Marty Levine
August 25, 2025
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights tells us that
- All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
- All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation, based upon the principle of mutual benefit, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.
For the Jewish people, Israel’s supporters tell us, that this justifies the state’s existence and its actions, however brutal they might be.
Denying the Jewish people their basic human rights, including the right to self-determination, is anti-Semitism. This basic right is fulfilled by the existence of the State of Israel. It is protected and advanced by the political movement to guarantee Jewish self-determination – Zionism. Zionism is about the Jewish people, and does not compete with any other people’s basic human right of self-determination. As anti-Zionism seeks to undermine this basic right of the Jewish, it is anti-Semitic. When anti-Israel rhetoric, advocacy or activity crosses the line beyond which it seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish State, it is anti-Semitic. There is no government whose policies are not legitimately criticized, but when this criticism aims to dismantle that country, it ceases to be legitimate. Disagreeing with French policies does not lead critics to the conclusion that France as a country is illegitimate, or that France should be disbanded. The same respect should be afforded to the State of Israel. Joint written statement* submitted by the Coordinating Board of Jewish Organizations (CBJO), a non-governmental organization in special consultative status and B’nai B’rith
But while Israel relies on this logic for justifying its existence as an Apartheid state, we are asked to understand that the right of self-determination applies to only one of the communities living on that land.
From its beginning, Zionism, the quest of the Jews for a homeland, rejected the existence of an existing community in the land that was to be the Jewish State, as it sought to fulfill its right of self-determination.
Borrowing a phrase that in rooted in 19th and early 20th century Christian thinking, Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the State of Israel’s first president, told the world:
In its initial stage Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite this people with this country? The owners of the country [the Ottoman Turks?] must, therefore, be persuaded and convinced that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the [Jewish] people and for the country, but also for themselves.
That statement was written in 1914 when, according to the Jewish Virtual Library the land looked anything but peopleless, and whose people were predominantly not Jewish:
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- Total Population: 689,000
- Jews: 94,000
- Non-Jews 595,000
- % Jewish 6%
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What my people envisioned as a safe-haven against a world that had stigmatized us, othered us, expelled us, and ultimately tried to exterminate us was a land where we had power and control. We envisioned a land where we made the rules and built a country to our liking. This required us to place our right of self-determination above all others. To do unto others as they had done unto us.
Beyond the political need for a safe haven, we had God on our side.
On that day, God made a covenant with Abram, saying: “To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river the Euphrates. The land of the Kenites, Kenizites, Kadmonites; the Chitties, Perizites, Refaim; the Emorites, Canaanites, Gigashites and Yevusites.” (Genesis 15:18-21)
“And I will give to you and to your descendants after you, the land of your temporary residence, all the land of Canaan as an eternal possession and I will be a God to them.” (Genesis 17:8)
And that makes our demand for self-determination more than just politics. As Rabbi Ken Spiro put it
However, the Jewish people base their claim on God’s promise. It is a moral claim because God is God and God is by definition truth, and God is by definition morality. God gave the Jewish people the Land of Israel. Without that, the only claim the modern State of Israel can make is it is stronger and was able to win all its wars with the Arabs.
Combine a mythology of an empty land with this messianic thinking, and the Jewish world has been able to ignore the expulsion and displacement of the people who did live on the land between the time the Jewish people went into exile and their “return.” We have been able to deny that they are even a people for whom the right of their own self-determination might be of concern.
There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. Prime Minister Golda Meir, 1969
We have been able to look away from the second-class citizenship that those Arabs (we dare not call them Palestinian) who remained within the state’s borders have been asked to live as. Within the State of Israel, the incorporation of this maximalist belief in self-determination has moved from the silent power of bigotry to more and more the overt policy of government.
Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe described their plight in an interview with Jacobin entitled “The Second-Class Citizenship of Palestinian Israelis”
In 2000, the Israeli political elite began to legislate against Palestinians in Israel. All kinds of unofficial practices against them suddenly became legal. For instance, Palestinians always had very limited access to land — they could not expand their areas — but now it also became illegal for them to do so. It was also forbidden for them to talk about the Nakba.
All of this culminated in the Nationality Law in 2018, which officially stated that Palestinians can be individual citizens of Israel, but they cannot be part of a national community. And this refers not only to 1948 territory — from the river to the sea, there is only one nation, the law says, and this is the Jewish nation. There is no other nation there.
The “miraculous” victory of Israel in the 6-Day war of 1967 gave fuel to the messianic belief in Jewish Supremacy. Israel became the governing force not only for its own Palestinian citizens, but for millions more who lived in the land they conquered, many of whom were the descendants of those who had been expelled from the land when the State of Israel had been established.
Year by year, the Jewish belief in god’s gift as the rationale for determining where their state would be grew. Speaking of a two-state solution to a problem of, not a land without a people, but a land with two people, slowly dropped away, replaced by the vision of a return to a biblical concept of a greater Israel. Settlements could grow at the expense of Palestinians. Civil rights could be different depending on which people you were a part of. This was tolerable even to the extent that some Israeli Jews recognized that they had emulated the White South African population and created in the name of Jewish self-determination, an Apartheid state.
And now we are in the midst of a State, The Jewish State, carrying out a cleansing, an ETHNIC cleansing of a people in Gaza and an annexation and removal of those people living in the West Bank, all in the name of the right to self-determination.
We have Israel’s Prime Minister telling the world that Israel is “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.” We have Israel’s Minister Benjamin Smotrich telling the world that there is no possibility of recognizing the Palestinians’ right to self-determination as he marks the building of more settlements for Jews on Palestinian lands
This reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize,” Smotrich said during a ceremony on Thursday. “Anyone in the world who tries today to recognize a Palestinian state will receive an answer from us on the ground.
It cannot be that one person’s rights can only be fulfilled by destroying another’s. Is this not what we learned from Nazi Germany?
Is this not what the same religious teaching that we use to justify Israel has taught us not to do?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reflected on the meaning of three biblical verses that tell us about God’s instructions about treating the other:
- Do not ill-treat a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in Egypt (Exodus 22:20)
- Do not oppress a stranger; you yourselves know how it feels to be a stranger because you were strangers in Egypt. ( 23:9)
- When a stranger lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The stranger living with you must be treated as one of your native- born. Love him as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. (Lev. 19:33–34)
And Rabbi Sacks concluded that these, along with many other teachings within the body of Jewish Religious thought, instructs us not to do what Israel and its supporters are doing:
The Torah asks, why should you not hate the stranger? Because you once stood where he stands now. You know the heart of the stranger because you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt. If you are human, so is he. If he is less than human, so are you. You must fight the hatred in your heart as I once fought the greatest ruler and the strongest empire in the ancient world on your behalf. I made you into the world’s archetypal strangers so that you would fight for the rights of strangers – for your own and those of others, wherever they are, whoever they are, whatever the colour of their skin or the nature of their culture, because though they are not in your image, says God, they are nonetheless in Mine. There is only one reply strong enough to answer the question: Why should I not hate the stranger? Because the stranger is me.
What is right?
I think it is when we stand together to call out what is clearly wrong and what our teachings require us to do. That is “To love our neighbor as ourselves” and to build the future together. And that can only be done by re
I know where I stand…what about you?
