‘Well, the point of view of the ‘light unto nations’ is an interesting appropriation of a religious Jewish point of view taken by the secular Zionist movement in order to convince a lot of European powers, to support a colonialist project in the midst of the Arab world. So you needed this image, I think first of all in order to win international legitimacy.

If you remember that since 1917, the Zionist movement was fighting for international legitimacy that became easier to win after the Holocaust. It was also needed for domestic consumption to explain to people why they should be living a in a place where they are so hated by the neighbourhood in which they chose to settle. So, I think it is a mixture of the religious ideology of the chosen people, and a very functional ideology in order to explain the unique place of the Zionist project in an Arab world, where other European projects such as the ones in Algeria and Egypt were forced to end and the colonisers were forced to go back to Europe.

Now, the rationale for my point of view is exactly that. In order to maintain the kind of enclave that the Jews wanted to keep in the post colonialist Arab world, they needed to use a lot of coercion and policies of ethnic supremacy, which is actually the essence of Zionism today to my mind.

I will give you a few examples: one is that we don’t have a constitution in Israel, but we have a constitutional law that is almost like a constitution and many of them are just apartheid laws.

For example, the law of the land, which says that 94% of the land in Israel belongs to the Jewish people alone, not to the state of Israel, and therefore 20% of the population -the Arabs- are barred from this land. Although the Arab population in Israel tripled compared to the Jewish population, there has not been one new Arab settlement or village built, while there are hundreds of new Jewish, towns, villages and settlements. So this is discrimination on the basis of ethnicity on land rights. You cannot exist in an agricultural society like the Arab one, if you are not allowed to expand according to your demographic group. That’s one law.

Then there is the law of citizenship, which says that Palestinians who may have brothers and sisters and relatives all over the Arab world are not allowed to reunite with their families, but Jews all around the world have all the rights to come and become full citizens from the moment they where born.

The third one is the law of social welfare, which says that only people who have served in the army are entitled to the full welfare social system. Now, the Arabs are not allowed to serve in the army, and therefore they are not allowed full social services. And these are just the formal laws.

There are many de facto manifestations of apartheid in the way towards the Arab population in the way that the budget is distributed; in the basic treatment by the authorities; the police; and so on.’

Enemy Of State