Last year, several student organizations at UC Berkeley Law School pledged (in a resolution) to not invite speakers who support Zionism, “the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” Controversy and threats of repression followed. Pro-Zionist groups launched a major national campaign falsely claiming this resolution amounted to a “Jewish-free zone” and was “anti-Semitic”; the “before” billboard pictured here (before it was corrected) was part of that attack. At the same time, a number of Jewish groups at UC Berkeley, including Jewish Voice for Peace, supported the resolution.

Despite its “democratic” veneer, the Zionist state of Israel is a racist, apartheid state on the model of white supremacist South Africa until 1990.¹ Theodor Herzl, a leading founder of Zionism, declared it “a colonial idea,” in service of “colonial expansion”—and it was embraced first by Britain and later the U.S. as the basis for an outpost for imperialism in the Middle East. A component of that “colonial idea” was virulent racist demonization and dehumanization of the Palestinian people.

Israel was built on the terrorist ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. That terror has intensified in recent years. A wave of uprisings across Palestine in 2021 was in response to decades of driving Palestinian people from their homes, isolating their villages behind over 400 miles of towering walls, subjecting them to constant police abuse, murder and torture, locking down around two million people in the massive outdoor prison in the Gaza region of Palestine, and intensifying attacks from rabid Zionist settlers in the West Bank region of Palestine that mimic the kind of violence the KKK brought down on Black people in the Jim Crow South in the U.S.

Today, Israel’s existence as a racist, Zionist state is dependent on the economic, political, diplomatic, and military backing of the U.S. Despite real conflicts between the two countries (and within their ruling classes over the form of the relationship), Israel serves as a unique asset in U.S. domination of a world of exploitation and oppression.² On the coming to power of a rabidly racist, fascist government in Israel headed by Benjamin Netanyahu in January of this year, Biden declared, “I look forward to working with Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been my friend for decades, to jointly address the many challenges and opportunities facing Israel and the Middle East region including threats from Iran.”