Israel's extremist government deserves reproach, not celebration

Today, Israeli President Isaac Herzog will be honored by members of Congress, addressing a joint session after meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday. Progressive members of Congress should not attend Herzog’s address.

Herzog is a fig leaf, putting a kinder, gentler face on Israeli apartheid and the most extreme government in Israel’s history. Last year was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005, and this year is on pace to be even worse, with more than 140 killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers so far. In just the first six months of 2023, Israel has already broken the annual record for new settlement units, and responsibility for Israel's illegal settlement enterprise has been shifted to civilian oversight — in effect de facto annexing the occupied West Bank — all under Herzog’s watch.

Herzog’s invitation, extended last year by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to mark the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding, appears meant to silence Israel’s critics from the top down. The critics could not be defeated at the popular level as evidenced by a recent Gallup poll showing that, for the first time, a majority of Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis. To stem the momentum of progressive movements, pro-Israel lobby groups have ramped up their efforts to adopt legislation intended to suppress the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights, as well as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition equating criticism of Israel to antisemitism.

The recent attacks on Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) are part of this effort.

Over the weekend, Jayapal told a Chicago audience something quite plain: that “Israel is a racist state.” Her words should not be controversial. Legacy and Israeli human rights organizations, together with United Nations agencies, committees and multiple independent studies, have all concluded that Israel oversees an apartheid regime. Legislated as a crime against humanity in 1973 and again in the 1998 Rome Statute, apartheid is, by definition, established “for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them." If it is apartheid, it is racist.

The rebuke of Jayapal ignores the overwhelming empirical evidence and analytical findings of the world’s most renowned human rights advocates and scholars. Following the backlash from Israel’s supporters, including several of her fellow Democratic members of Congress, Jayapal amended her statement to describe Israel’s government, rather than the Israeli nation, as racist.

Ironically, there is no such thing as an Israeli national — this is the crux of the matter.

Israel is not, and has never been, a state of its citizens. Under Israeli law, which bifurcates Jewish nationality and Israeli citizenship, a Jewish teen in Lisbon who just discovered Israel on a map has more rights in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories than an 80-year-old Palestinian woman born in what became Israel before it was established in 1948.

Native Palestinians who became citizens in Israel — and make up more than 20 percent of its population — are not only second-class citizens, they are rendered present-absent to facilitate their ongoing dispossession. In 2018, Israel’s parliament adopted the Jewish Nation-State Law, declaring that only Jews have the right to self-determination in Palestine/Israel. A year later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it even more plainly: Israel is “the national state, not of all of its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.”

Yet for the U.S. elected officials singing Israel’s praise, it is as if none of this has happened. As if Israel did not torpedo the Palestinian state as well as the possibility of binationalism; did not declare unilateral sovereignty over Jerusalem; or allow three settler pogroms against Palestinian villages. It's as if a robust social movement featuring Black and Palestinian solidarity that has affirmed joint struggle and helped catapult progressive Democrats into office never took place. As if Israeli leaders themselves did not call it apartheid and become sidelined by an extremist government intent on upending an independent Israeli judiciary.

It may as well be 1987, when Herzog’s father, Chaim Herzog, addressed Congress, or 2000, when the Oslo negotiations collapsed at Camp David. U.S. official rhetoric is the same, even though so much has fundamentally changed. There exists an apartheid reality in Israel and rather than contend with this, Israel’s most ardent defenders want to normalize and exemplify it.

In their invitation to Herzog, Sen. Schumer and Speaker Pelosi referred to the founding of Israel as a “historic and joyous milestone” to be celebrated. They fail to acknowledge that exclusive Zionist sovereignty necessitated the ethnic cleansing of three-quarters of all Palestinians from their homeland to make way for a Jewish majority state, known to Palestinians as the Nakba (catastrophe), and that their systematic erasure continues into the present. The ongoing Nakba and the massive suffering it inflicts on Palestinians is nothing to be celebrated.

Herzog might be considered a moderate by the right-wing standards of Israeli politics, but that says little. He does not even oppose the West Bank settlement enterprise, considered illegal by international diplomatic consensus and now up for scrutiny as a war crime before the International Criminal Court. Congress should be discussing measures of accountability, rather than normalizing the apartheid of our time.

At least five progressive members of the House have said they will boycott Herzog’s address, as many did with the recent address by Indian Prime Minister Modi. Others should join their principled stand and skip Herzog’s speech.

Nelson Mandela once said that the freedom of South Africans is incomplete without the freedom of Palestinians. So too is the case for progressive movements in the United States. Abandoning Palestinians is not a pragmatic option — it is only self-defeating and harmful precisely at a time when the tide is turning.

A human rights attorney, Noura Erakat is associate professor at Rutgers University and author of “Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.”