity to universal principles of justice.

As Sfard asked: How did we produce replicas of our persecutors? The answer lies not in Jewish identity, but in the corrosive power of Zionism, an ideology of ethnonational supremacy. The task now is to build a political order grounded not in domination, but in equality.

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