Since I work in IT I’ve had dealings with Israeli companies, staffed by Israelis, and…they never struck me as being the monsters that are portrayed as typical of Israeli people and culture in much discourse in the UK in Quaker and Quaker-adjacent spaces. And, I have Jewish friends, and Jewish Friends, who look at much of the pro-Palestinian rhetoric deployed in the UK and elsewhere, including by Quakers, and feel very uncomfortable about it. So I’ve been reading around a lot of accounts of Israel, and how it got to be the way it did, and how others have ended up talking about it the way they do. A lot of stuff. And the threads are complex and tangled.

I’ve turned to AI, to Claude Opus 4.8 “Extra” specifically, and had a conversation with it about this, and had it do a write-up. The tragic conclusion is that the rise of Kahanist influences within the government has made true now, what was not true in the past.

The Anatomy of an Accusation

Israel stands charged with being a racist, apartheid, settler-colonial state, always so and so by design. As a fixed verdict the charge fails, yet the bounded part of it that the evidence supports has been widening as the heirs of Meir Kahane take office. And ironically, much of the language now used to draw the indictment was manufactured by the power whose backing made the state possible.

The case against Israel arrives as a single indictment with several counts:

• that it is a racist state
• that it practises apartheid
• that it is an outpost of European settler colonialism, and
• that it was all of these from conception and by intent.

Stated whole, and as a fixed property of the state, the indictment fails, because it is a bundle rather than a claim and the counts are not equally true.

Restricted to the occupied territories and to documented practice, a substantial part of it survives contact with the evidence and now commands the agreement of serious courts and human-rights bodies. That part has been growing, and the sharpest change is recent and domestic: the current of avowed Jewish supremacism that Israel spent its first decades outlawing, the movement of the late Meir Kahane, now holds senior cabinet office and shapes policy over Palestinian life. The honest response is therefore neither endorsement nor flat denial, but a disaggregation that has to track a moving object rather than fix a verdict for good: separating what the evidence supports from what the slogan smuggles in beside it, and registering that the supported part is larger today than it was a generation ago.

A second finding is less often noticed. The vocabulary in which the indictment is now drawn, with racism, colonialism and apartheid soldered into one accusation, was assembled in large part by the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War. The same bloc had supplied the recognition and the weapons without which Israel might not have survived its first year. The power that served as midwife to the state became the principal author of the charge that its birth was a crime. The irony is not decorative; it bears directly on the weakest count, the claim that Israel was a Western colonial venture from the start.

Take the counts in order of how well they stand.

Apartheid

The word does two jobs at once, and the claim depends on the confusion. In the governing instruments, the 1973 Apartheid Convention and Article 7 of the Rome Statute, apartheid names a generic crime against humanity: an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, maintained with intent. It is not a label reserved for South Africa. The category does not rest on biological race, a notion with no coherent basis, human variation being continuous and greater within the conventional racial groupings than between them. The law instead treats a racial group as a social and political construction, marked by descent, ethnicity or nationality, which is why it reaches Jews and Palestinians as readily as any population customarily called a race. So “meets the legal definition of apartheid” and “is much the same as apartheid South Africa” are different propositions, and the second is far harder to sustain than the first.

The institutional weather has shifted. B’Tselem (January 2021), Human Rights Watch (April 2021), Amnesty International (February 2022) and the Israeli group Yesh Din (2020) have all reached for the apartheid framework, though they disagree about its reach. Human Rights Watch and Yesh Din confined the finding largely to the occupied territories; B’Tselem and Amnesty extended it to the entire system between the river and the sea, with Amnesty tracing the regime of domination to the state’s establishment in 1948. In July 2024 the International Court of Justice found that Israeli law in the occupied territories effects a separation between settlers and Palestinians that breaches Article 3 of the racial-discrimination convention, the article that prohibits racial segregation and apartheid. The Court was studiously careful: it treated segregation and apartheid as distinct crimes and declined to define apartheid or to say which it had found. That reticence is itself evidence of how contested the strongest version remains.

The comparison holds best where the claim is narrowest. In the West Bank the structural parallels with the South African system are close: two legal codes for two populations in one territory, a settlement enterprise, a permit and movement regime, impunity for settler violence. It is weakest applied inside the pre-1967 lines, where Arab citizens vote, sit in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court, and where an Arab party entered the governing coalition in 2021. There is no equivalent of South Africa’s Population Registration Act, the distinctions run through nationality and security rather than codified racial classification, and the economic logic differs, since apartheid sought to retain a rights-less Black labour force whereas the Israeli pattern tends toward separation. The defensible position rejects the totalising version and takes the bounded one, focused on the territories, seriously.

Settler colonialism

This count is not a legal category but an analytical model, and so the test is explanatory fit rather than a court’s finding. The model worth assessing is the academic one, chiefly Patrick Wolfe’s and Lorenzo Veracini’s, not the looser public usage where the phrase works as a verdict. Wolfe distinguished extractive colonialism, which exploits native labour for a distant metropole, from settler colonialism, which seeks to replace the native population on the land and so runs on a logic of elimination. His slogan, that invasion is a structure rather than an event, locates the analysis in outcomes, not in the settlers’ stated motives. Both Wolfe and Veracini counted Israel among their cases.

A good deal fits. Zionism involved migration to settle and build sovereignty on land already inhabited; it proceeded through systematic land acquisition, with the Jewish National Fund holding purchased land inalienably for Jews, and through displacement that culminated in the expulsions and flight of 1948. Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict remains the most rigorous application, arguing that the Yishuv moved from an early plantation model toward an exclusivist settlement form built on the conquest of land and of Hebrew labour. Rashid Khalidi reads the whole century as a colonial war on an indigenous society. The early movement used colonial vocabulary about itself without embarrassment, from the Jewish Colonial Trust to Jabotinsky’s candid “Iron Wall.” The post-1967 West Bank fits the type almost without remainder.

Three features strain against the model. There was no metropole; the settlers were a stateless, persecuted diaspora seeking the sovereignty they lacked, not the agents of a mother country. There is the contested indigeneity claim, the understanding of the project as return to an ancestral land rather than arrival in a foreign one. And there is motive: Zionism was driven substantially by flight from pogrom and then from genocide. On Wolfe’s own terms motive cannot exempt a structure, so refuge does not dissolve the analysis; but it weighs heavily against the broader analogy to Europe’s imperial enterprises, which the harder deployments tend to pass over. The “European” qualifier is accurate of the founding ideology and leadership, overwhelmingly Eastern European, and misleading of the present state, where a majority of Israeli Jews are of Middle Eastern, North African or Ethiopian origin, many of them refugees from Arab lands. Derek Penslar’s formulation, that Zionism both is and is not colonialism, is close to where a careful account ends. The framework is a productive lens, strongest on the territories, and not a complete description.

The midwife

The external sponsorship that the colonial reading requires was, at the decisive moment, the wrong colour for the thesis. In May 1947 Andrei Gromyko told the General Assembly that no Western European state had protected the Jews during the war, and backed partition. On 29 November the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics, Poland and Czechoslovakia all voted for Resolution 181, votes without which the two-thirds majority would have failed. During the 1948 war, with a Western arms embargo in force, Czechoslovakia supplied the new state with rifles, machine guns and fighter aircraft under Soviet approval, the only significant external military supply it received and a materially decisive one. Moscow then granted the first de jure recognition, three days after the declaration and ahead of Washington’s de facto recognition. Stalin’s calculation was anti-British: to evict the Mandate power from the region, with a socialist-leaning Jewish state as a plausible client.

The support was instrumental and short. Stalin’s last years turned violently antisemitic, through the Slánský trial of 1952 and the Doctors’ Plot of 1953. The 1955 Czech-Egyptian arms deal flipped the bloc to the Arab side; Moscow broke relations in 1967 and became the chief patron of the Arab states and later the PLO. A state armed at its birth by Moscow against London is an awkward specimen of Western settler colonialism. This founding history is precisely what the strongest “Western implant” version of the indictment must leave out.

The making of a slogan

The phrase that fuses the counts, “Zionism is racism,” has a traceable history, and it begins well before 1975. Its doctrinal pedigree lies in classical Marxism’s denial that the Jews constituted a nation, set out in Stalin’s 1913 Marxism and the National Question and shared by a Bolshevism that held Jewish workers should dissolve into the international proletariat rather than pursue separate nationhood. Soviet hostility to Zionism thus predated the state it would later target.

The specific equation of Zionism with racism was, in origin, a diplomatic manoeuvre. During the mid-1960s negotiations over the racial-discrimination convention, the Soviet Union resisted having antisemitism condemned by name and pressed instead to condemn Zionism alongside Nazism, a device to deflect scrutiny of its own treatment of Soviet Jews. After the 1967 war the campaign hardened into an industry. State publishing produced a literature of “Zionology”, Trofim Kichko’s Judaism Without Embellishment in 1963 and Yuri Ivanov’s Caution: Zionism! in 1969 among the notorious examples, drawing openly on older antisemitic tropes, and in 1974 the Party Central Committee adopted a seven-point plan to intensify anti-Zionist propaganda.

The charge reached the General Assembly through a coalition with mixed motives. The Soviet line fused with an Arab anti-colonialism rooted in the real experience of 1948 and with Third-Worldist solidarity politics at the end of the decolonisation era, when many African states had broken with Israel and ranged it alongside white-minority rule in southern Africa. The year 1975 supplied the precursors: the Mexico City women’s conference declaration listing colonialism, Zionism and apartheid in one breath; the Organisation of African Unity summit at Kampala asserting a common imperialist origin for the regimes in Palestine, Rhodesia and South Africa; the Non-Aligned conference at Lima branding Zionism a racist and imperialist ideology. On 10 November 1975, Resolution 3379 determined Zionism to be a form of racism, by 72 votes to 35 with 32 abstentions. The American ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan answered that the lie was the proposition itself; Israel’s Chaim Herzog called it antisemitism in diplomatic dress. The resolution was revoked in December 1991, by 111 votes to 25, amid the Gulf War and the Madrid conference, with the expiring Soviet Union co-sponsoring the repeal.

Two qualifications keep the genealogy honest. Anti-Zionism as such is older and more various than the Soviet slogan; it includes Bundist socialism, Orthodox religious objection, Arab nationalism responding to dispossession, and the Jewish binationalists Arendt, Magnes and Buber. The slogan was engineered in Moscow, the broader argument was not. And provenance does not settle present truth: that the Soviets coined the phrase does not make any particular contemporary charge false, any more than the legal questions about the occupation can be answered by pointing at their pedigree. Still, 1975 is the moment at which racism, colonialism and apartheid were first welded into a single accusation, and that welded bundle is what the present campaigns inherit.

The inheritors

Two lineages run into the progressive and left-wing campaigns of the past fifteen years. The first is the scholarly settler-colonial frame migrating from the seminar into activist common sense, the pivotal text being Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s 2012 essay insisting that decolonisation is not a metaphor but the literal return of land. Welded to intersectionality, this gave Palestine solidarity its organising premise and converted the conflict from a dispute between two national movements, which a partition can in principle settle, into a relation of coloniser and colonised, which only reversal can. That is why the third demand of the boycott movement, the return of the 1948 refugees, became its non-negotiable core, and why two-statism came to look like a settler’s bargain. The pairing of Ferguson and Gaza in 2014 set Israel inside one global structure of settler racism alongside the United States, Canada and Australia.

The second lineage is the older one. The framing of Israel as an imperialist outpost, and the bundling of colonialism with apartheid and racism, descends from Resolution 3379 and its 1975 coalition rather than from Wolfe. The contemporary left speaks this dialect fluently and, for the most part, without knowing who composed it.

Between the two lineages stands a single conference, and it is where the older one re-entered the world. When the General Assembly repealed Resolution 3379 in 1991, the charge lost the state that had built it; a decade later it acquired a new sponsor in international civil society. The United Nations World Conference against Racism, held at Durban from 31 August to 8 September 2001, was meant to open a century of human rights, and on slavery and reparations it did serious work. On Israel it became the occasion for reviving the equation the Assembly had just buried. After the United States and Israel walked out, and with the European Union threatening to follow, the intergovernmental declaration dropped the explicit language and settled for a reference to the plight of Palestinians under occupation.

The parallel NGO Forum went much further, branding Israel an apartheid and racist state and producing scenes that sympathetic observers could not defend: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on sale on the grounds, antisemitic caricature, harassment of Jewish delegates, and the removal by vote of the Jewish caucus’s own paragraph on antisemitism, after which the UN High Commissioner Mary Robinson declined to forward the NGO document to governments. It is Israel’s defenders who insist most loudly that Durban gave birth to the boycott movement, and the movement’s own dating of itself to a Palestinian call of 2005 need not contradict them, for the strategic continuity is plain: the isolation of Israel under the apartheid brand, driven now by a coalition of NGOs in place of a bloc of states. The conference fell three days before the attacks of 11 September 2001 and was almost wholly forgotten by the public, which let the strategy mature unobserved.

The path into institutions is now clear. The boycott movement (2005) and the academic boycotts (the American Studies Association in 2013) built the vehicle; the disciplines followed, the American Anthropological Association in 2024 treating settler colonialism in Palestine as settled fact. In electoral politics the Democratic Socialists of America moved from its Harrington-era democratic-socialist Zionism to open anti-Zionism over the 2010s, carried into Congress by the Squad, into the 2024 primaries by the “uncommitted” movement, and to its high-water mark by Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 victory in New York, against a backdrop of collapsing support for Israel among younger Democrats. Britain ran the same current earlier through Corbyn-era Labour and the unlawful-conduct finding of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2020. After October 2023 the wave crested in encampments at more than 180 universities, framed explicitly as acts of decolonisation.

The campaigns are strongest where the underlying framework is bounded, on the occupation, the settlements and the conduct of the Gaza war, and the generational shift in opinion tracks those events rather than theory alone. They are weakest, and most prone to the recurring collision with antisemitism, where they run on the totalising version, because that version has no stable stopping point short of dissolving Jewish-majority sovereignty itself. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism, and many participants, including the anti-Zionist Jews of Jewish Voice for Peace, hold that line with care. But a frame that classes the state as an illegitimate implant, married to a vocabulary that had already named Zionism itself as the racism, removes the natural place to stop. The repeated quarrels over a slogan such as “globalize the intifada” are symptomatic of the frame, not incidental to it. None of this began on the campuses. The same boundary gave way at Durban a generation earlier, where a conference convened against racism proved unable to keep its case against Zionism from passing into hostility toward Jews. It has given way again at every stop the frame has made since, which is what one should expect of a flaw built into the design.

Kahane’s heirs

On the question of intent the disaggregation has so far worked in Israel’s favour. One current of evidence runs the other way. Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn rabbi who founded the Jewish Defence League and then the Kach party, built a programme of open Jewish supremacism: the mass expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the territories, a state ruled by religious law wherever it conflicted with democracy, the stripping of citizenship from non-Jews, and a ban on sex and marriage between Jews and Arabs that he modelled frankly on statutes the Knesset itself likened to Nuremberg. The system rejected him. Kach took a single seat in 1984; in 1985 the Knesset amended its Basic Law to bar lists that incite racism, a measure aimed squarely at Kahane; in 1988 the Supreme Court upheld the disqualification of Kach as a racist party, the first such ban in the state’s history. After a Kach follower, Baruch Goldstein, murdered twenty-nine Palestinians at prayer in Hebron in 1994, Israel proscribed the Kahanist organisations as terrorist. For four decades the explicit form of the charge this essay examines was something the Israeli mainstream put outside the law.

That has changed. The ideology the state once banned now sits in its cabinet. Itamar Ben-Gvir, who brought Otzma Yehudit into Netanyahu’s coalition in 2022 and has held the national security ministry for most of the time since, is an avowed admirer of Kahane who kept a portrait of Goldstein in his home until he moved into mainstream politics, and who carries multiple convictions for incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organisation. With the police and the West Bank Border Police under his authority, he has loosened firearms restrictions, backed armed settlers, and stated in 2023 that his family’s freedom of movement in the territory outweighed that of its Arab residents. Bezalel Smotrich, who has described himself as a “fascist homophobe”, holds the finance ministry and with it powers over the civil administration of the West Bank; he has presided over an acceleration of settlement construction and proposed annexing most of the territory while denying citizenship to the Palestinians within it. In 2025 the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway imposed sanctions on both men for incitement to violence against Palestinians, a step without obvious precedent against serving ministers of an allied democracy.

This is the development that most tests the argument of these pages, and it tests it in both directions. It confirms that the totalising charge is wrong about origins and design, since a state built as a supremacist project would not have spent forty years outlawing its supremacists. But it removes much of the comfort the bounded reading might otherwise take, because the current once confined to the fringe now sets policy over the very population the apartheid finding concerns. The genealogy traced above showed the slogan “Zionism is racism” to be, in origin, a manufactured libel. Kahanism is the reason the manufacture does not dispose of the present: when the minister commanding the police is a disciple of Kahane and the minister governing West Bank land seeks annexation without rights, the charge of state racism gains a witness in the cabinet that no account of its pedigree can impeach. The regime’s character is not fixed but moving, and over the past decade it has moved toward the thing its accusers name. That trajectory, more than any single statute or statistic, is what a defender of the bounded reading now has to reckon with.

The reckoning

The method that survives all four counts is the same: disaggregate. The totalising indictment, with its “always”, its “by design” and its “much the same as South Africa”, fails on its own terms. It denies the periodisation a historian owes seventy-five years of changing arrangements, and it suppresses the inconvenient facts in turn, the non-European majority of today’s Israelis, the refuge that drove the founders, the contested claim to ancestral land, the Soviet midwifery at the birth, and the plain reality of two national movements with claims to one territory. The bounded version, confined to the occupied territories and to documented practice, is another matter, and it has moved from the margins toward the centre of international law. And it is strengthening from within, as the supremacist current once outlawed in Israel takes hold of the ministries that govern Palestinian life. A defence of the bounded reading against the totalising one can no longer rest on the claim that Israeli democracy keeps such forces from power, because it does not.

The cost of the totalising frame is a single, consequential blindness. It cannot tell the occupation, which Israel could choose to end, from the existence of a Jewish state, which it cannot end except by elimination. The same blindness was built into the slogan at its origin, when a Cold War coalition found it useful to declare not a policy but a people’s national movement to be a crime.

There is a closing symmetry worth holding in view. One power stands at both ends of the story: the hand that armed the state in 1948 and the hand that, a generation later, drafted the charge that its creation was a crime against the world. The regime that authored the phrase is gone; the phrase has outlived it and now circulates among people who would disown its parentage. The conflict it describes is real, and the grievances on the Palestinian side are real. They deserve a better instrument than a slogan built to serve a purpose that had little to do with them.

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Addendum: The Year of the Welding

1975, and how three accusations became one

The charge that runs through this essay, with racism, colonialism and apartheid fused into a single indictment of Israel, was not assembled gradually. It was set in a single year, by a coalition whose members wanted different things from it. The idea had been in circulation since the mid-1960s, when Soviet negotiators on the racial-discrimination convention pressed to condemn Zionism in place of the antisemitism they would not have named. What 1975 added was the welding: three world forums in three months declared Zionism a species of racism and colonialism before the General Assembly made it law.

19 June – 2 July, Mexico City. The World Conference of the International Women’s Year adopts a declaration listing, in one sequence, colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination as the evils that peace requires the world to eliminate. The grammar of the list does the work: Zionism is placed among the others as though membership were self-evident.

28 July – 1 August, Kampala. The Organisation of African Unity summit, in resolution 77 (XII), asserts a common imperialist origin for the racist regimes in occupied Palestine, in Rhodesia and in South Africa. The apartheid analogy is now explicit and continental, made while white-minority rule still governed two of the three.

25 – 30 August, Lima. The Non-Aligned Movement’s foreign ministers brand Zionism a racist and imperialist ideology and a threat to world peace, carrying the formula into the largest bloc of the post-colonial world.

10 November, New York. General Assembly Resolution 3379 determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination, citing the Mexico City and Kampala texts by name. It passes 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, on the votes of the Soviet bloc, the Arab and Muslim states, about half of Africa and parts of Asia. The American ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan answers that the lie is the resolution itself; Israel’s Chaim Herzog denounces it as antisemitism in the costume of diplomacy.

16 December 1991, New York. Resolution 46/86 revokes 3379 by 111 votes to 25, in the wake of the Gulf War and on the eve of the Madrid conference. The Soviet Union, ten days from dissolution, co-sponsors the repeal of the charge it had spent a quarter-century promoting.

The repeal closed the file at the United Nations and changed almost nothing elsewhere. The bundle assembled in 1975 had already passed out of the institution that made it and into a wider argument, where it remains. Each later revival, from the Durban conference to the campus encampments, reactivates the same fusion of the three charges that this year first set. The vote can be reversed; the welding has proved harder to undo.