Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 22.02.2026
This week, the Zionist government decided to officially turn the West Bank lands into state land. The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee will now discuss a proposal that would allow settlers the right to purchase land – even within Palestinian communities.
Netanyahu’s Zionist government is working to promote the annexation of the West Bank, which the Zionists call Judea and Samaria. The Zionist Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee will convene to discuss the bill to “Eliminate Discrimination in the Purchase of Land in Judea and Samaria,” which gives settlers the right to purchase land beyond the Green Line, including within Palestinian communities.
This week, the Committee for the Supervision of the Fund for the Citizens of Israel, headed by Knesset member Nissim Vattori of the Likud, is expected to discuss the connection of natural gas in Judea and Samaria, with the participation of Energy and Infrastructure Minister Eli Cohen.
In addition, last week, Knesset member Simcha Rotman (Religious Zionism) approved his bill in the Constitution Committee for the first reading, which enshrines the term “Judea and Samaria” as the official designation in all Israeli legislation for the West Bank. Palestinians from the funds transferred to it from the Israeli government. According to the amendment, Israel will deduct funds from the Palestinian Authority for stolen Israeli cars.
All of these are in addition to a decision approved earlier this week by the Political-Security Cabinet, according to which people in the Regularization Administration of Finance Minister and Minister of Defense will begin in the coming weeks to conduct land surveys in the territories of Judea and Samaria, which will lead to the annexation of additional lands there as state land.
The purpose of the resolution, which is backed by Minister of War Yisrael Katz and Minister Smotrich, is to renew the implementation of the official land arrangement by the State of Israel in the West Bank, and to halt the Palestinian Authority’s attempts to carry out land settlement procedures in Area C.
Ministers Smotrich and Katz said in a statement: “As part of the proposal, it will be determined that the settlement procedures carried out by the Palestinian Authority in Area C are carried out without authority, and their products – including documents, maps, drawings and permits – will have no legal or class validity in any official proceeding in the State of Israel. In addition, the security establishment will be instructed to act to prevent the continuation of the Palestinian settlement, including preventing professionals from entering the territory, blocking foreign aid to the settlement, and directly demanding that the Palestinian Authority cancel its activity in this area. The Minister of Defense will also order the renewal of the land arrangement in the West Bank by the Israeli authorities in the region, as well as the establishment of an inter-ministerial team to complete the professional, legal and budgetary preparations for the implementation of the move within 60 days.”
This is in fact another stage in a series of moves that have been taking place in the West Bank over the past two years: After almost completely revoking the powers of the Civil Administration, establishing the Regularization Administration, transferring building permits in the settlements to weekly levels, expanding the establishment of agricultural farms, and carrying out a series of declarations of various areas as state land, Smotrich continues to take the next step – revoking the land surveys carried out by Palestinians in various areas of the West Bank and conducting new surveys by his people.
One of the problems that settlers encounter on the way to expanding settlements and outposts is “private Palestinian land.” These are lands whose owners have proven in the past that they belong to them since the days of Jordanian rule. Now, with the Cabinet decision, many lands in Judea and Samaria will be subjected to a new survey by Smotrich’s people in the Administration, and if they are found, they will be declared state land. This is another move through which the colonialist settlement movement will be able to declare additional areas as state land.
Minister Smotrich explained: “As part of the revolution of normalization and de facto sovereignty that we are leading in Judea and Samaria, we have passed an important Cabinet decision. For the first time, the State of Israel is taking responsibility for the territory as a permanent sovereign, and is beginning to implement a land arrangement in Judea and Samaria. A land arrangement will create legal certainty, allow land reserves for settlement development, prevent PA attempts to take over open areas, and eliminate the danger of the Palestinian terror state.”
In addition, the settlers act violently against Palestinian communities in order to expel them from their homes. While many people recognize that Israel is an apartheid state, the slogan to turn the apartheid state into a free Palestinian state from the river to the sea is met with legal and violent measures byWestern imperialist countries that protect Israel, the spearhead of Western imperialism in the region.
According to International Model United Nations (IMUN):
“The United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973) defines apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal (2002) defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
Between 1948-49, Zionist terrorist militias and then the Israeli army ethnically cleansed between 750,000 and one million indigenous Palestinians in order to establish Israel as a Jewish majority state, including dozens of massacres of Palestinian civilians. More than 400 Palestinian cities, towns, and villages were systemically destroyed by Israel or repopulated with Jewish Israelis, many of them recent immigrants from Europe. Ever since, millions of Palestinian refugees have been denied their internationally-recognized legal right to return to their homes, as enshrined in UN Resolution 194, because they are not Jewish. At the same time, the Israeli government encourages Jews to immigrate from all over the world to live on stolen Palestinian land.
Approximately 150,000 Palestinians survived the ethnic cleansing and remained inside what became Israel in 1948. The new Israeli government expropriated most of their land for the use of Jewish Israelis and while granting them citizenship, governed them by repressive and discriminatory military rule until the end of 1966.
Since 1948, Israel has continued to systematically dispossess and discriminate against Palestinians inside Israel and in the territories, Israel militarily occupied in the 1967 War (the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza), including by making it nearly impossible for most Palestinians to get permits to build new homes or apartments and destroying those that are built without permission. In places like the Negev desert in southern Israel, the government has been destroying entire villages as part of a plan to “Judaize” the region, evicting whole communities of Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and replacing them with Jewish Israelis.
Inside Israel’s internationally-recognized pre-1967 borders, there are dozens of laws (this link opens in a new window) that privilege Jewish citizens and/or discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20% of Israel’s population. These laws affect everything from housing and land ownership, to health care, education, and family reunification rights. In 2018, the Israeli government passed the so-called “Jewish nation-state bill that codifies in Israel’s quasi-constitutional basic laws the privileged position that Jewish citizens enjoy over indigenous Palestinians. Among other things, it declares Jews have a “unique” right to self-determination in the land of Israel (which for most Israelis includes the occupied Palestinian territories) and directs the state to regard “Jewish settlement as a national value” and to “act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation,” thereby making racially segregated housing official state policy.
In the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Palestinians have lived under repressive, discriminatory Israeli military rule since the 1967 War, systemically denied their basic human rights because they are not Jewish. Israel has also systematically destroyed tens of thousands of Palestinian homes and expropriated massive amounts of Palestinian land for the construction of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in violation of international law. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers living illegally on Palestinian land in the West Bank are subject to Israeli civilian law when accused of a crime, while Palestinians (including children) living in the same territory are tried in Israeli military courts that have been condemned as unjust by human rights groups. According to a 2010 Human Rights Watch report entitled “Separate and Unequal: Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”:
“Palestinians face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, depriving them of electricity, water(schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits… While Israeli settlements flourish, Palestinians under Israeli control live in a time warp – not just separate, not just unequal, but sometimes even pushed off their lands and out of their homes.
In July 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian land is illegal while noting: “the Court is of the view that the régime of comprehensive restrictions imposed by Israel on Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory constitutes systemic discrimination based on, inter alia, race, religion, or ethnic origin,” in violation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and other conventions. In an annex to the summary, the president of the court wrote that Israel’s discriminatory laws and measures in the occupied Palestinian territories are “tantamount to the crime of apartheid.”
One of the first people to use the word “apartheid” in relation to Israel was Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who warned (this link opens in a new window) following the 1967 War of Israel becoming an “apartheid state” if it retained control of the occupied territories.
In a 1976 interview, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin warned of Israel becoming an apartheid state, noting (this link opens in a new window): “Because of the [Arab] population. I don’t think it will be possible to [build settlements] over time, unless we want to get to apartheid, with a million-and-a-half Arabs inside the state of Israel.
In 1999, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak stated “Every attempt to keep hold of [Israel and the occupied territories] as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.” In 2010, Barak said (this link opens in a new window): “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic… If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
In 2007, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned (this link opens in a new window) that Israel would face a civil rights struggle similar to the one mounted against apartheid in South Africa if it did not relinquish the occupied territories.
In 2015, Meir Dagan, former head of Israel’s spy agency the Mossad from 2002 to 2011, declared (this link opens in a new window): “In the Palestinian arena, [Netanyahu’s] policy will lead … to apartheid.”
In 2023, Tamir Pardo, former head of the Mossad from 2011 to 2016, “There is an apartheid state [in the West Bank. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”
In 2006, former US President Jimmy Carter published a book entitled, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” comparing Israel’s regime in the occupied territories to South African apartheid.
In May 2021, during Israel’s assault on Gaza that killed 256 Palestinians, including 66 children, several Democratic members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) and Rep. Cori Bush (MO), described Israel as an apartheid state.
In July 2013, then-recently retired Marine Corps general and head of the US military’s central command (CENTCOM), and future Secretary of Defense under President Trump, James Mattis warned that Israel’s construction of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land were turning Israel into an apartheid state.
In the last more than two years the Zionist monster has committed a genocide in Gaza and state terror in the West Bank in addition to the settlers’ terror. While the political nature of Israel as an apartheid state has been exposed. Thus, the Zionist monster does not have political, legal or moral reasons to exist and must be destroyed and replaced by a Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Reformists and rightwing centrists are calling for the nonsense solution of two states. Some add the words “socialist states”. However, revolutionary Marxists do not recognize the right of settler colonialists to a state. Trotsky dealt with this issue in the context of South Africa:
“The example of our South African friends again confirms the fact that in the present epoch only the Bolshevik-Leninists, that is, the consistent proletarian revolutionaries, take a serious attitude to theory, analyze the realities, and are learning themselves before they teach others. The Stalinist bureaucracy has long ago substituted a combination of ignorance and impudence for Marxism.
The overthrow of the hegemony of British imperialism in South Africa can come about as the result of a military defeat of Great Britain and the disintegration of the Empire. In this case, the South African whites could still for a certain period – hardly a considerable one – retain their domination over the blacks.
Another possibility, which in practice could be connected with the first, is a revolution in Great Britain and her possessions. Three-quarters of the population of South Africa (almost six million of the almost eight million total) is composed of non-Europeans. A victorious revolution is unthinkable without the awakening of the native masses. In its turn, that will give them what they are so lacking today – confidence in their strength, a heightened personal consciousness, a cultural growth.
Under these conditions the South African Republic will emerge first of all as a “black” republic; this does not exclude, of course, either full equality for the whites, or brotherly relations between the two races – depending mainly on the conduct of the whites. But it is entirely obvious that the predominant majority of the population, liberated from slavish dependence, will put a certain imprint on the state.
Insofar as a victorious revolution will radically change not only the relation between the classes, but also between the races, and will assure to the blacks that place in the state which corresponds to their numbers, insofar will the social revolution in South Africa also have a national character.
We have not the slightest reason to close our eyes to this side of the question or to diminish its significance. On the contrary, the proletarian party should in words and in deeds openly and boldly take the solution of the national (racial) problem in its hands.
Nevertheless, the proletarian party can and must solve the national problem by its own methods.
The historical weapon of national liberation can be only the class struggle. The Comintern, beginning in 1924, transformed the program of national liberation of colonial people into an empty democratic abstraction which is elevated above the reality of class relations. In the struggle against national oppression different classes liberate themselves (temporarily) from material interests and become simple “anti-imperialist” forces.
In order that the spiritual “forces” bravely fulfill the task assigned to them by the Comintern, they are promised, as a reward, a spiritual “national-democratic” state-with the unavoidable reference to Lenin’s formula: “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.”(I)
The thesis points out that in 1917 Lenin openly and once and for all discarded the slogan of “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” as if it were a necessary condition for the solution of the agrarian question. [1] This is entirely correct.
But to avoid misunderstanding, it should be added: a) Lenin always spoke of a revolutionary bourgeois democratic dictatorship, and not about a spiritual “people’s” state; b) in the struggle for a bourgeois democratic dictatorship he offered not a bloc of all “anti-czarist forces,” but carried out an independent class policy of the proletariat.
An “anti-czarist” bloc was the idea of the Russian Social-Revolutionaries and the Left Cadets, that is, the parties of the petty and middle bourgeoisie. Against these parties the Bolsheviks always waged an irreconcilable struggle.
When the thesis says that the slogan of a “Black Republic” is equally harmful for the revolutionary cause as is the slogan of a “South Africa for the Whites,” then we cannot agree with the form of the statement. Whereas in the latter there is the case of supporting complete oppression, in the former there is the case of taking the first steps toward liberation.
We must accept decisively and without any reservations the complete and unconditional right of the blacks to independence. Only on the basis of a mutual struggle against the domination of the white exploiters can the solidarity of black and white toilers be cultivated and strengthened.”
Some soft Zionists who call themselves “Marxists”, like “Socialist Struggle” argue that Israel is not similar to South Africa, because in Israel the Jews are the majority while in SA the blacks were the majority. What they forget is that the Palestinians including the refugees are more than the Israeli Jews, and the Palestinians are part of the future Arab revolution in the region. Trotsky wrote a long time ago that reformists see reality only within the borders of the state they live in.
The ICL recognizes Israel as a nation and stands for self determination for all nations, namely, they support the existence of a Zionist state. What they ignore in addition to the opposition to a Palestinian state in entire Palestine, the Supreme Court of Israel rule that Israel is not a state of the Israelis but of all the Jews who allegedly one nation.
“Israel’s Supreme Court has rejected a petition by a group of Israelis who requested that their nationality clause in the national population records be changed from “Jewish” to “Israeli.” The judges ruled that the petitioners had failed to prove that there is such a thing as an Israeli nationality“[i]
National consciousness is required element for a nation
Endnotes:
[i] Leon Trotsky Letter to South African Revolutionaries (April 1933)
[ii] The Jewish Chronical https://www.thejc.com/news/world/israeli-theres-no-such-nationality-qwqsqto0 see: פסק דין ע”א 8573/08 עוזי אורנן נ’ משרד הפנים