Confronting the architecture of Zionist supremacy is not an attack against
Jews. It is a defence of the belief that no people’s freedom can be built on
the subjugation of another.
Zionism emerged in the same
intellectual climate that produced European colonialism, concepts of racial
hierarchy, and the ethnonationalism that would later culminate in fascist
movements. Theodor Herzl, the movement’s founder, envisioned a Jews only state
in Palestine as a “civilizing” outpost of Europe, seeing the indigenous
inhabitants—Muslims, Christians and Jews—as inferior. In Der
Judenstaat (The Jew State) and Altneuland
(The Old New Land), Herzl described the future Jewish society as modern,
rational, and European, one that would be implicitly superior to the “backward”
and “barbaric” native population.
Herzl’s writings repeatedly framed Palestinians not as a people with political rights, but as an obstacle to be managed, displaced, subordinated and possibly eliminated. 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 fascist elements including: a belief in demographic engineering (ethnic cleansing); a vision of a homogenous ethnonational state; a hierarchical worldview that placed European Jews at the apex of humanity; and a willingness to subordinate or remove indigenous populations by force. These elements place Herzl within the intellectual genealogy of European racial nationalism and fascism. If one removes his Jewish identity he would very easily have found a home in Europe’s fascist movements.
This is not an accusation of personal malevolence but rather a recognition that Herzl’s political philosophy was shaped by the dominant ideologies of his time—settler colonialism, racialized nationalism, and ethnonational exclusivity. These ideas later crystallized into Israeli state policies that privileged Jews over native Palestinians and forceful control over their territory and their rights.
The making of a supremacist regime
The Nakba of 1948—marked by mass ethnic cleansing, massacres, eradication of Palestinian towns and villages, and the permanent exclusion of refugees—was not an aberration but a foundational moment for the new Israeli state built on the blood and bones of historic Palestine’s indigenous people. Additionally, Laws such as the Absentee Property Law ensured that Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes could never return, while their lands and property 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, enjoying full political rights, and receiving state protection, and a second where Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land theft, and arbitrary detention and torture. B’Tselem concluded in 2021 that this constitutes “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossed reached the same conclusion, documenting policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic and political supremacy through land control, movement restrictions, and discriminatory laws. These are not fringe interpretations. They are the assessments of leading human rights institutions.
Supremacy is sustained not only
through laws but through language. Israeli political leaders have repeatedly
used debasing rhetoric that strips Palestinians of humanity. Former Justice
Minister Ayelet Shaked notoriously
referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes,” calling for the killing of
Palestinian mothers to prevent future generations. At the start of the Gaza genocide Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called all
Palestinians “human animals,” advocated for a complete siege of Gaza after the
October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Israeli political, military and religious leaders have variously described Palestinians as a “cancer”
and "vermin" to be exterminated.
Such language is not merely hateful—it is functional. It prepares the public to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, brutality, and large‑scale military assault. The Israeli-American historian of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, who did his PhD on the indoctrination of Nazi German soldiers has argued that young Israeli soldiers who have fought inside the Gaza Strip in the ongoing during the Gaza genocide display attitudes towards their enemies similar to those of Nazi troops and Hitler Youth in the Second World War in that they have internalized the view that Hamas militants are “human animals.” Settler violence, often carried out with impunity, 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 since the mid-2000s to today. By mid‑November 2023, Holocaust and genocide scholars—including Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, and Barry Trachtenberg—warned that Israel’s actions risked or constituted genocide. Their warnings were grounded in patterns familiar from other cases: forced displacement; destruction of civilian infrastructure; mass killing; and rhetoric invoking biblical annihilation narratives.
Holocaust survivors and their descendants have echoed these warnings with a moral authority that cannot be dismissed. Drawing on memories of Jewish ghettos, forced displacement, starvation, and the systematic stripping away of human dignity, they argue that the dehumanization of Palestinians mirrors patterns they recognize from their own histories under Nazi rule. These are not casual comparisons or rhetorical flourishes; they are the reflections of people who have spent a lifetime with memories of how atrocity begins—in language, in policy, and in the gradual normalization of cruelty. Their testimony carries a weight that is both personal and scholarly, a lived experience intertwined with decades of reflection on the mechanisms of genocide. Their testimonies cannot be dismissed, and should be seen as a clarion call to recognize the universal dangers of dehumanization before it hardens into something even more catastrophic.
For decades, Israel benefited from near‑total impunity in the international legal system for actions dating back to its founding—ethnic cleansing, mass killing, wars of aggression, military occupation, and the annexation of conquered land. However, that shield is finally beginning to crack, given that the world has awakened to the scale and visibility of Israeli state violence. The old narratives that once insulated Israel from accountability no longer hold. Proceedings before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have forced an unprecedented global reckoning with the legal and moral consequences of prolonged occupation, systemic discrimination, and the routine use of force against an entire civilian population.
Some Holocaust scholars who initially defended Israel’s actions in Gaza have since fallen silent. Their early endorsements of Israel’s violence—rather than of universal human rights—exposed a troubling readiness to subordinate anti‑racist principles to personal ethnonational loyalty. That scholars such as Dean Barbara Krauthamer of Emory University—a historian of African American life and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—along with Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, the influential dean of Berkeley Law, and Professor Deborah Lipstadt, Emory’s renowned Holocaust scholar and the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, have all remained conspicuously silent as the death toll in Gaza has soared—and despite genocide declarations from their own colleagues, as well as findings from the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other respected human rights bodies—reveals a profound betrayal of the very lessons the field of genocide studies was created to uphold.
Zionism is the cousin of white
supremacy
From its earliest formulations in
late‑19th‑century Europe, Zionism imagined a political order in historic
Palestine built around the primacy of one ethnonational group—Jews. Over the
decades, that vision hardened into a state structure that leading human rights
organizations now describe as a regime of systematic domination and
subjugation. Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Amnesty International,
and numerous scholars of genocide and settler colonialism have concluded that
Israeli governance from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean
Sea constitutes apartheid, persecution, and—in the eyes of many
genocide scholars—an unfolding genocidal process.
Crucially, this critique is not
new, nor is it limited to Palestinians or contemporary human rights
organizations. Some of the most influential Jewish intellectuals of the 20th
century—Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Asimov, and Sigmund Freud (among
others)—warned explicitly against the creation of a Jewish state built on
ethnonational exclusivity. They feared that a state founded on Jewish supremacy
would betray Jewish ethical traditions, ignite endless conflict, and reproduce
the very forms of chauvinism and racial hierarchy that had oppressed Jews in
Europe for centuries.
Einstein denounced the early Zionist leaders and their militias as “fascist.” Arendt warned that a Jewish state would become “a Sparta”—a hyper-militarized, society obsessed with defence to the detriment of democratic values, and peaceful coexistence. Freud rejected the idea of a nationalist project in Palestine because he viewed religious and ethnic nationalism as a form of neurosis, and believed it would provoke Arab resentment, alienate the Islamic and Christian worlds, and fail to solve global antisemitism. And Asimov rejected the idea of Israel and ethnic nationalism, including Zionism, because he was a staunch humanist who believed humanity’s survival depended on moving past tribal divisions.
Their warnings were prophetic. They foresaw that a state built on privileging one group over another would inevitably become a machinery of subjugation that would irreparably damage Jewish society and culture, and inflict immense suffering.
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 Israelis themselves.
Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard captured this internal reckoning with painful clarity when he wrote in Haaretz: “I look at these young people who are poisoned with racism and hatred [towards Palestinians], 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 [Nazi] persecutors?
Sfard’s question is not rhetorical. It is a diagnosis of a society shaped by decades of brutal occupation, illegal settlements on Palestinian land, and ethnonational fear—one in which Jewish supremacy has become normalized, even valued. His words echo the earlier warnings of Einstein, Arendt, Asimov, and Freud, that a political project rooted in ethnonational dominance and subjugation of indigenous Palestinians would inevitably deform the society that built it, corrode its moral foundations, and reproduce the very patterns of exclusion and dehumanization that Jews themselves had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
The tragedy is not only that these warnings were ignored, but that the consequences have unfolded exactly as these thinkers predicted. A state built on the premise of supremacy has produced a political culture in which domination is seen as security, inequality of peoples as natural, and brutal violence as necessary for the Zionist project to succeed. The intellectual giants who opposed Zionism did so not out of hostility to Jewish survival, but out of a profound understanding of what happens when any people—especially a historically persecuted one—embraces the logic of ethnonational power.
Einstein denounced the early Zionist leaders and their militias as “fascist.” Arendt warned that a Jewish state would become “a Sparta”—a hyper-militarized, society obsessed with defence to the detriment of democratic values, and peaceful coexistence. Freud rejected the idea of a nationalist project in Palestine because he viewed religious and ethnic nationalism as a form of neurosis, and believed it would provoke Arab resentment, alienate the Islamic and Christian worlds, and fail to solve global antisemitism. And Asimov rejected the idea of Israel and ethnic nationalism, including Zionism, because he was a staunch humanist who believed humanity’s survival depended on moving past tribal divisions.
Their warnings were prophetic. They foresaw that a state built on privileging one group over another would inevitably become a machinery of subjugation that would irreparably damage Jewish society and culture, and inflict immense suffering.
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 Israelis themselves.
Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard captured this internal reckoning with painful clarity when he wrote in Haaretz: “I look at these young people who are poisoned with racism and hatred [towards Palestinians], 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 [Nazi] persecutors?
Sfard’s question is not rhetorical. It is a diagnosis of a society shaped by decades of brutal occupation, illegal settlements on Palestinian land, and ethnonational fear—one in which Jewish supremacy has become normalized, even valued. His words echo the earlier warnings of Einstein, Arendt, Asimov, and Freud, that a political project rooted in ethnonational dominance and subjugation of indigenous Palestinians would inevitably deform the society that built it, corrode its moral foundations, and reproduce the very patterns of exclusion and dehumanization that Jews themselves had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
The tragedy is not only that these warnings were ignored, but that the consequences have unfolded exactly as these thinkers predicted. A state built on the premise of supremacy has produced a political culture in which domination is seen as security, inequality of peoples as natural, and brutal violence as necessary for the Zionist project to succeed. The intellectual giants who opposed Zionism did so not out of hostility to Jewish survival, but out of a profound understanding of what happens when any people—especially a historically persecuted one—embraces the logic of ethnonational power.
Zionism’s racialized and fascist
foundations
Herzl’s writings repeatedly framed Palestinians not as a people with political rights, but as an obstacle to be managed, displaced, subordinated and possibly eliminated. 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 fascist elements including: a belief in demographic engineering (ethnic cleansing); a vision of a homogenous ethnonational state; a hierarchical worldview that placed European Jews at the apex of humanity; and a willingness to subordinate or remove indigenous populations by force. These elements place Herzl within the intellectual genealogy of European racial nationalism and fascism. If one removes his Jewish identity he would very easily have found a home in Europe’s fascist movements.
This is not an accusation of personal malevolence but rather a recognition that Herzl’s political philosophy was shaped by the dominant ideologies of his time—settler colonialism, racialized nationalism, and ethnonational exclusivity. These ideas later crystallized into Israeli state policies that privileged Jews over native Palestinians and forceful control over their territory and their rights.
The making of a supremacist regime
The Nakba of 1948—marked by mass ethnic cleansing, massacres, eradication of Palestinian towns and villages, and the permanent exclusion of refugees—was not an aberration but a foundational moment for the new Israeli state built on the blood and bones of historic Palestine’s indigenous people. Additionally, Laws such as the Absentee Property Law ensured that Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes could never return, while their lands and property 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, enjoying full political rights, and receiving state protection, and a second where Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land theft, and arbitrary detention and torture. B’Tselem concluded in 2021 that this constitutes “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossed reached the same conclusion, documenting policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic and political supremacy through land control, movement restrictions, and discriminatory laws. These are not fringe interpretations. They are the assessments of leading human rights institutions.
Palestinian dehumanization as
policy and culture
Such language is not merely hateful—it is functional. It prepares the public to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, brutality, and large‑scale military assault. The Israeli-American historian of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, who did his PhD on the indoctrination of Nazi German soldiers has argued that young Israeli soldiers who have fought inside the Gaza Strip in the ongoing during the Gaza genocide display attitudes towards their enemies similar to those of Nazi troops and Hitler Youth in the Second World War in that they have internalized the view that Hamas militants are “human animals.” Settler violence, often carried out with impunity, 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 since the mid-2000s to today. By mid‑November 2023, Holocaust and genocide scholars—including Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, and Barry Trachtenberg—warned that Israel’s actions risked or constituted genocide. Their warnings were grounded in patterns familiar from other cases: forced displacement; destruction of civilian infrastructure; mass killing; and rhetoric invoking biblical annihilation narratives.
Holocaust survivors and their descendants have echoed these warnings with a moral authority that cannot be dismissed. Drawing on memories of Jewish ghettos, forced displacement, starvation, and the systematic stripping away of human dignity, they argue that the dehumanization of Palestinians mirrors patterns they recognize from their own histories under Nazi rule. These are not casual comparisons or rhetorical flourishes; they are the reflections of people who have spent a lifetime with memories of how atrocity begins—in language, in policy, and in the gradual normalization of cruelty. Their testimony carries a weight that is both personal and scholarly, a lived experience intertwined with decades of reflection on the mechanisms of genocide. Their testimonies cannot be dismissed, and should be seen as a clarion call to recognize the universal dangers of dehumanization before it hardens into something even more catastrophic.
Impunity as Israeli policy
For decades, Israel benefited from near‑total impunity in the international legal system for actions dating back to its founding—ethnic cleansing, mass killing, wars of aggression, military occupation, and the annexation of conquered land. However, that shield is finally beginning to crack, given that the world has awakened to the scale and visibility of Israeli state violence. The old narratives that once insulated Israel from accountability no longer hold. Proceedings before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have forced an unprecedented global reckoning with the legal and moral consequences of prolonged occupation, systemic discrimination, and the routine use of force against an entire civilian population.
Some Holocaust scholars who initially defended Israel’s actions in Gaza have since fallen silent. Their early endorsements of Israel’s violence—rather than of universal human rights—exposed a troubling readiness to subordinate anti‑racist principles to personal ethnonational loyalty. That scholars such as Dean Barbara Krauthamer of Emory University—a historian of African American life and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—along with Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, the influential dean of Berkeley Law, and Professor Deborah Lipstadt, Emory’s renowned Holocaust scholar and the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, have all remained conspicuously silent as the death toll in Gaza has soared—and despite genocide declarations from their own colleagues, as well as findings from the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other respected human rights bodies—reveals a profound betrayal of the very lessons the field of genocide studies was created to uphold.
Zionism is the cousin of white
supremacy
Zionism and white supremacy share
structural parallels that are evident in the ways they operate within the
societies where they are present. Both Zionism (as practiced by Israel) and
white supremacy in certain Western countries share the following: they construct
a superior in‑group entitled to land and sovereignty; they justify
dispossession of an indigenous population; they rely on demographic engineering
(i.e. ethnic cleansing); they use narratives of civilizational superiority over
other peoples; and they normalize segregation and unequal citizenship.
In the United States, “manifest
destiny” justified the displacement and slaughter of millions 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 Palestinian and non‑European
Jews. This is not metaphor. It is the lived, legal, and political structure
under which millions of Palestinians are forced to exist.
A society shaped by supremacy
The internal consequences of
supremacy are not confined to the Palestinians who live under its control, they reverberate through Israeli
society itself. Haaretz has documented in painstaking detail how the normalization of Jewish supremacy has
fractured Israel from within, empowering extremist settler factions
and far‑right movements that now sit at the centre of national political life.
What was once dismissed as the ideological fringe has become the gravitational
core of Israeli politics. The settlers who torch Palestinian homes, uproot
olive groves, and assault children now shape cabinet portfolios, dictate
coalition terms, and define the boundaries of acceptable public discourse.
Supremacy, once a tool of domination over Palestinians, has metastasized like a
cancer into a governing ethos in Israel.
The depth of this transformation
is starkly reflected in Israeli public opinion. A Haaretz poll published
on June 3, 2025, revealed findings that lay bare the mainstreaming of
exterminationist ideology within Israeli society. According to the survey, 47% of Israeli Jews supported “killing
all Palestinians in Gaza," including infants; 82% supported
the complete ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza; and 56% supported
expelling all non‑Jews from every territory under Israeli control—all of which
are crimes under international law. These numbers, reported directly by Haaretz,
do not represent fringe extremism but a chilling portrait of a society in which
supremacist ideology has penetrated deeply into the public consciousness. They
expose a political culture in which mass expulsion and even mass killing are no
longer unthinkable but openly endorsed by large segments of the dominant
ethnonational group.
It appears that the post-Oslo era
did not moderate these supremacist forces but instead entrenched them. After
the world celebrated handshakes on the White House lawn in September 1993,
Israel accelerated its political, with the promise of a negotiated peace
masking a deeper structural transformation—the consolidation of a system
designed to ensure permanent Jewish political and territorial dominance over
the Palestinian people and the land that was meant to be their nation.
Critics writing in Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera argue that what is described as
“Jewish self‑determination” has, in practice, evolved into a system of Jewish
supremacy that denies Palestinians any equivalent political, civil, or human
rights. They point out that a state cannot claim to be both democratic and
permanently structured around the dominance of one ethnonational group. The
contradiction is not theoretical; it is lived daily by millions of Palestinians
who experience military law, checkpoints, home demolitions, land theft, and the
denial of basic freedoms, while Jewish settlers living beside them enjoy full
civil rights, state protection, and political representation.
This critique is not limited to
journalists or activists. It is increasingly echoed by scholars of settler
colonialism, apartheid, and ethnonationalism, who argue that Israel’s political
order exhibits the defining characteristics of a supremacy-based regime not
unlike Apartheid South Africa, where differential citizenship, territorial
fragmentation, demographic engineering, and the systematic devaluation of the
rights of the indigenous population was the norm. Far from being a fringe
interpretation, this analysis has become the emerging consensus across multiple
academic fields.
In this sense, the crisis facing
Israeli society is inseparable from the crisis it has imposed on Palestinians.
Supremacy is an unstable organizing principle that demands constant
enforcement, constant fear, constant mobilization against an imagined
demographic threat. It produces a politics of paranoia, a culture of
dehumanization, and a public sphere in which violence becomes not only
permissible but inevitable. To understand contemporary Israel, then, is to
understand a society shaped—indeed warped—by the structures of supremacy it has
built. And to understand the Palestinian condition is to recognize that these
structures are not temporary distortions but the defining architecture of the
state.
Toward a future beyond supremacy
Recognizing the supremacist
structures embedded in Israeli governance does not diminish the reality of
Jewish suffering, nor does it erase the profound and enduring trauma of
antisemitism. It does not question the legitimacy of Jewish collective
identity, cultural continuity, or the aspiration for safety in a world where
Jews have historically faced persecution. What it does is insist on a truth
that should be self‑evident—the memory of historical trauma cannot be used to
justify the infliction of trauma on another people.
To confront the architecture of
supremacy is not an attack against Jews. It is a defence of the universal
principle that no people’s liberation can be built on the subjugation of
another. History shows, again and again, that domination is not a path to
security but a guarantee of perpetual conflict. A political order that relies
on the permanent disenfranchisement of millions cannot produce lasting safety
for anyone, including the group it claims to protect.
Ending the occupation,
dismantling apartheid structures, and recognizing Palestinian political and
human rights are not acts of hostility toward Jews or threats to Jewish
survival. They are acts of fidelity to the very principles that many Jewish
thinkers, activists, and Holocaust survivors have championed for generations:
justice, equality, and the recognition of people’s humanity. A political order
grounded in equality is not a danger to Jews—it is the only durable guarantee
of their safety.
Michael Sfard’s haunting
question—How did we produce replicas of our persecutors?—demands an answer that
goes beyond individual prejudice or political miscalculation. The answer lies
in the corrosive power of ethnonational supremacy itself. Any ideology that
elevates one group’s rights above another’s, will inevitably reproduce the very
patterns of domination it claims to reject. Supremacy is not a shield; it is a
poison.
A future beyond supremacy
requires more than policy reform. It requires a dismantling of the structures
that created it and a transformation similar to what took place after World War
Two in Germany and Japan. It demands the courage to envision a shared future
rather than a zero‑sum struggle, to replace domination with equality, and to
recognize that the humanity of Palestinians is not a threat to Jewish existence
but a precondition for a just and lasting peace. The path forward is not easy,
but it is clear that only by dismantling the structures of supremacy can
Israelis and Palestinians alike reclaim their full humanity.
The task now is to build an
Israeli political and societal culture that is grounded not in the ideology of
Zionism—the domination of Jews over Palestinians—but one founded on the
principles of human rights, equality of peoples, inclusion and co-existence.
© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All
Rights Reserved.
In the United States, “manifest destiny” justified the displacement and slaughter of millions 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 Palestinian and non‑European Jews. This is not metaphor. It is the lived, legal, and political structure under which millions of Palestinians are forced to exist.
A society shaped by supremacy
The internal consequences of supremacy are not confined to the Palestinians who live under its control, they reverberate through Israeli society itself. Haaretz has documented in painstaking detail how the normalization of Jewish supremacy has fractured Israel from within, empowering extremist settler factions and far‑right movements that now sit at the centre of national political life. What was once dismissed as the ideological fringe has become the gravitational core of Israeli politics. The settlers who torch Palestinian homes, uproot olive groves, and assault children now shape cabinet portfolios, dictate coalition terms, and define the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. Supremacy, once a tool of domination over Palestinians, has metastasized like a cancer into a governing ethos in Israel.
The depth of this transformation is starkly reflected in Israeli public opinion. A Haaretz poll published on June 3, 2025, revealed findings that lay bare the mainstreaming of exterminationist ideology within Israeli society. According to the survey, 47% of Israeli Jews supported “killing all Palestinians in Gaza," including infants; 82% supported the complete ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza; and 56% supported expelling all non‑Jews from every territory under Israeli control—all of which are crimes under international law. These numbers, reported directly by Haaretz, do not represent fringe extremism but a chilling portrait of a society in which supremacist ideology has penetrated deeply into the public consciousness. They expose a political culture in which mass expulsion and even mass killing are no longer unthinkable but openly endorsed by large segments of the dominant ethnonational group.
It appears that the post-Oslo era did not moderate these supremacist forces but instead entrenched them. After the world celebrated handshakes on the White House lawn in September 1993, Israel accelerated its political, with the promise of a negotiated peace masking a deeper structural transformation—the consolidation of a system designed to ensure permanent Jewish political and territorial dominance over the Palestinian people and the land that was meant to be their nation.
Critics writing in Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera argue that what is described as “Jewish self‑determination” has, in practice, evolved into a system of Jewish supremacy that denies Palestinians any equivalent political, civil, or human rights. They point out that a state cannot claim to be both democratic and permanently structured around the dominance of one ethnonational group. The contradiction is not theoretical; it is lived daily by millions of Palestinians who experience military law, checkpoints, home demolitions, land theft, and the denial of basic freedoms, while Jewish settlers living beside them enjoy full civil rights, state protection, and political representation.
This critique is not limited to journalists or activists. It is increasingly echoed by scholars of settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnonationalism, who argue that Israel’s political order exhibits the defining characteristics of a supremacy-based regime not unlike Apartheid South Africa, where differential citizenship, territorial fragmentation, demographic engineering, and the systematic devaluation of the rights of the indigenous population was the norm. Far from being a fringe interpretation, this analysis has become the emerging consensus across multiple academic fields.
In this sense, the crisis facing Israeli society is inseparable from the crisis it has imposed on Palestinians. Supremacy is an unstable organizing principle that demands constant enforcement, constant fear, constant mobilization against an imagined demographic threat. It produces a politics of paranoia, a culture of dehumanization, and a public sphere in which violence becomes not only permissible but inevitable. To understand contemporary Israel, then, is to understand a society shaped—indeed warped—by the structures of supremacy it has built. And to understand the Palestinian condition is to recognize that these structures are not temporary distortions but the defining architecture of the state.
Toward a future beyond supremacy
Recognizing the supremacist structures embedded in Israeli governance does not diminish the reality of Jewish suffering, nor does it erase the profound and enduring trauma of antisemitism. It does not question the legitimacy of Jewish collective identity, cultural continuity, or the aspiration for safety in a world where Jews have historically faced persecution. What it does is insist on a truth that should be self‑evident—the memory of historical trauma cannot be used to justify the infliction of trauma on another people.
To confront the architecture of supremacy is not an attack against Jews. It is a defence of the universal principle that no people’s liberation can be built on the subjugation of another. History shows, again and again, that domination is not a path to security but a guarantee of perpetual conflict. A political order that relies on the permanent disenfranchisement of millions cannot produce lasting safety for anyone, including the group it claims to protect.
Ending the occupation, dismantling apartheid structures, and recognizing Palestinian political and human rights are not acts of hostility toward Jews or threats to Jewish survival. They are acts of fidelity to the very principles that many Jewish thinkers, activists, and Holocaust survivors have championed for generations: justice, equality, and the recognition of people’s humanity. A political order grounded in equality is not a danger to Jews—it is the only durable guarantee of their safety.
Michael Sfard’s haunting question—How did we produce replicas of our persecutors?—demands an answer that goes beyond individual prejudice or political miscalculation. The answer lies in the corrosive power of ethnonational supremacy itself. Any ideology that elevates one group’s rights above another’s, will inevitably reproduce the very patterns of domination it claims to reject. Supremacy is not a shield; it is a poison.
A future beyond supremacy requires more than policy reform. It requires a dismantling of the structures that created it and a transformation similar to what took place after World War Two in Germany and Japan. It demands the courage to envision a shared future rather than a zero‑sum struggle, to replace domination with equality, and to recognize that the humanity of Palestinians is not a threat to Jewish existence but a precondition for a just and lasting peace. The path forward is not easy, but it is clear that only by dismantling the structures of supremacy can Israelis and Palestinians alike reclaim their full humanity.
The task now is to build an Israeli political and societal culture that is grounded not in the ideology of Zionism—the domination of Jews over Palestinians—but one founded on the principles of human rights, equality of peoples, inclusion and co-existence.
© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
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