This past week was Palestine Awareness Week, when members of Students for Justice in Palestine worked to present facts and viewpoints that run counter to the traditional negative portrayals of Palestinians. As part of the effort, the organization created posters presenting facts about the Israel-Palestine conflict that would surprise most Americans, like facts illustrating the enormous disparities in military strength between the Israeli army and the Palestinian people, and between the magnitude of the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians and those committed by the Palestinians against Israelis.

Unfortunately, some individual or group, presumably unhappy with this factual presentation, has seen fit to sabotage these signs. Although I have never heard of a pro-Palestinian group sabotaging signs put up by Zionist groups, I have more than once encountered vandalism against pro-Palestinian groups, presumably by Zionist individuals. I suggest that this reflects on the fact that Zionists are insecure in their own political position.

Zionism, born during the heyday of colonialism as a colonial movement, has not successfully adjusted to this postcolonial world. The self-serving nationalist myths that used to pass as truths have been systematically debunked, in most cases by Israeli historians, and are no longer taken seriously in respectable circles. The old racialist caricatures of Israelis and Arabs are too embarrassing, too evocative of the historical racism in this country, for educated Americans to entertain. And though Zionists have spent enormous sums of money on advertising and image management, they have not identified a successful message. Just a couple of years ago, Israel was rated the world’s worst brand by the National Brands Index.

If you read the Zionist press, as I often do, you’ll find that discussions about communication are dominated by concern that the Zionist message is not succeeding among young people, and proposals for how better to “sell” Zionism and Israel to the targeted audiences. This is in stark contrast to discussions in the human rights community, which is concerned about how to break through the media and cultural barriers that prevent the Palestinian side of the story from reaching a mass audience. No wonder, then, that when Palestinian groups take steps to communicate its message, Zionists feel like they have to undermine it through acts of destruction.

This letter got me a request to meet with the director of Hillel, which I shall do on Tuesday.

Originally conceived as an opinion piece, it would have noted, as Edward Said noted in “The Question of Palestine”, that in many respects Zionism is a great success – it’s created a state with a strong economy, powerful military, solid educational sector and arts scene, and at least for Jewish citizens a democracy.

And then there are the reasons it’s a failure, even on its own terms. As Eqbal Ahmad has argued, Israel has created a situation where its survival is premised on the perpetual military and political weakness of the Arab states. As a result, Zionists have failed in their goal of creating a secure safe haven for the Jewish people. It’s also a failure in that its desperate clinging to the program of colonization and conquest is causing serious moral deterioration among Israelis, and very bad publicity outside Israel. In the final calculation, Israel may be a net debit for the Jewish people.

Those who are subjected to the Zionist propaganda that permeates Western culture, and don’t have or don’t use the requisite intellectual self-defense, could be forgiven for viewing the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians as analogous to the relationship between the US and black people. This analogy follows from the liberal Zionist script: Israel is a democracy, albeit an imperfect democracy that has a race problem, just like the United States; and just like the United States, things are getting better for Palestinians in Israel.

The analogy is wrong. The status of Palestinians in Israel is more like American blacks in the mid-1860’s, after slavery was ended but before the 14th Amendment guaranteed them equal rights. Palestinians are second-class citizens, subject to all kinds of laws, regulations and practices designed to marginalize and exclude them from political and civil life. Israel is an apartheid state by the standard of the United Nations’ Convention on Apartheid.

The greatest source of political marginalization is something virtually never noticed in the West, even by leftists. It is the fact that only a small fraction of Palestinians are treated as Israeli citizens. We get so used to treating Israel and Palestine as separate entities, that we forget that Palestinians, as the indigenous people of Palestine at the time of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, are entitled to Israeli citizenship. That means all Palestinians – the residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the refugees, as well as those living in Israel. The arbitrary, illegal and systematic denial of Israeli citizenship on a racial basis is the most important instrument of marginalization. (It also makes it clear that Israel is not a democracy – but that’s a subject for another day.)

But even if we only consider Palestinian citizens of Israel, the level of marginalization is extreme. To begin with, Palestinians are legally treated as second class citizens. As documented most extensively by Uri Davis, Israeli Palestinians are subjected to an array of laws and regulations in such areas as eligibility for citizenship, land use, and army service, with the overall effect of giving the benefit of the laws to Jews and not to Palestinians. Most importantly for political marginalization, Israel’s election rules permit the government to disqualify political parties that advocate racial equality from participating in elections.

Israel’s racial supremacy has significant differences from American racial supremacy. For one, Zionists are outnumbered by Palestinians in a way that white Americans are not (yet) outnumbered by minorities, and its policies are therefore more aimed at keeping the minority in political control, while in the US, racial policies, embodied in the police and prison systems, are focused on economic control. (Though restrictive immigration policy is more in line with the kind of demographic warfare that Israel wages.) Another important difference is that the US is committed formally to racial equality, while Israel is formally committed to racial supremacy. That’s why Israel has all kinds of laws on the books that would be immediately ruled unconstitutional in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment if enacted in the US.

There’s one Israeli racial practice that’s not a law but is very important for keeping Palestinians politically marginalized, and that is the cooperation among Jewish political parties to exclude Palestinian individuals and parties from positions of power. There has been some progress recently, with the first appointment of a Palestinian-Israeli, Ghaleb Majadele, to the Israeli cabinet about a year and a half ago. But one other historic practice continues unchanged: Jewish Israeli leaders will not rely on an Arab party to hold the balance of power in forming coalition governments. Israeli leader Tzipi Livni has repeated this practice of late. In other words, Jewish political leaders in Israel would rather suffer political defeat than give Arab parties too much political power. That’s some serious racial supremacy.

In summary, Israel has a ways to go before it is as racially tolerant as the US. I’m calling 2037 as the year that Arab Israelis break through the political barrier in part as an aspirational, rather than a predictive goal. Achieving this goal will not just require a major cultural change among Israeli Zionists towards greater tolerance, it may also require the elimination of some of the legal apparatus that is used to systematically keep the Palestinians politically marginalized.