In 2021, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem classified the State of Israel as "a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea" through laws amounting to apartheid. It also took note of the fact that, after it was established in 1989, it initially focused on the legal and social situation in the Israeli-occupied territories, but that "what happens in the Occupied Territories can no longer be treated as separate from the reality in the entire area under Israel’s control," owing to the fact that there "is one regime governing the entire area and the people living in it, based on a single organizing principle."[4]
Proponents of the one-state solution cite the development of Jewish supremacy as one of the main reasons for the necessity of a single country that applies democratic principles across all sectors of society, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliations.[5]
Discourse
Ilan Pappé, an expatriate Israeli historian, writes that the First Aliyah to Israel "established a society based on Jewish supremacy" within "settlement-cooperatives" that were Jewish owned and operated.[6]Joseph Massad, a professor of Arab studies, holds that "Jewish supremacism" has always been a "dominating principle" in religious and secular Zionism.[7][8] Zionism was established with the goal of creating a sovereign Jewish state, where Jews could be the majority, rather than the minority. Theodor Herzl, the ideological father of Zionism, considered antisemitism as an eternal feature of all societies in which Jews lived as minorities, and as a result, he believed that only a separation could allow Jews to escape eternal persecution. "Let them give us sovereignty over a piece of the Earth's surface, just sufficient for the needs of our people, then we will do the rest!"[9]
In 2002, Joseph Massad said that Israel imposes a "Jewish supremacist system of discrimination" on Palestinian citizens of Israel, and that this has been normalized within the discourse on how to end the conflict, with various parties arguing that "it is pragmatic for Palestinians to accept to live in a Jewish supremacist state as third class citizens".[1]
^Ilan Pappé (1999). The Israel/Palestine question. Psychology Press. p. 89. ISBN978-0415169479. Whereas the First Aliya established a society based on Jewish supremacy, the Second Aliya's method of colonization was separation from Palestinians.
^Menchik, Jeremy (August 2024). "Introduction: Symposium on the Jewish Left". Critical Research on Religion. 12 (2): 210–214. doi:10.1177/20503032241269655.
^ ab"Supremacy Unleashed: The Ongoing Erosion of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel." Shira Robinson 2021, The Routledge Handbook of Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa
^Saïd, Ibrahim L. (1 October 2020). "Some are more equal than others: Palestinian citizens in the settler colonial Jewish State". Settler Colonial Studies. 10 (4): 481–507. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2020.1794210.