250 YEARS: The United States – from independence to empire (part two)

250 YEARS: The United States – from independence to empire (part two)  Follow this link for part 1.

by Michael Roberts

It took some time after independence and the defeat of the British before the new economy of the United States got going.  War continued on and off with the British over Canada and ithrough a short British invasion and destruction of Washingto DC in 1812. 

During this period, trade was volatile, rising to over 20% of GDP after the revolution and then collapsing during the subsequent war with the British. After that though, the US economy started to expand fast.  Trade as a share of GDP stayed low only because domestic output rocketed as agricultural production exploded. 

The US administration under its early Presidents encouraged the settlement of the West  and South at the expense of the native Americans who were driven further and further west.  The US expanded its territory by purchasing Louisiana from the French in 1803.  With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, native Americans were forced to relocate, leading to the devastation of thousands in a ‘Trail of Tears’.

In 1823, President Monroe proclaimed his famous ‘doctrine’ that the Western hemisphere would be under American control and the old former European colonial powers were not welcome. 

In 1846, the US expanded its territory by signing the Oregon Treaty with the British to allow settlements and went even further by launching a war against Mexican control of Texas, eventually taking over vast areas in the South-West right to the Pacific Coast.  

But there was one important factor holding back the United States from becoming a major industrial and trading nation: slavery in the southern states.  When the southern states tried to secede from the Union, the north launched a long and bitter war lasting nearly five years.  But the resulting victory for the industrial north with its much larger ‘free’ working population laid the basis for a huge expansion of output.  The Civil War shifted political power to the Republican party from the North, which instituted high tariffs to raise revenue and to protect domestic industry.  The US economy became more diversified, with a growing manufacturing sector that reduced the nation’s dependence on imported manufactured goods.  By the end of the civil war, the US had already become the largest capitalist economy in the world in GDP terms.

The advent of the railway boom after Civil War which culminated in the transcontinental rail connecting East to West in 1869 was a huge step forward for domestic production and trade.

By the 1900's, US per capita income exceeded that of then current but declining hegemonic power, the UK.  So in just one century, the American capitalists had overtaken their former masters.

Beginning in the 1850s, the United States took its first steps toward developing an overseas empire in the Pacific.  In 1867, the US bought Alaska from the Russians. Trade with Asia now became possible and the US elite began to open their eyes to gaining control of the vast Pacific Ocean.  

The new empire was driven by economic interests. When there was a commodity boom, entrepreneurs raced into Pacific islands to set up shop, creating farms and plantations or staking claims for mining.  The first islands were annexed in the 1850s and 1860s starting with Midway. By the 1870s, American citizens were effectively running the Hawaiian government, steering the course toward annexation. And by the 1880s, the US government was directly administering Samoa and behaving like a traditional imperial power in cooperation with the British and German governments.

The late 19th century marked a transition from a continental nation to an established global power, largely galvanized by the Spanish-American War of 1898.  Using the excuse of an unexplained explosion of the US battleship Maine in February 1898, the US declared war on Spain and quickly took over Cuba.  Soon after, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico were occupied and the independent Republic of Hawaii was annexed by the US.

The construction of this American empire was riddled with racism from the start. For some in the elite, building an empire in the Pacific was a problem because it could lead to “polluting and weakening our system of government by taking to our bosom a horde of Asiatic savages.”  Others favoured a missionary approach.  American control was necessary because Filipinos are “children utterly incapable of self-government.”  The US role in the Philippines was a “divine mission” to establish a “system where chaos currently reigns.” Imperialists doubted the capacity of the Philippine people for self-government; they would “need the training of fifty or a hundred years before they shall even realize what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.”

Although the US economy expanded throughout the 19th century, it did not do so in a steady and harmonious way.  The boom and bust cycle of capitalist accumulation operated, engendering a long depression from 1883-97 (note in the graph below the stagnant growth in the 1880s).

Even as late as 1880, nearly half of all American workers were still farmers, with only about 15% working in manufacturing. But in the next 40 years that ratio was reversed. By the 1920s, the US was the world’s manufacturing powerhouse and financial centre. The American working class was now the largest in the world. But as ‘going West’ was no longer an option if you were unemployed or on low wages, trade unions were formed and class struggles intensified in the cities. 

The weakening and destruction of large parts of Europe and Asia during WW1 and WW2 put the US firmly in the driving seat of global capital.  In 1945, the US was dominant in manufacturing, finance and military power (only the Soviet Union could rival the latter). The US controlled the post-war institutions set up at the Bretton Woods meeting in the US that established the UN, the World Bnk and the IMF.  The world entered a period of ‘Pax Americana’.

‘Pax America’ was world peace only on America’s terms: the ‘cold war’ continued against the Soviet Union; and the US intervened to stop leftist governments gaining power, not only across South America, but also in the Middle East and in Asia – but not always with success as the war in Vietnam proved.  

Indeed, that ignominious defeat coincided with the beginning of an underlying decline in America’s economic power, first with the rise of European industry from the ashes of war; and then with Japan’s meteoric industrial revival in the 1970s.  The dollar began to lose its almost total dominance in world markets and was devalued in 1971 as US manufacturing declined and was forced to shift overseas to find cheaper labour.  The Vietnam disaster led to the economy running trade deficits and the US government running budget deficits for the first time since WW2. The profitability of capital had began to fall and the Golden Age of US investment was over. 

The fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s was supposed to give US imperialism complete control forever. It would be ‘the end of history’.  Ironically, it was just the start of US decline in the face of an even stronger new economic rival: China.

In the third part of this story, I shall cover the current threat to the US global empire, generated first, by weakness within the domestlc economy and second, by emergent rivals without – not unlike the ancient Roman empire’s decline after the 2nd century AD.

                                            Video from Middle East Eye

Zionism and Imperialism

By John Clarke

Former Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) organizer. Presently part of 230 Fightback

A major source of left disorientation on the question of Palestine is a failure to understand the relationship between the Zionist project and its imperialist sponsors. A lot flows from this so it’s worth thinking through.

Zionism emerged, as a political ideology in 19th Century Europe. It was a highly secular and nationalist perspective that was embraced by some Jewish intellectuals. Based largely on the discrimination and persecution that Jews faced, they decided that a Jewish homeland was the solution. Once it was decided that the theft of Palestinian land would form the basis for the new state, the stamp of colonialism and racism marked the whole undertaking.

Like any other forms of settler-colonialism, the Zionist project required an imperial sponsor and those taking it forward placed a huge emphasis on convincing ruling circles in Europe that the state they proposed to establish would be a garrison that would protect their regional interests. This was framed in predictably racist terms that suggested ‘civilization’ could be protected from Asiatic ‘barbarism.’ Christian ideas of a reclaiming of the ‘Holy Land’ were also appealed to with considerable success. Indeed, Christian Zionism predated the movement that emerged among Jewish intellectuals.

The great breakthrough for the Zionists came in 1917 when the British government issued the infamous Balfour Declaration. This recognized the Zionist claim and supported a Jewish state on Palestinian land. With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WW1 and its loss of control of Palestine, the country was placed under a British Mandate.

European Jewish settlers continued to move into Palestine and the British crushed Palestinian resistance with extreme brutality. Though the British would clash with the Zionist militias, they cleared the way for the 1948 ethnic cleansing that led to the formation of the Israeli state.

As the effort to complete the dispossession of the Palestinians proceeded, Western support for the ongoing project was crucial. A 1947 UN resolution (adopted at a time when that body was comprised almost entirely of Western countries) proposed to partition Palestine in proportions that gave far more territory to the Jewish settlers than the size of their population could possibly justify. Canada played a key role in ensuring this resolution was adopted.

The 1948 cleansing operation took even more Palestinian territory that the UN resolution called and Israel was established in that year. A belated colonial state had been established in the Middle East just as that region was, for the most part, ridding itself of direct colonial domination. Israel’s role as a garrison of Western interests was firmly established right at the outset.

It wasn’t until 1967, when the remaining part of historic Palestine was seized, that the US decided to give the level of support to the Zionist project it has maintained ever since. The huge defeat that the forces of Arab nationalism suffered at the hands of Israel’s military convinced the US to adopt the role of main imperial sponsor that Britain had once played.

While there have been significant differences between the US and Israel over the years and some particularly sharp ones have arisen at the present time, the massive and vital support that has given has been based on the interests of the dominant imperialist power. 

This has been based on the great significance of oil wealth and the other economic assets of the region, as well as geopolitical considerations. If the importance of the region’s oil has receded for the US, control of the region remains a key priority and the containment of Chinese influence and investment is an ongoing objective.

The Israeli garrison state is so critical because of its militarized settler population. Client state authoritarian Arab regimes are greatly valued but they face the threat of popular uprisings. Israel, on the other hand, is a warlike regional attack dog with a thoroughly pro-Western settler population that the US strongly preserves with the utmost determination.

Israel has a powerful base of support in the Western countries and this includes a lobby operated by forces within the official Jewish institutions that is undoubtedly very influential. However, the role of these initiatives is often greatly exaggerated and you will often see articles and social media posts suggesting that this lobby is the one that is really in control. Sometimes, this goes over to ugly stereotypes that dredge up notions of conspiracy and undue influence on the part of a Jewish cabal.

Yet, the simple reality is that the tail doesn’t wag the dog and Western support for the settler state is rooted in self-interest. If we were to imagine the impossible and consider what would happen if the Zionist lobby transferred its resources, support base and high-placed mouthpieces into an effort to convince Western governments to take climate change seriously, we can be sure that its influence would take a nosedive.

A related form of left disorientation can be seen in the exceptionalization of Israel and the Zionist ideology. Of course, Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians, its genocide in Gaza and its regional wars of aggression are utterly terrible crimes but they take place within a broader imperialist framework that continues on a global scale. From Hiroshima to Iraq and in dozens of other places, US imperialism has engaged in murder and state terrorism on a scale that far exceeds Israel’s crimes, which we might note have been carried out with US weapons.

Zionism is a supremacist and deeply racist ideology with its own particular elements but it emerged out of European colonialism and remains linked to ideological perspectives that exist within the Western powers. The hideous dehumanization of the Palestinians that is a defining feature of Zionism is entirely in line with the ideologies that have driven forward colonial undertakings since Columbus and his genocidal cohorts set sail.

We must oppose the Zionist state, expose its crimes and challenge its enablers. However, our key task is to sever the lifeline of military, economic and diplomatic support that maintains Israel as a Western garrison state. To do that, it is essential that we understand that the Western ruling establishments aren’t the dupes of some mysteriously influential Zionist conspiracy but the brutal and clear minded sponsors of the horrors that Israel inflicts and from which they benefit. If we can be clear on this question, our contribution to the fight for a free Palestine will be all the stronger for it.

 

250 YEARS: The United States – from independence to empire. Part 1

250 YEARS: The United States – from independence to empire

Part One: the revolution. 

by Michael Roberts

On the 4th July 2026 it will be 250 years since the 13 British colonies in North America declared independence from the British colonial power at a congress in Philadelphia.  Since independence, the United States of America, as it came to be called, expanded to the West to encompass the whole continental area and later built an overseas empire in the Americas and on to the Pacific. By the end of the 19th century, the US had become a major economic and industrial power, and by the end of the WW2 in the 20th century, the US became the dominant industrial, financial and military power globally.  ‘Pax Americana’ epitomised the period from mid-20th century to its end.  However, in the three decades of the 21st century, that dominance began to give way (relatively) to new emergent economic and political rivals.

The rise of US capitalism over 250 years mirrors almost exactly the rise of capitalism to become the dominant mode of production globally.  In the mid-18th century, capitalist accumulation was still very much confined to trade and even less to farming.  Industrialisation was not the motive force of growth and the vast majority of the population in the Americas, Europe and Asia lived and worked on the land.

1776 was also the year that the Scottish enlightenment economist, Adam Smith, published his still famous book, The Wealth of Nations, which provided the theoretical and empirical foundation for the ending of feudal and semi-feudal restrictions on growth and prosperity.  Smith argued that the wealth of nations should and could be built on free markets for buying and selling, with minimal government interference and with the ending of state-controlled monopolies.  Such freedom would enable increased ‘division of labour’ to maximise productivity and the accumulation of capital.  The rise of US capitalism has personified Smith’s expectations – but it has also starkly revealed the faultlines and contradictions in the capitalist mode of human social organisation.

The rise (and fall?) of US capitalism can be divided into four historical periods: 1) 1776: independence from British colonial power and the expansion of the US empire; 2) 1861-64: the Civil War that forced the submission of the slaveholding states to federal power and accelerated industrialisation and capitalist markets throughout the continent, along with the expansion of the US empire into the Americas and the Pacific; 3) 1941-45: after two world wars, US global hegemony was confirmed and the international rules of trade, order and institutions came under US control; and 4) from 1991: with the end of the Cold War as the Soviet Union collapsed, but ironically, far from the US sustaining total global dominance (with the ‘end of history’), US imperialism went into relative decline, both economically and politically, even if it is still by far the most powerful nation on the planet.

The Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776 did so first and foremost to obtain ‘home rule’ from Britain, in order to gain specific political and economic rights denied by the British Crown (which had also denied such rights to Ireland at the same time).  But the Founding Fathers in no way wanted a systemic restructuring of society . Led primarily by the wealthy planter and mercantile elite, their goal was to eliminate British interference, while preserving established social hierarchies and property traditions.  However, to succeed in their aims, the elite had to enlist the support of the poor farmers and the multitude in the coastal towns.  So, as in any such rebellion or revolution, the War of Independence developed into a class conflict within the ‘national’ struggle for freedom from British rule.  Apparently, “all men are created equal” (of course, not women, not slaves, not native Americans), said the Founding Fathers. So even in a highly unequal society that was the 13 colonies, some encouragement had to be given to the poor multitude.

Indeed, from the Boston Tea Party in 1773 through Yorktown in 1781 and the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the Revolution became a civil war. By 1780, about a third of the roughly 2,100,000 free citizens of the British colonies that became the ‘United States’ would have described themselves, with mixed idealism and self-interest, as Patriots. But another third stayed loyal to the British Empire. Threatened with being tarred and feathered, having their property seized, about 60,000 of these roughly 700,000 Loyalists decamped to Canada or Britain. The final third of the colonists occupied the uneasy middle. They were not willing to pledge their lives and fortunes to a bloody, collective war with the British Empire, but neither would they sustain a fierce and also bloody loyalty to the British king and country.

Historians calculate that 25,000 to 70,000 Patriots died directly because of the war, killed by camp fever and musket fire. Some 7,000 Loyalists did too. An additional 130,000 Americans were killed by a spike in smallpox that the movement of populations during the war exacerbated. The American revolution was hell. Nearly as many died relative to the population as in the civil war of the 1860s, ie almost 4 percent of the free population. By comparison, about one-third of 1 percent of Americans died in World War II. The Revolution for ‘democracy and independence’ was a bloody business.

The struggle for independence became a war and a civil war first because of the deteriorating economic situation for the British empire after they managed to defeat the French in so-called seven years war of 1764-71, in which many colonists and native Americans fought.  From the early 1600s, British settlers in North America had relied on overseas trade for their well-being. Trade furnished the colonists with clothing and blankets, nails and firearms, cooking implements and metal goods, and other tools and materials that could not be produced locally. Without these imports, their standard of living might have suffered so much that they would not have stayed.

But after the French war, booty from the French and revenues from British troops stationed in North America disappeared.  Interest rates soared, forcing real estate prices ever downward, eventually to a half or even a third of their highest point. The colonists appealed to the Mother Country Britain for aid, but at every turn, the British Crown and its parliament in Westminster looked to get the colonists to pay from the war against France.

First came onerous trade restrictions that cramped intra- and intercolonial trade. Cut off from traditional trading partners abroad, the colonists could not earn sufficient foreign exchange (species) abroad. Next came the Currency Act, which made it unlawful for the colonies to issue any more fiat paper money. Then came the straw that broke the camel’s back: the Stamp Act, which required colonists to pay a tax on any printed material (that encompassed everything from legal documents to newspapers).  The Patriotic elite roused the population to oppose ‘taxation without representation’ – somewhat ironic given that back in Britain much of the people had to pay taxes decided by a parliament that elected members from just 1% of British adults.

The call for ‘democracy’ sounded the bell for independence.  In January 1776, Thomas Paine, a poor artisan who had immigrated from Britain, wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense, presenting in an exciting and impressive fashion the case for an independent Republic, not just representation under the British Crown. It was a massive best seller (100,000 copies) and spread across all classes and especially to the rank and file in the Patriot army.  

But democracy in Paine’s sense was not the aim of the Founding Fathers.  Throughout the war against the British, they were determined to ensure that any radical democratic movements and proposals were stopped.  Military leader, George Washington, one of the richest men in the colonies with thousands of slaves and many acres of land, tried to stop the recruitment of slaves to the army even as the British were offering freedom to them if they joined the Crown’s ranks.  Eventually, Washington had to give way.  But he still crushed any rebellions and mutinies in the army, just as Cromwell had done in the 1640s English Civil War. The most famous of these attempts to turn independence into economic equality was the so-called Shays rebellion in 1780, after the war against the British had been won.

Such rebellions frightened the merchant and slave-holder elite and encouraged them to ensure that the loose Confederation of colonial states was solidified into a Constitution deliberately designed to curb any democracy for the many over the few. There was to be a President to replace the British King and the revolution’s military leader Washington was elected by acclamation as the first.  And there was to be a Senate composed of the elite to ensure no anti-business, anti-slavery and anti-land majority would hold sway.  The President would be elected not by a mass adult vote, but by an ‘electoral college’ that strengthened the slave states and weakened the most populous states in the North. And there would be a Supreme Court of elected-for-life judges that could block any measures that were ‘unconstitutional’.

Those who looked to rebel against this ‘stitch-up’of democracy were greeted with vicious repression or the cry: “Go West, young man” –  ie go beyond the Blue Ridge mountains to seek your fortune.  From the very beginning of the revolution, both the elite and the multitude in the colonies looked to gain lands in a massive continent as the way to increased their prosperity. The British had blocked this and assigned those lands to the native American nations.  With the defeat of the British, the flood to the West began – acting as a powerful safety valve against rebellion within the ex-colonies.  The native American tribal nations were subject to relentless policies of genocide (similar to that now repeated in Gaza), with their populations decimated and their food sources (buffalo) annihilated. Meanwhile, slavery in the southern colonies was cemented, despite the British attempts to end it globally. 

The American revolution was thus a ‘bourgeois revolution’ (with some peculiar institutions left intact – requiring further action later).  Yes, the revolution had to mobilise the poorer classes to succeed, but only to establish an independent capitalist state that would eventually rule the world. 

In the next part, I shall look at the American economy in the 19th century: the expansion of an empire across the continent and Latin America; and after the civil war in the 1860s, the industrialisation of America and its further imperial expansion into the Pacific. 

Israel is an apartheid state – and its weird marriage laws show us how

 Israel is an apartheid state – and its weird marriage laws show us how

Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own nationality. Why? Because a common national identity would sabotage Israel’s carefully veiled system of segregation.

Johnathan Cook, June 30th.

Israel’s supporters have gone apoplectic over a short post on X from the journalist Mehdi Hasan, highlighting Israel’s peculiar marriage laws.

Hasan asks: “Did you know that you can’t have a civil or secular marriage in Israel?”

Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan Did you know that you can’t have a civil or secular marriage in Israel? Michael A. Cohen (NOT TRUMP’S FORMER FIXER) @speechboy71 Something like 40 countries have an official state religion. Israel is not one of them! In fact, that Israel defines itself as a Jewish state is not even a religious designation. That Mamdani continues to make this mistake and continues to focus on the world’s one Jewish 4:24 AM · Jun 29, 2026 · 577K Views 407 Replies · 554 Reposts · 6.2K Likes

He’s not wrong. Israel has banned civil marriage. You can wed only in a ceremony strictly controlled by religious authorities. If you want a civil marriage, you have to travel to another country. 

Why, you might reasonably wonder. Isn’t Israel a modern, secular, western-style liberal democracy? After all, that’s what our politicians and media keep telling us.

The most popular rejoinder to Hasan from Israel’s apologists – that the situation is no better in Saudi Arabia – is not quite the flex they seem to imagine. So Israel offers the same human rights protections as Saudi Arabia? Impressive.

Others have pointed out that Israel inherited the so-called “millet” system from the Ottoman empire, which gave the leaders of each confessional group across the Middle East autonomous control over their community’s religious affairs.

Doubtless, 150 years ago the system worked relatively well in reducing communal tensions in religiously diverse parts of a large empire. It prevented officials in Constantinople – modern-day Istanbul – from getting dragged deeply into the day-to-day affairs of its often distant subjects.

But 150 years ago, Britain sent children up chimneys to sweep them. The law was changed around that time to stop this abusive and dangerous practice.

Israel was established nearly eight decades ago, supposedly as a secular, western-style liberal democracy. It has had 78 years to change those archaic Ottoman marriage laws.

Why hasn’t it done so?

All the bluster decrying Hasan’s post is a desperate attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that Israel’s antiquated marriage laws survive because they are useful to Israel.

In fact, they are more than that. They are a core component of Israel’s version of apartheid – a racist system of segregation Israel has successfully shielded from the view of western publics with the help of western politicians and media.

‘Demographic threat’

Israel’s ban on civil marriage is central to its efforts to prevent what past racist societies, such as apartheid South Africa and the American Deep South, termed “miscegenation” – that is, sexual relations between different ethnic groups. You might remember that the Nazis had unpleasant views on this subject too.

Here is the current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, opposing miscegenation in 2016: 

Preventing assimilation in the Jewish state is completely legitimate and not at all racist. You are assuming as a basis for the discussion that preventing intermarriage is wrong, while ignoring the fact that most [Jewish] girls who go with Arabs are poor girls who are being used.

Former education minister Rafi Peretz called mixed marriages involving Jews a “second Holocaust”. 

In Israel, such views are entirely mainstream. In 2018, Yitzhak Herzog, Israel’s current president and the former leader of an ostensible leftwing Israeli party, described mixed marriages among American Jews as a “plague” for which a “solution” had to be found – presumably by copying Israel’s approach. 

In Israel, the chief concern is not about marriages between Jews and the Palestinians under occupation – which Israel and its supporters like, bogusly, to present as a straightforward “security” matter. 

In the occupied territories, Israel uses far blunter methods than laws to prevent any kind of intimate relations developing between Jews and a captive Palestinian population. It prefers physical containment and violence. 

Palestinians under occupation are forcibly separated from Israeli Jews. They are hemmed into their own tightly confined ghettoes by Israel’s network of steel and concrete barriers; by the Israeli army; by checkpoints; by separate, apartheid roads in the West Bank; and by Jewish militias living on stolen lands in so-called “settlements”.

There is little chance of interaction, let alone intermarriage, in such circumstances – except when Israeli soldiers or armed Jewish settlers come rampaging into Palestinian communities to destroy crops, kill livestock, poison wells, torch homes and cars, and beat up – and sometimes kill – the inhabitants.

Nonetheless, there is still a potential vulnerability in Israel’s system of segregation.

In 1948, Israel expelled 80 per cent of the Palestinian population from their homes and lands in an area that was henceforth to be called, not Palestine, but the “Jewish” state of Israel. 

A few Palestinians remained, however, inside those borders – mostly from oversight or error. Despite covert efforts by Israel for several years after the 1948 war to force them out of the state, its officials eventually came under international pressure to give these stranded Palestinians citizenship – even if in practice, as we shall see, this conferred on them very inferior rights.

Even today, Israel is extremely worried about a supposed threat from its third-class Palestinian “citizens” – officially termed “Israel’s Arabs”. Given a higher birth rate, their numbers have grown exponentially over eight decades. They now comprise a fifth of Israel’s population. 

Israeli journalists, academics and politicians, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, regularly call the country’s Palestinian citizens a “demographic threat”, and endlessly worry about the “Palestinian womb”. 

No state of all its citizens

But Israel faces a countervailing pressure. If it makes its treatment of Palestinian citizens too obviously racist and oppressive, some outsiders might start to realise it is not the secular western-style liberal democracy it claims to be.

You will hear the pro-Israel lobby in the West tell you that so-called “Israeli Arabs” have exactly the same rights as Israel’s Jewish population, guaranteed by Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That is not even remotely true.

Adalah, a leading legal rights group in Israel, has a database showing more than 70 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jewish citizens and Palestinian citizens. These laws form the core of Israel’s apartheid system.

Israel’s Basic Laws, a sort of constitution, explicitly exclude any principle of civic equality. Every attempt by a Palestinian party in Israel to get a debate in the parliament on Israel becoming a “state of all its citizens” – that is, a liberal democracy – is barred from discussion. And in 2018 the Israeli government passed a Nation-State Law declaring that Israel belongs to the Jewish people, not to all the citizens who live there. 

As with Palestinians under occupation, Israel has almost entirely confined its Palestinian citizens to their own segregated, underfunded, under-resourced communities (townships) on less then 3 per cent of the country’s land. 

A small minority of Palestinian citizens inside Israel live in segregated, deprived neighbourhoods of what are misleadingly termed “mixed” cities. Other Palestinian citizens, the most oppressed of all, live in communities inhabited by their families for centuries but which have been criminalised by an Israeli state that refuses to recognise them.

Many hundreds of Jewish rural communities, by contrast, operate effectively as exclusive membership clubs. They have the power to excludePalestinian citizens – a right they take full advantage of.

Separate planning structures ensure massively overcrowded Palestinian communities inside Israel are unable to build new homes and expand. Palestinian children are schooled in a separate and much inferior education system. 

For the who wish to dig deeper, I have written a lengthy essay setting out the details of Israel’s apartheid system here.

The ban on civil marriage inside Israel’s borders is not usually cited, even by critics, as an example of its apartheid system of rule. But the ban persists because it is the ideal way to conceal segregation under the veneer of equal treatment.

Israel’s Palestinian citizens must marry in ceremonies conducted by their religious community’s leaders: by Muslim clerics, or by various Christian churches, or by the Druze clergy.

It is the same for Jews in israel. They must be married by an Orthodox rabbi.

So everyone faces the same restrictions. But the point is this: the equality of treatment ensures very unequal outcomes. It is designed that way.

Fascist thugs

Inside Israel, intermarriage is only possible if one party can convert to their partner’s religion.

Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate makes it impossible for Palestinians under occupation to convert to Judaism in Israel, with the head of its conversion authority stating in 2016 that any such applicants are rejected “without review because of their ethnic origin”. 

Meanwhile, Israel makes almost as difficult for anyone else considered a non-Jew to convert to Judaism, most especially Palestinian citizens. Over decades, there have been only a handful of such cases. 

In practice, this means that in any relationship between a Palestinian citizen of Israel and an Israeli Jew, it almost always falls to the Israeli Jew to convert to the religion of the Palestinian citizen, whether a Muslim, Christian or Druze. That entails the Jewish partner losing their Jewish status and the many consequential privileges inside Israel that derive from that status. 

Israel has found this is a much better solution than apartheid South Africa’s, where blacks and whites were explicitly barred by law from marrying. Israel can achieve the same result more quietly. 

Given the entirely segregated structure of Israeli society, and the strong social taboos among Israeli Jews on “miscegenation”, the number of intermarriages in Israel between Jews and Palestinian citizens barely reaches double digits each year.

There are even groups like Lehava – Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan – that go around beating up Palestinians caught anywhere near Jewish neighbourhoods in Jerusalem and terrorising any young Jewish women suspected of being romantically involved with a Palestinian. Lehava hold noisy and disruptive protests to shame the odd Jewish woman who converts and marries a Palestinian citizen. 

All of this happens with a quiet wink from the authorities. The current police minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, has long been a patron of the fascist, Jewish supremacist thugs of Lehava.

In the rare cases of a Jew converting and marrying a Palestinian citizen, the Palestinian partner faces innumerable legal and social obstacles to integrating into a Jewish community they do not belong to.

Instead, the Jewish partner moves to a Palestinian community – an Israeli version of a township like Soweto – and educates their children inside the vastly inferior “Arab” school system. The former Jew loses most of the ethnic privileges they previously enjoyed inside the world’s only “Jewish” state.

Faced with this as their future, such couples often seize the opportunity for neither to convert and instead marry and live abroad.

Jewish ‘nation’

None of these difficulties are accidental. It is exactly how you would expect an apartheid system that prefers to obscure its apartheid character to structure its laws – and thereby help its lobby in the West, including the western political and media class, to claim that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

Israel learnt from the mistakes of the old South Africa. It mastered the modern arts of public relations – or at least it did until Benjamin Netanyahu tore up the script by erasing Gaza.

Inside Israel, the apartheid system extends far beyond marriage laws to touch all areas of life.

Subscribed

Here is another way Israel has obscured its apartheid system – again not in the occupied territories, but inside Israel itself.

The same system that denies Israelis the possibility of a civil or secular marriage also refuses to recognise that they have any kind of civil or secular identity, simply as Israelis. By law, everyone in Israel must belong to a confessional group: as a Jew, Muslim, Christian or Druze. 

Which makes sense of another little-known fact about Israel: Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own – in this case, Israeli – nationality. Why? For the simple reason that, were Israelis to share a common national identity, it would be much harder for the Israeli state to operate its apartheid system. 

Israeli nationality exists only as a fiction on Israeli passports to allow the population to travel internationally. Inside Israel, everyone is identified by their confessional group. 

In Israel, “Jewish” is treated as a nationality. Remember the 2018 Nation State Law. What it declared is that the state of Israel belongs exclusively to the “nation” of Jews – that is, to every Jew around the globe, not just those living in Israel. 

Muslims and Christians are lumped together into a similarly artificial “Arab” nationality, while the Druze have their own, different nationality. The same Nation State Law makes clear that the state of Israel does not belong to these other “nations”, despite their families having lived on the same lands for centuries. Palestinian citizens are nothing more than guests – and unwelcome ones at that. 

This segregation carries through to Israel’s ID cards. These cards, which must be carried at all times, used to include a section that expressly showed the “nationality” of each Israeli. But this section attracted uncomfortable scrutiny during a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by a group of dissident Israelis seeking recognition of an Israeli nationality. Officials removed the category from the card. However, Israel’s population register still includes a nationality classification. 

In addition to Jew, Arab and Druze, there are more than 120 other categories to deal with all the anomalies. I was just one such anomaly after I married a Palestinian Christian and entered a lengthy and difficult naturalisation process. My nationality was classed as “British”. 

Why all this complexity? Why all this unique weirdness? 

Because Israel needs to conceal its system of apartheid. The old South Africa simply said: one law for whites and another for blacks. 

Israel knows this no longer plays well. So it has devised a convoluted, baffling system that few understand as a way to avoid attracting attention and criticism. 

Special Jewish rights

So let’s end with just one example of how Israel’s apartheid system works in practice. 

Notionally, Israel confers on all its citizens – Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze – equal rights as citizens. But with a sleight of hand, it then undermines those equal rights by conferring superior “national” rights on one group only, Jews. If there is a conflict between a citizenship right and a Jewish “national” right, you’ve probably already guessed that the Jewish national right takes precedence. 

Education is a good illustration. All Israeli citizens enjoy a right to have their children educated, because education is a citizenship right. But lots of veiled manoeuvres – like extra budgets for National Priority Areas, special subsidies for Jewish religious schools, funding from the diaspora, and bigger tax disbursements from central government for Jewish local authorities – mean Jewish schools are far better funded than “Arab” schools.

Education for Israel’s Palestinian citizens has been underfunded for eight decades. So even though Israel’s apologists will claim the funding gaps are slowly narrowing, the continuing shortfall simply compounds a decades-long historical injustice. Arab schools are so far behind they can never catch up without aggressive additional funding Israel clearly has no intention of ever offering them.

There are massive shortages of classrooms and staff in dilapidated school buildings. Old books are often grossly outdated and poorly translated into Arabic by the state. Palestinian educational leaders have no input into the curriculum the community’s children are taught. There are strict controls by Jewish (usually racist) officials over what can be taught and who can teach. And on top of all this, huge cultural biases in matriculation exams make it far harder for Palestinian citizens to gain entry to universities in Israel. 

There are many other problems. For example, nearly one in 10 Palestinian children in Israel live in historic communities built on lands that the Israeli state now wishes to “Judaise” – reserve for the Jewish population – and are therefore denied all recognition. 

Treated like criminals, these children rarely have schools in their communities because no permanent buildings are allowed. What buildings there are cannot be connected to the electricity or water grids. Even children of kindergarten age must typically travel long distances – sometimes close to 60 km a day – to get to a licensed school. 

The forms of discrimination in education alone are endless. But they do not stop there. The discrimination is replicated in all major facets of life for Israel’s more than 2 million Palestinian citizens through these conceptual and legal contortions over religion, citizenship and nationality.

None of this should be a surprise. It is exactly what you would expect in an apartheid state like Israel.