Is This Israel’s First Apartheid War?

Far from lacking a political strategy, Israel is fighting to reinforce the supremacist project it has built for decades between the river and the sea.

Over the past year, many have argued that the October 7 disaster — the largest massacre of Israeli civilians in the country’s history — was a sign that the status quo of permanent occupation has collapsed. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel had been advancing a policy of long-term “conflict management” to bolster its occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands while containing fragmented Palestinian resistance. This involved financing a “deterred” Hamas, which several Israeli leaders considered to be “an asset.”

It’s true that some aspects of this strategy did collapse in the wake of October 7 — especially the illusion that the Palestinian national project could be crushed, or that Hamas and Hezbollah could be kept at bay in the absence of any political agreements. The notion that Jewish settlement could guarantee security along Israel’s borders and frontiers — a long-standing Zionist myth — was also shattered; beyond the deep trauma and grief suffered by dozens of Jewish border communities, some 130,000 Israelis from more than 60 localities within the Green Line were displaced, and most of them remain so.

Other experts have claimed that Israel’s war in Gaza, and now Lebanon, is void of political strategy for “the day after,” and is fought solely for the sake of Netanyahu’s political survival. But contrary to popular opinion, clear-eyed analysis of the past year shows that Israel continues to promote an unmistakable strategic goal in this war: maintaining and deepening the regime of Jewish supremacy over Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In this sense, the past 12 months might be best understood as Israel’s “first apartheid war.”