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.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Reflections on the 78th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe)

There will be no peace in the Middle East until the foundational injustice at the heart of the region—the creation of Israel on stolen land, and its repercussions—is addressed.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

As Palestinians and their allies mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba we need to reflect on how the world arrived at this moment in history and what it means. 

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Western governments watched Nazi Germany’s escalating persecution of Jews with a mixture of indifference, appeasement, and self‑interest. That moral failure helped clear the path to the Holocaust. Today, a parallel pattern of ambivalence, active support for Israel, and deep anti‑Palestinian racism among Western political elites is enabling another catastrophe in full view of the world—the ongoing Nakba and the Gaza Genocide being perpetrated by Israel on Palestinians.

This is not rhetorical excess. It is what emerges when one takes Palestinian history seriously, listens to the growing number of Jewish and Israeli voices breaking from Zionist orthodoxy, and examines the historical record—including the United Nations’ own documentation of its permanent responsibility on the question of Palestine, and its role in creating the situation of the Palestinian people.

The reality is the Nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic— never ended. It refers to the mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing and dispossession of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war and the erasure and depopulation of more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages. For decades, Western discourse treated this as an unfortunate but closed chapter, a tragic birth pang of a necessary state. But for Palestinians, the Nakba is not a date, it is an ongoing structural injustice that has affected generations of their people.

The UN itself acknowledges that the Nakba was not merely a by-product of war but a systematic process of displacement and dispossession that created one of the world’s largest and longest‑standing refugee populations. The UN’s “About the Nakba” page explicitly states that the events of 1948 “resulted in the displacement of more than half of the Palestinian Arab population” and that the consequences of this displacement “remain unresolved to this day.”

Palestinian writer Aziz Abu Sarah describes the Nakba as having “a dual meaning”—both the razed villages and refugee camps of 1948, the daily reality of land confiscation in the years and decades that followed, settlement expansion, family separation, and legal discrimination that continues to this day. His parents cannot legally live in the house they built just outside Jerusalem without losing their Jerusalem IDs, while nearby illegal Jewish settlers enjoy full rights. Every checkpoint, every denied permit, every demolished home is experienced as a renewed Nakba.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV) reinforces this understanding, arguing that the Nakba is “not a historical event but an ongoing process,” one that has evolved from ethnic cleansing in 1948 to what they describe as genocide in Gaza today. Their analysis emphasizes that the logic of elimination—removing Palestinians from their land—has been consistent since the creation of Israel.

Human rights organizations and Palestinian institutions now explicitly frame Israel’s current genocide in Gaza as a continuation of that same project of displacement and replacement. The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights calls the present war “a renewed Nakba manifested in a genocidal war,” noting mass killing, starvation, siege, and the displacement of nearly two million people in Gaza as part of an “ongoing colonial policy based on population replacement, land control, and the erasure of Palestinian national identity.”

The UN’s 2024 Nakba commemoration made the same point: “The Nakba of 1948 and today’s Nakba in Gaza are not two separate events, but an ongoing process of Palestinian displacement and replacement.”

The truth is that to call Israeli oppression of Palestinians merely “a conflict” is to participate in the erasure of Palestinian history and almost eight decades of Palestinian suffering.

Western complicity: From 1948 to Gaza today

The Nakba was not only the work of Zionist terrorist militias and the Israeli army. It was made possible by Western powers—particularly the United States—that endorsed partition of historic Palestine, recognized the new state created on lands beyond the UN partition plan, and then looked away as refugees were barred from returning by Israel in defiance of international law.

Ardi Imseis, in his 2024 UN‑commissioned study The Nakba and the United Nations’ Permanent Responsibility for the Question of Palestine, argues that the UN bears a unique and ongoing responsibility because it played a direct role in partitioning Palestine and then failed to enforce the rights of the displaced population. Imseis notes that the UN’s responsibility is “not episodic but permanent,” rooted in the fact that the organization “helped create the conditions that made the Nakba possible.”

UN Resolution 194 affirmed the right of Palestinian refugees to return or receive compensation, but Western governments never seriously enforced it. Their strategic interests—Cold War positioning, oil, and alliance with a self‑styled “outpost of the West”—took precedence over Palestinian rights.

The same pattern is evident today. As Gaza is bombed into ruins, with hundreds of thousands killed and many more maimed or starved, Western states continue to arm, fund, and diplomatically shield Israel. Legal experts, UN rapporteurs, and civil society groups have warned of a serious risk, and ultimately, the reality of genocide. Just as Western governments once found reasons to downplay or rationalize Nazi persecution of Jews until it was too late, they now supply endless justifications to excuse or minimize Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life. Then, the rationales centered on fear of refugees, antisemitism, and geopolitical calculations. Now, they invoke “counter-terrorism,” “self-defence,” and the imperative to stand with an ally—no matter what that ally does.

Suppressing the story: Nakba denial as a Western project

The Nakba is not only being continued on the ground, it is being suppressed in classrooms, parliaments, and media studios across the West.

In the United States, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy barred Palestinian‑American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from holding a Nakba commemoration at the Capitol after lobbying from the Anti‑Defamation League, forcing the event to move to a different room offered by Senator Bernie Sanders. Senator Jacky Rosen condemned the very idea of calling Israel’s establishment a “catastrophe” as “deeply offensive,” erasing the lived catastrophe of Palestinians in favour of a sacrosanct (albeit false) state narrative.

The Jewish Currents newsletter that reported this incident drew a sharp parallel between this discomfort with Nakba education and white uneasiness about teaching Black history in the United States. It described a “collective narcissism” that reads any expression of Palestinian identity—flags, commemorations, the kheffiya Palestinian scarf, even grief—as an attack on Jews, and noted that Israel‑advocacy organizations are increasingly using the charge of antisemitism to preemptively repress Palestinian speech, from the U.S. to Germany, where Berlin police have repeatedly banned Nakba Day protests.

Inside Israel, the state has passed laws penalizing public institutions that commemorate the Nakba, and Palestinian educators face constant pressure. Abu Sarah notes that the Israeli government not only ignores Palestinian history but “is also trying to force Palestinians to forget their own narrative, by forbidding commemoration of the Nakba.” Organizations like Zochrot, which work to educate Israeli Jews about the Nakba and Palestinian return, have been marginalized and attacked, even as they collaborate with groups like BADIL to bring Nakba testimony to international audiences.

In the U.S., Jewish Voice for Peace’s “Facing the Nakba” curriculum exists precisely because mainstream Jewish and general education has erased this history. The curriculum explicitly teaches that the Nakba “began with Israel’s establishment, and continues to this day,” and is designed to help U.S. Jews confront why they were never taught this story and how that omission shapes their politics. It is initiatives like this that are attempting to resist the Zionist attempt to deny the reality of what Palestinians have endured.

From Nakba denial to a new form of Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial is not only the crude claim that the gas chambers never existed. It is also any attempt to relativize, justify, or erase the systematic destruction of European Jewry. We rightly treat such denial as a moral red line.

Yet when it comes to Palestinians, Western political and media elites routinely engage in analogous forms of denial. They:

• Erase the original crime by refusing to acknowledge that Israel’s creation involved mass expulsion and dispossession.

• Justify ongoing violence as unfortunate but necessary “self‑defence,” even when it clearly targets civilians on a massive scale.

• Suppress testimony by banning Nakba commemorations, criminalizing Palestinian solidarity, and smearing critics as antisemites or terrorist sympathizers

The UN’s 2024 Nakba commemoration made explicit what Palestinians have long said: “The Nakba is an enterprise of displacement and replacement of people that continues to this very day,” and Gaza’s people now face a choice between “displacement, subjugation, or death—in other words, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or genocide.” To deny this reality, or to insist that it cannot be named because it offends Western sensibilities, is to participate in a form of historical and moral erasure that echoes the mechanisms once used to minimize the Holocaust while it was unfolding.

Jewish voices breaking the spell

One of the most hopeful developments is that more Jewish and Israeli voices are publicly challenging the myths that sustain this denial. The Al Jazeera feature on Jewish voices around Nakba Day highlights historians like Avi Shlaim, who calls Israel “a pariah and a war criminal state” whose brutality in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank have created a crisis with world Jewry. Within Jewish communities, projects like “Facing the Nakba” and the work of Jewish Currents, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others are insisting that Jewish ethics demand confronting Palestinian dispossession, not denying it.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada adds that confronting the Nakba is not only a moral obligation but a necessary step toward ending what they describe as Israel’s “genocidal campaign” in Gaza.

Their message is simple: acknowledging the Nakba and opposing genocide in Gaza is not anti-Semitic, it is a Jewish obligation grounded in the very lessons of the Holocaust that Western elites claim to honour.

Justice for Palestinians: The defining human rights struggle of our time

Because the Nakba is ongoing, justice for Palestinians is not one issue among many, it is the central test of whether the international human rights system means anything at all.

The UN’s own language now recognizes that 1948 and Gaza are part of a single process of displacement and replacement.[5] Anthropologists describe Israeli institutions, including universities, as “settler universities” embedded in a 78‑year project of ethnic cleansing and “Judaization.” Palestinian and international human rights groups document patterns of apartheid, persecution, and now genocide.

If the world cannot—or will not—stop a state that openly talks of a “second Nakba,” that has destroyed every university in Gaza, that starves children and then blames their parents, then the post‑1945 promise of “never again” has been hollowed out and is meaningless, not only for Jews, but for everyone.

There will be no peace in the Middle East until the foundational injustice at the heart of the region is addressed—the creation of a state on stolen land, the exclusion of its indigenous people, and the ongoing attempt to erase their presence. 

The UN’s worst decision and what it would mean to undo it

In hindsight, the UN’s endorsement of the partition of historic Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state in a region where Palestinians were the majority may be the single most disastrous decision it made in the 20th century. Not because Jews did not deserve safety after the Holocaust, but because that safety was pursued through the dispossession of another people rather than through de‑Nazification, open borders, and genuine global responsibility for refugees.

Ardi Imseis argues that the UN’s failure to uphold Palestinian rights after partition created a “permanent responsibility” that the organization has yet to fulfill. The turmoil, wars, occupations, and cycles of violence that have followed are not unfortunate side effects, they are the predictable consequences of building a state on a foundational injustice and then refusing, decade after decade, to confront it.

The Nakba was not an accident. It was a choice. Continuing it is also a choice.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.