Whose Majority Is the "Zionist Majority"? The Israeli Elections, the Roots of a State, and Those Who Stand Against It

Reading Israel through a Class Window, from the Ballot of 27 October 2026 to the History of Exile, from the Irrigation Pipe to Surveillance Software

October 28, 2026 at 11:09 AM73 min readAuthor: Oğuz Demirkapı

Whose Majority Is the "Zionist Majority"? The Israeli Elections, the Roots of a State, and Those Who Stand Against It

Dear Young Comrades,

Yesterday, on 27 October 2026, Israel went to the polls. On election night the same phrase came from the mouths of the two main rivals, Benjamin Netanyahu and Gadi Eisenkot: "Zionist majority." Netanyahu said the Zionist majority must come to its senses and unite. Eisenkot has been repeating for months that any government he forms will rest only on a "Zionist majority". Two blocs that want to bring each other down agree on one thing completely: the vote of the Arab citizens who make up a fifth of the country's population will not be counted in the arithmetic of forming a government.

In this piece we will try to understand where that sentence comes from. A short summary first, then the detail: the election now under way, the structure of Israel's political system, how Jewish communities scattered across the world took shape and bound themselves together before the state was founded, what Zionism is and why it draws so much anger, why it was decided to found a state, the roles in life of the communities who live in Israel, today's "leaps" in technology and agriculture, what is being tested in Palestine, what Israel is trying to do in the world, the line between what is documented and what is claimed in much-discussed subjects such as the Greater Middle East Project and the CIA–Mossad relationship, and finally who stands against this nationalist politics and what they want.

Before we begin, let us set down a principle, because the whole piece rests on it: the Jewish people, Zionism and the State of Israel are three separate things. Hatred of Jews (antisemitism) is one of the longest-running racisms in human history, and it is in no way acceptable to us. Criticising the occupation and discrimination policies of the Israeli state is not antisemitism; on the contrary, Israeli Jews are among those who make this criticism most courageously. The language of a "Jewish conspiracy", so common in Türkiye, has no place in our ranks. We oppose racism wherever it comes from; we discussed this at length in "What Is This Thing Called Racism?".

First, a Summary: Israel in Fourteen Points

The election is deadlocked. With about half the ballot boxes counted, Likud is on 27 seats and Eisenkot's Yashar! party on 21. Netanyahu's bloc is around 56 seats, Eisenkot's opposition bloc around 49. Nobody reaches a majority of 61. The final results will be announced on 4 November.
The real news is the Arab voter. Turnout, at 77.7 per cent, is the highest since 1999. Among Arab citizens it is estimated to have reached 80 per cent. The Joint List and Ra'am together are taking between 15 and 19 seats; that is a historic record.
Both blocs refuse to form a government with the Arab parties. Only Yair Golan's Democrats keep that door open. The "deadlock" is in fact the racial boundary of Israeli politics.
Two blocs, two rights. At the head of the opposition is a former chief of staff (Eisenkot), beside him a former director of the settler lobby (Bennett) and an ultra-nationalist (Lieberman). On the occupation and on Gaza there is no difference of principle between the main opposition and the government, only a difference of method and of management.
The Jewish diaspora is not a single people but many-layered communities. Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi communities were bound together for centuries by religion, language, trade networks and communal organisation; but their class structures and their fates were very different.
Zionism was for a long time a minority current among Jews. In 1897 two organisations were born in the same year: the Zionist Organisation in Basel and the socialist Bund in Vilnius. One said "go to Palestine", the other "stay where you are and fight for equal citizenship and socialism".
Zionism is a child of the European nationalisms. It answered antisemitism with "we are a separate nation, we will found our own state"; it carried that out on another people's land, by displacing them and by allying with imperialism. That is the justified reason it draws anger. But the language of hatred that uses the word "Zionist" in place of "Jew" is racism, plain and simple.
The Holocaust and the calculations of the great powers gave birth to the state. The West did not want to take in the Jewish refugees who had survived genocide; Britain withdrew; the United States and the USSR, for different reasons, backed the 1947 UN partition resolution. The price was paid in the exile of 750,000 Palestinians (the Nakba).
Israel's political system is a coalition regime with a single constituency and no written constitution. No party has ever won a majority on its own. The army, religion and "demography" are the system's three load-bearing pillars.
Israeli society rests on an ethnic division of labour. Secular Ashkenazi elites, Mizrahi workers, the Haredi community, Druze and Circassians who do military service, Bedouin in unrecognised villages, Arab health workers who carry the hospitals, migrant workers stripped of rights. Giving each layer a separate status is a tool for dividing workers.
Behind the stories of the "start-up nation" and the "country that made the desert bloom" stand the army, the occupation and state capital. High technology is 58 per cent of exports; arms exports hit a record of 19.2 billion dollars in 2025. Irrigation and water-treatment technologies are real achievements, but the distribution of water is also part of the occupation.
Palestine is a laboratory. A permit regime, facial recognition, spyware, a blockade calculated in calories, targeting by artificial intelligence: Israel develops there the methods of governing millions of people without recognising their rights, and sells them to the world with a "battle-tested" label. Today's opposition leader, Eisenkot, is the architect of the "Dahiya doctrine", which targets civilian infrastructure.
The Greater Middle East Project and the CIA–Mossad relationship are real, but they are not "a hidden hand that runs everything". There are open strategic texts that want to see the region divided and weak (Yinon, "A Clean Break", PNAC) and documented intelligence partnerships (Trident, Iran-Contra, Stuxnet). Türkiye's rulers were a party to these as well. The language of conspiracy makes both classes and peoples invisible.
There are people who stand against it. The Arab parties, Hadash, whose core is the Communist Party, the joint Jewish-Arab movement Omdim Beyahad (Standing Together), conscientious objectors, human rights organisations, and Jewish peace movements across the world. What they want has something in common: equal citizenship, an end to the occupation, and a politics in which labour is spoken of, not war.

Now let us go into the detail.

What Happened at the Ballot Box?

The background of the election

This is the first general election since the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 (about 1,200 people were killed in Israel, and 251 were taken hostage). In the three years since, more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Even since the ceasefire declared on 10 October 2025, more than 1,400 people have lost their lives; Israel holds about 60 per cent of the Strip behind the line called the "yellow line" (Al Jazeera). At the end of February 2026 Iran was attacked together with the United States, and in March a new war began in Lebanon. Settler attacks in the West Bank rose by more than 50 per cent in 2026 compared with the previous year, and construction tenders were opened in the E1 corridor (PISM).

The 25th Knesset was the first parliament since 1988 to serve out its term, and it was dissolved on 17 July 2026. Netanyahu's coalition tried to carry the judicial-reform crisis, the crisis over exempting Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) youth from military service, and the war all at once. After the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling on the exemption, the Haredi parties left the government and then returned; in October 2026 Shas and United Torah Judaism announced that they would enter no government without an exemption law (Wikipedia, the election campaign).

Netanyahu, meanwhile, is on trial both in his corruption cases and under the arrest warrant the International Criminal Court issued in November 2024. On the pardon application he made to President Herzog, Herzog had said in April 2026 that he wanted to see a settlement before deciding (Al-Monitor). For Netanyahu, then, the election is not only a question of power but of his personal legal fate.

The sides in the race

Netanyahu's bloc	Eisenkot's opposition bloc
Likud (Netanyahu), merged with Gideon Saar's New Hope	Yashar! (Gadi Eisenkot, Chief of Staff 2015–2019)
Otzma Yehudit / Jewish Power (Itamar Ben-Gvir)	Beyahad / Together (Naftali Bennett + Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid)
Religious Zionism–Zehut (Bezalel Smotrich)	The Democrats (Yair Golan; Labour Party + Meretz)
Shas (Aryeh Deri, Mizrahi Haredi)	Yisrael Beytenu (Avigdor Lieberman)
United Torah Judaism (Ashkenazi Haredi)
Outside the blocs: the Joint List (Hadash + Ta'al + Balad, leader Yousef Jabareen) and Ra'am (Mansour Abbas)

Benny Gantz's Blue and White party withdrew from the election on 19 October once it became clear it would fall below the threshold (Al Jazeera). The opposition's five leaders promised at the end of September not to attack one another through the campaign. Trump, on 18 October, openly backed Netanyahu.

The first results

Exit polls on election night put the opposition ahead; towards morning the picture turned. With 49.7 per cent of ballot boxes counted (on the morning of 28 October) the distribution was as follows (Ynet):

Party	Seats (preliminary)
Likud	27
Yashar!	21
Joint List	11
Beyahad	11
Democrats	9
United Torah Judaism	9
Yisrael Beytenu	8
Otzma Yehudit	7
Shas	7
Religious Zionism–Zehut	6
Ra'am	4
Netanyahu's bloc	56
Opposition bloc	49
Arab parties	15

These figures are not final; as the votes are counted and the effect of the 3.25 per cent threshold becomes clear, a few seats may shift. The final results are expected to be certified on 4 November. But the main line of the picture looks unlikely to change: nobody reaches 61.

The real event of the election: Arab voters walked to the ballot box

National turnout was 77.7 per cent; that is a rise of 7 points on 2022 and the highest rate since 1999 (Jerusalem Post). More striking is the picture in the Arab towns. In Umm al-Fahm turnout rose from 38 per cent in 2022 to 70 per cent; it was 83 per cent in Sakhnin, 81 per cent in Kafr Qasim, and rates above 87 per cent were seen in Bedouin villages (Ynet). The overall turnout of Arab citizens is estimated at around 80 per cent (Al Jazeera).

This walk to the polls did not happen by itself. The three components of the Joint List reunited in August 2026. The candidacy of Balad's leader, Sami Abu Shehadeh, was blocked by the Central Elections Committee. During the campaign, Otzma Yehudit militants attacked the Joint List's Tel Aviv headquarters. On election day it was reported that vehicles flying Likud flags in Jerusalem broadcast the call to prayer from loudspeakers and urged "the Arabs are voting, you vote too". Netanyahu, for his part, shared a photograph of women in headscarves waiting in a polling queue and warned of the danger of a "Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi government" (Al Jazeera).

This has a meaning: Arab voters answered at the ballot box a campaign that presented them as a "threat". But that answer is not included in the arithmetic of forming a government. Ra'am's leader Abbas summed the situation up shortly: "With the numbers we have, there is no government."

A class reading of the election

The election picture shows two things at once.

First: a serious part of Israeli society is tired of Netanyahu's rule. The flight from responsibility for 7 October, the failure to set up a state commission of inquiry, the prolongation of the war, the hostages left to their fate for a long time, and a cost of living 20 per cent higher than in the rich countries of Europe. The opposition's campaign gathered this anger: a state commission of inquiry, a fight against monopolies, military service for the Haredim.

Second: the political form of this anger comes from the right and from the army. The opposition's leader is a former chief of staff; its second major partner, Bennett, was once director of the settler organisation the Yesha Council; Lieberman is an ultra-nationalist politician who lives in a settlement under occupation. The destruction in Gaza, the annexation in the West Bank and the political rights of Palestinians are not on the main opposition's agenda. What is being discussed is who will run the war more "competently".

The election in Israel, then, is taking place between two fractions of capital and of the army: on one side a settler–religious–populist coalition, on the other a secular centre-right, close to technology and export capital and drawn from the army. Their common denominator is the first word of the formula "a Jewish and democratic state". The concept of a "Zionist majority" is the name of that common denominator: a fifth of the population counted as voters but not counted in the arithmetic of power.

We have seen this picture in other elections before. When we discussed the rise of the AfD in Germany, we wrote about how the centre parties took over the language of the far right. In Brazil and in Serbia we asked what the masses who walked to the ballot box won, and what they could not win. In Israel we have to ask the same question: after the ballot box, where will the Arab workers, peasants and young people who went to the polls in record numbers walk?

The Structure of Israel's Political System

The basic institutions

The Knesset: a single chamber of 120 seats. The whole country is one constituency; the voter votes not for a person but for a party list (closed-list proportional representation).
The electoral threshold: in 1949 it was 1 per cent. It was raised to 1.5 per cent in 1992, to 2 per cent in 2006, and to 3.25 per cent in 2014. One of the clearest aims of the last increase was to leave the small Arab parties out; the Arab parties' founding of the Joint List in 2015 was an answer to that law.
The government: after the election the president consults the party leaders and gives the task of forming a government to the person who receives the most recommendations. The candidate must win a confidence vote of 61 in the Knesset within 28 days (extendable by 14).
The president: elected by the Knesset, the office is largely symbolic; but it has the power of pardon and the power to assign the task of forming a government.
No constitution: Israel has no written constitution. In 1950 it was decided that "Basic Laws" would be passed step by step instead of a constitution. The greatest reason a constitution could not be made was that no agreement could be reached on the state's relation to religion and on the definition of its borders. The Supreme Court therefore became almost the only institutional guarantee of citizens' rights; that is also the reason for the fight over judicial reform in 2023.

The coalition that never ends

In Israel's history no party has ever won a majority on its own. Small parties, especially the religious parties, have therefore always played the role of "kingmaker". The "status quo letter" that Ben-Gurion wrote in 1947 to the Orthodox Agudat Yisrael is the first document of this bargain: Saturday would be the official day of rest, the kosher rule would apply in public institutions, marriage and divorce would be left to the religious courts, and religious schools would be autonomous. There is still no civil marriage in Israel today; this is the product of the founding bargain, not of a new religious offensive.

Three periods

1948–1977: Mapai hegemony. Ben-Gurion's Labour party (Mapai) ran the state, the Histadrut trade-union federation and the kibbutzim with one hand. The Histadrut was both the workers' union and one of the country's largest employers (the construction company Solel Boneh, a bank, health insurance, an industrial holding). This was a national state capitalism built in a "socialist" language. In the same period, between 1948 and 1966, Arab citizens lived under military rule: travel permits, curfews, confiscation of land.

1977–1992: the Mahapakh (the upheaval). Menachem Begin's Likud came to power for the first time. Behind it lay a class dynamic: the Mizrahi Jews brought from Arab countries in the 1950s had been settled, under the rule of the Ashkenazi Labour elite, in "development towns" and temporary camps (ma'abarot), and pushed to the lower rungs of the labour market. Begin gathered this anger in a nationalist and religious language. With the 1985 Stabilisation Plan the country entered a neoliberal turn; the Histadrut's companies were sold, the kibbutzim were privatised.

From 1992 to today: Oslo, the Intifada and the Netanyahu era. Rabin's Oslo process (1993) was broken when he was killed by a Jewish far-right militant in 1995. The Second Intifada (2000–2005) in effect dispersed the "peace camp". Netanyahu was prime minister in 1996–1999, 2009–2021 and from 2022 to today; he is the longest-serving prime minister in the country's history. Five elections were held between 2019 and 2022. The Bennett–Lapid government formed in 2021 was the first in history in which an Arab party (Ra'am) entered a coalition, and it lasted a year. The Nation-State Basic Law passed in 2018 wrote into constitutional rank that "the right of national self-determination belongs only to the Jewish people", and lowered the status of Arabic as an official language.

The system's three load-bearing pillars

Pillar	How it works	Its class meaning
The army	Compulsory military service, the passage of generals into politics (Rabin, Barak, Sharon, Gantz, Eisenkot), the passage from military intelligence into the technology sector	For the Jewish citizen the army is a channel and a network of class ascent; for the Arab citizen it is a mechanism of exclusion
Religion	The definition of marriage, divorce, burial and citizenship (the Law of Return)	The poverty of the Haredi community is managed by subsidy; religious authority bargains with secular capital
"Demography"	The policy of preserving a Jewish majority: encouragement of immigration, speaking of the Arab population as a "threat"	The basic ideological tool that divides the working class along ethnic lines

Before the State: From Scattered Communities to the Idea of a Nation

Ancient roots and exile

The first layer of Jewish history rests on the small kingdoms of Israel and Judah on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in 586 BCE ended with part of the society being sent into exile; some returned, some stayed in Babylon and formed a large community. The destruction of the Second Temple by Rome in 70 CE, and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135, led to the dispersal of the religious centre from Jerusalem.

An important note here: the diaspora is not only a story of exile. Long before the Roman period there were large Jewish communities in Alexandria, in Antioch, in the cities of Anatolia and in Babylon. These also grew through trade, migration and conversion. Among historians there are still lively debates about the origins of today's Jewish communities. But this is clear: the diaspora is a bond that communities living for thousands of years in different geographies, speaking different languages and occupying different class positions, built through a common religion and a common memory.

A materialist reading: the "people-class"

In the Marxist tradition one of the most interesting answers to this question was given by the Belgian Jewish revolutionary Abram Leon, killed at Auschwitz in 1944. In The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (1946), published after his death, Leon argued that Jews had maintained their existence inside European feudalism as a "people-class": a community excluded from the land-bound peasantry and from the feudal aristocracy, but one that had taken on a function in trade and in money. Because the Christian church forbade interest, the money-circulation function of the medieval economy was left largely to them. This function both protected them and, when the feudal order was shaken, made them the "scapegoat".

Leon's thesis can be debated; but it reminds us of this: the source of hatred of Jews is not "the nature of the Jews" but class relations in feudal and then capitalist society, and the need of the rulers to direct anger. Marx too, in On the Jewish Question, which he wrote in 1843, had said that the real question was not religious emancipation but the social emancipation of the human being.

Three great branches

Community	Where they lived	Language	Their fate
Ashkenazi	The Rhine basin, then Poland-Lithuania, Russia, Eastern Europe	Yiddish (German-based, in Hebrew letters)	Massacres in the Crusades (1096), blame during the Black Death, the ghetto, pogroms; in the nineteenth century the great majority of European Jews
Sephardi	The Iberian Peninsula; after the expulsion of 1492, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, the Netherlands	Ladino (Judeo-Spanish)	Expelled from Spain in 1492; settled in the Ottoman Empire, especially in Salonica and Istanbul
Mizrahi	Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, the Maghreb	Arabic, Persian and local languages	Lived for centuries inside Muslim societies with "dhimmi" status; after 1948 most migrated to Israel, or were pushed to migrate

How did excluded communities bind themselves together?

How did scattered communities stay together for more than a thousand years without states? The answer lies in a set of common institutions:

A common text and a common law: the Torah and the Talmud let communities everywhere take part in the same legal and religious argument. A response (responsa) written by a rabbi from Cairo was read in Poland. This was a knowledge network built before the printing press.
Communal organisation (the kahal): each community built an autonomous structure that collected its own tax and ran its school, its cemetery and its aid fund. The kingdoms of Europe collected tax from these structures in a lump.
Trade and credit networks: in Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade, and later on the exchanges of Amsterdam and London, kinship and communal networks stood in for trust.
Charity and "rescue" networks: the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in Paris in the nineteenth century (1860), opened hundreds of schools in the Middle East and North Africa. Baron Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association (1891) settled those fleeing the pogroms in agricultural colonies in Argentina. In this period Argentina, Uganda and even Siberia were considered, besides Palestine, as a solution to the "Jewish question".
Workers' organisations and the press: at the end of the nineteenth century Jewish workers in Eastern Europe founded unions, newspapers and reading circles in Yiddish. Jewish migrants working in the garment workshops of New York formed one of the most militant sections of the US labour movement (the ILGWU union, the Arbeter Ring mutual-aid organisation).

Jewish communities, then, stood not only by religion but by common institutions. This is a historical example of what we call the "knowledge commons": a community without a state surviving by making knowledge, mutual aid and law common.

Modern antisemitism and three answers

With the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, Jews were counted as equal citizens for the first time (1791). But in the nineteenth century, with the crises of capitalism, religious hatred of Jews gave way to modern antisemitism based on "race"; the word "antisemitism" was invented in 1879 by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr as a political programme. Tsarist Russia, from 1791, confined Jews to a "Pale of Settlement" in the western border region. Great pogroms took place in 1881–1882 and in Kishinev in 1903. The Dreyfus Affair in France in 1894 showed that even in the most "enlightened" country a Jewish officer could be condemned on a fabricated charge of espionage.

Three main answers came from inside the Jewish communities to this oppression:

Answer	What it proposed	Who
Migration	Go west, especially to America	Between 1881 and 1914 about 2 million Eastern European Jews migrated to the United States
Socialism / the Bund	"Doikayt" (hereness): stay in the country where you are, struggle together with the working class for equality and socialism, cultural autonomy	The General Jewish Labour Bund, founded in Vilnius in 1897; a large part of the Russian and Polish socialist movement
Zionism	Antisemitism cannot be defeated; Jews must found their own state	Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State (1896); the Basel Congress of 1897

The year 1897 is symbolic: in August the Zionist Organisation was founded in Basel, in October the Bund in Vilnius. Both were answers to antisemitism; but one proposed national separation, the other class unity. Until the 1940s Zionism was a minority among Jews. Most Orthodox rabbis saw the founding of a state as interference in the Messiah's work and opposed it. The assimilated bourgeoisie in the West feared that its loyalty would be questioned. Socialists saw Zionism as a bourgeois nationalism that divided the working class.

What Is Zionism, and Why Does It Draw So Much Anger?

A definition

Zionism is a political movement born in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century which holds that Jews are a nation, that this nation can escape antisemitism only in its own state, and that this state must be founded on the historic land of Israel, that is, in Palestine. It takes its name from Mount Zion in Jerusalem. A religious longing for "return" had existed for centuries in Jewish worship ("Next year in Jerusalem"); but Zionism turned this religious longing into a modern, secular nation-state programme. Most of its first theorists were not religious; Herzl was a Viennese journalist.

Zionism is a child of the European nationalisms of its period. While Germans, Italians and Poles were founding their nation-states, Jews were told "you do not belong to this nation". Zionism answered, "you are right, we are a separate nation, we will found our own state". It accepted, from the opposite direction, the basic thesis of antisemitism, the thesis that Jews do not belong to the societies they live in. The first criticism the Bund and the socialists directed at Zionism was exactly this.

The currents of Zionism

Current	Its representatives	What it argued
Political Zionism	Theodor Herzl	Found a state by diplomacy, by obtaining a "charter" from the great powers
Labour Zionism	Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson	Build the state from below by settling a Jewish working class on the land, through the kibbutz, the Histadrut and "Hebrew labour"; the current that ran the state for 30 years
Revisionist Zionism	Ze'ev Jabotinsky, later Begin and Likud	The "Iron Wall" (1923): because the Arabs will not consent voluntarily, a Jewish state can be founded only by military force; a greater Israel covering both banks
Cultural Zionism	Ahad Ha'am, Martin Buber	A cultural and spiritual centre more than a state; figures such as Buber and Judah Magnes argued for a single binational state
Religious Zionism	Rav Kook and his son, later Gush Emunim and today Smotrich	The state is the beginning of the Messiah's coming; the lands taken in 1967 are God's promise; settlement is a sacred duty

What is in power today is the combination of revisionist and religious Zionism. The "Iron Wall" essay Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 is one of history's most outspoken colonial texts: the author himself says that native peoples have never voluntarily consented to colonisers, and that an "iron wall" is therefore needed to break Arab resistance.

Why does it draw so much anger?

The word "Zionism" is spoken today with anger in a large part of the world, especially in the Middle East. We have to separate the sources of this anger, because part of it is fed by a justified political criticism and part by racism, plain and simple.

The sources of the justified criticism:

Settler colonialism: Zionism aimed to found a state on land where another people lived, and it carried this out without that people's consent, by displacing them. For Palestinians, Zionism is not an abstract ideology; it is the name of the homes lost in 1948, of the occupation that has continued since 1967, of the destruction in Gaza today.
Citizenship built on ethnic privilege: the Law of Return grants every Jew in the world the right to Israeli citizenship, while the Palestinians expelled in 1948, and their descendants, are not granted the right to return to their own villages. The 2018 Nation-State Law carried this distinction to the constitutional level.
Alliance with imperialism: Herzl knocked on the door of every power of the period, from the Ottoman Sultan to the German Kaiser; the Zionist movement became intertwined with the interests of the British Empire in the region, and later with those of the United States. For oppressed peoples, Zionism was seen as imperialism's forward post in the region.
Today's practice: the war in Gaza, settler violence and annexation in the West Bank have raised world public reaction to its highest level. In 1975 the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 3379, which defined Zionism as "a form of racism and racial discrimination"; the resolution was revoked in 1991, in the balance of power changed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The sources of racist hatred:

Using the word "Zionist" in place of "Jew": in many places, especially on the internet, the word "Zionist" is used not for Israeli policy but to target Jews directly. The claim that "Zionists" run the world's banks, its media and its wars is today's form of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forged document invented in 1903 by the Tsarist secret police.
Conspiracy theories: a language that looks for "a Zionist hand" behind every crisis, every earthquake and every economic collapse makes class relations and concrete responsibilities invisible. Instead of criticising a capitalist, a general or a government, it accuses a people. This is the oldest game, and it serves the ruling classes.

Our distinction

From a Marxist point of view Zionism is a bourgeois nationalism which claims to have been born as a national liberation movement, but which was realised through the dispossession of another people and through alliance with imperialism. Our opposition to it rests on the same principle as our opposition to every nationalism: the liberation of one people cannot be built on the oppression of another.

But we must keep, with care, the line between "criticism of Zionism" and "hatred of Jews". A young Israeli objector criticises Zionism more sharply than we do; thousands of Jews in the United States take to the streets saying "not in our name". Our enemy is not a people, but a class and state order that rules over that people as well.

Why Was a State Founded?

Settlement on the land: "Hebrew labour" and the kibbutz

Zionist immigration (aliyah) came to Palestine in waves from 1882. The second wave, between 1904 and 1914, brought the cadre that would later found the state: Ben-Gurion and "Labour Zionism". The first kibbutz, Degania, was founded in 1910. The kibbutzim were agricultural communes of common property and of common production and consumption; they became one of the world's longest-lived collective experiments.

But the basic principle of this "socialist" settlement was "Hebrew labour" (avoda ivrit): Jewish employers should not employ Arab workers, and the Jewish market should not buy Arab produce. The Histadrut union, founded in 1920, did not accept Arab workers as full members until 1959. The lands were mostly bought from large landowners living in Beirut and Damascus; after the sale, the Palestinian peasants (fellahin) who had worked that land for generations were driven off. The Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF), founded in 1901, made it a condition that land it bought would be leased in perpetuity only to Jews.

A Marxist warning is needed here: socialist language does not make a colonial settlement socialist. The kibbutz was egalitarian on the inside; on the outside it was the instrument of the dispossession of the native peasantry. The class question is answered not by how equal a structure is within itself, but by whose land and whose labour it is built on.

The calculation of the great powers

The Balfour Declaration of 1917: in the middle of the First World War, Britain announced that it supported the establishment in Palestine of "a national home for the Jewish people". At the time about 90 per cent of Palestine's population was Arab. Britain's calculation was to secure the east of the Suez Canal and the road to India.
The British Mandate, 1920–1948: Britain ruled the two societies against each other. The Great Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 was crushed by the British army and Zionist militias; the political and military structure of Palestinian society was broken in this period.
The Évian Conference of 1938: of the 32 countries gathered for the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, almost none opened their doors. This scene became one of the most bitter historical proofs strengthening Zionism's thesis that "there is nowhere else to go".
The Holocaust: Nazi Germany killed about 6 million of Europe's Jews. The Yiddish-speaking world of workers and artisans in Eastern Europe, that is, the Bund's social base, was physically destroyed. After the war hundreds of thousands of survivors waited in camps for "displaced persons"; the United States and Britain were reluctant to accept them on their own soil.

The 1947 partition resolution and the attitude of the USSR

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly, by resolution 181, accepted the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions. The Jewish community, about a third of the population and in possession of less than 7 per cent of the land, was given 55 per cent of the land.

We have to be honest here: the Soviet Union had as much of a role in the resolution's passing as the United States. In a speech at the UN in May 1947, Andrei Gromyko supported a two-state solution, citing the Holocaust and the West's inability to protect the Jews. The USSR became the first state to recognise Israel in law (de jure); arms were sent via Czechoslovakia. Behind this decision lay the calculation of pushing Britain out of the region and the expectation that the new state would turn socialist. The expectation came to nothing: Israel soon became the United States' most reliable ally in the region. This is one of the subjects we have to face, with maturity, through our historical experience. (Türkiye too became, in March 1949, the first Muslim-majority country to recognise Israel.)

1948: independence and the Nakba

On 14 May 1948 the founding of Israel was declared. In the war that followed, about 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes or fled; more than 400 villages were destroyed or emptied. Palestinians call this the Nakba (the catastrophe). They were not allowed to return; their property passed to the state under the Absentees' Property Law. The roughly 150,000 Arabs who remained in Israel lived under military rule until 1966.

In the same years the Jewish communities in the Arab countries also came to Israel, both under the pressure of local nationalism and through migration operations organised by Zionist organisations (120,000 people from Iraq, 49,000 from Yemen). The displacement of both peoples is the two faces of the same process. The thousand-year-old Jewish community of Baghdad and the thousand-year-old Arab community of Jaffa passed into history in the same decade.

1967 and the occupation

In the Six-Day War of 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Sinai. Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1979; on the remaining lands there is an occupation regime that has lasted 59 years. Today more than half a million settlers live in the West Bank, and more than 200,000 in East Jerusalem. Since 2023, permits or tenders have been issued for more than 40,000 housing units, and about 100 unauthorised "outposts" have been legalised (PISM).

The basic question unanswered since Israel's founding is this: about half of the roughly 15 million people living from the river to the sea are Palestinian. How long can a state remain "democratic" by giving citizenship to some of these people, military rule to some, and a blockade to some? In January 2021 the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem defined this order as "a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea" and used the concept of apartheid.

The Communities Living in Israel, and Their Roles in Life

Roughly 73 per cent of Israel's population of about 10 million is Jewish, 21 per cent Arab, and the rest are communities counted in the category "other". But these three categories hide the variety inside them. Each community's relation to the state, to the army and to the labour market is different, and Israel's ruling class uses these differences with skill: divide and rule is the oldest technique of government here as well.

The layers inside the Jewish communities

Community	Approximate size	Its social role
Secular Ashkenazim	A significant part of the Jewish population	The founding elites; predominant in army command, the academy, the judiciary, technology and big capital; the core of the Tel Aviv-centred liberal section
Mizrahi Jews	About half the Jewish population (the boundaries are blurring with mixed marriages)	The working class settled in development towns in the 1950s; today partly risen into the middle class, but the base of Likud and Shas; a historic anger against the Ashkenazi elites, the fuel of right-wing populism
Haredim (ultra-Orthodox)	About 13–14 per cent of the population, the fastest-growing section	A significant part of the men study in religious schools (yeshivas), do not do military service and work at a low rate; women are the family's main source of income; the poverty rate is high; their parties are the "kingmaker" of coalitions
Religious Zionists / settlers	About 10–12 per cent of the population	A growing weight in the army's officer cadres; the ideological core of the settlements in the West Bank; today in the ministries
Those of Soviet origin	About 1 million people who arrived in the 1990s	Strong in technology and engineering; about 400,000–500,000 of them cannot marry in Israel because they are not counted as "Jewish" under religious rules; Lieberman's base
Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel)	About 170,000	Airlifted in 1984 and 1991; large protests in 2015 and 2019 against poverty and police violence; the clearest target of the racism inside Jewish society

Arab/Palestinian citizens

About 21 per cent of the population, that is, more than 2 million people. The descendants of those who were not expelled in 1948 and remained on their land. They increasingly define themselves as "Palestinian citizens of Israel".

Their roles in life: Israel's health system cannot work without Arab workers. About a quarter of physicians, about half of pharmacists, and a significant part of nurses are Arab citizens. Construction, transport and the service sector also rest largely on their labour. In the technology sector their share is still very low.
Discrimination: structural discrimination in municipal budgets, planning permission and housing; Arab towns often cannot expand, and face the demolition of unlicensed buildings. Because they do not do military service, they are excluded from the rights, the networks and the job opportunities tied to service.
Crime organisations: in recent years armed crime organisations have exploded in the Arab towns; the annual number of murders runs into the hundreds, and most remain unsolved. Arab politicians see this as the state's policy of "governance by neglect".

"Divided" Arabs: Druze, Bedouin, Christians

Israel divided Arab society into religious and ethnic subgroups and gave them different statuses.

The Druze (about 150,000): since 1956 military service has been compulsory for Druze men. They serve at a high rate in the army, the border police and the prison service; this is the state's model of a "loyal minority". But the 2018 Nation-State Law caused great anger among the Druze, because it declared them second class; tens of thousands of Druze marched in Tel Aviv against the law. Most of the Druze in the Golan, by contrast, count themselves Syrian and have largely refused Israeli citizenship.
The Bedouin (about 300,000): most live in the Negev. Some serve as volunteers in the army as trackers. At the same time they are the country's poorest community: tens of thousands live in villages the state does not recognise, where water, electricity and roads are not provided, and their homes are regularly demolished. The village of Al-Araqib has been demolished and rebuilt more than 200 times. Bedouin were among those killed and taken hostage in the 7 October attack; this is the tragic symbol of their being caught "between two fires".
Christian Arabs (about 180,000): concentrated in Haifa, Nazareth and the Galilee. Their level of education and their share of the middle class are high; they played an important role in the history of the Palestinian national movement and of the Israeli Communist Party. In 2014 the state began to register some of them as "Aramean", a separate national category; the aim was to separate Christians from an Arab identity and to draw them into military service.

Communities familiar from Türkiye

Circassians (about 5,000): they live in the villages of Kafr Kama and Rehaniya in the Galilee. They are the descendants of Circassians who migrated to Ottoman lands with the Tsarist Russian expulsion in the Caucasus in the nineteenth century. Although they are Muslim, they do military service like the Druze; the Circassian language is taught in the schools. It is a trace of the Ottoman policy of settling migrants, reaching as far as today's Israel.
Armenians: the Armenian Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem is one of the world's oldest Armenian communities. The "Cows' Garden" resistance that the Armenian community sustained in 2023 against the long-term lease of part of the quarter to an investor showed that settler pressure targets not only Muslim Palestinians but Christian communities as well.

Small religious communities

Samaritans: about 900 people, one of the world's smallest and oldest religious communities; they live on Mount Gerizim near Nablus and in Holon.
Bahá'ís: their world centre is in Haifa. The centre is here because they are oppressed in Iran; but they do not proselytise in Israel.
Ahmadis: in Haifa's Kababir neighbourhood.

Those who are not citizens: migrant workers and asylum seekers

Migrant workers: Thais in agriculture, Filipinos in the care of the elderly and the disabled, Chinese, Indians and Sri Lankans in construction. Their visas are often tied to the employer; changing employer or organising is very difficult. After 7 October, new inflows of workers were brought in to fill the place of the roughly 150,000 Palestinian workers who were banned.
African asylum seekers: about 25,000–30,000 people, most from Eritrea and Sudan. Governments defined them as "infiltrators"; there was the Holot detention centre in the Negev, campaigns of deportation, and provocations in south Tel Aviv that set poor Israeli workers against asylum seekers.
Palestinian workers from the West Bank: for decades they were the cheapest source of labour for the Israeli economy; queues beginning at four in the morning at the border crossings, the permit regime and the bribes paid to intermediaries were the daily reality of this labour.

A class reading

This many-layered structure in Israeli society forms an ethnic division of labour: secular Jewish elites in the most skilled and best-paid jobs; Mizrahi, Russian and Druze workers in the middle layers; Arab citizens, Palestinian workers and migrants in care, agriculture and construction. Each layer is given different rights and different "loyalty tests". This structure prevents workers from uniting around common interests: the poor Mizrahi worker in south Tel Aviv directs his anger not at the economic order that impoverishes him, but at the Eritrean asylum seeker beside him. This is the same mechanism we have seen in Germany and in Türkiye.

Israel Today: Technology and Agriculture

The figures of the "start-up nation"

According to the 2026 report of the Israel Innovation Authority (Innovation Authority):

High technology exported about 85 billion dollars in 2025; that is 58 per cent of the country's total exports.
The sector produces 18.3 per cent of gross domestic product and provided about half of the growth in the economy.
About 400,000 people, that is 11.4 per cent of employment, work in this sector.
In 2025 there were 198 company sales; the total value was about 84 billion dollars. A large part of this was Google's agreement to buy the cybersecurity company Wiz for 32 billion dollars.
About 70 per cent of investment is foreign capital.
But for the first time in a decade the number of R&D workers fell (by about 3,500 people). The share of private high-technology workers located in Israel fell from 69 per cent in 2019 to 62 per cent in March 2026. Management and decision centres are moving abroad.

Where does this success come from?

Instead of idealist explanations such as "creative Jewish intelligence" or "a culture of enterprise", let us look at the material sources:

The army is a technology school. The signals unit of military intelligence, 8200, and the elite technology programme Talpiot, founded in 1979, give thousands of young people every year, with state money, advanced technical training, experience of working on secret projects, and a network that will last a lifetime. Companies such as Check Point, NSO and Cellebrite were founded with cadres who came out of these units.
The state founded venture capital. The Yozma programme, which the state launched in 1993 with about 100 million dollars, drew foreign venture-capital funds into the country through state partnership. What is told as a "free-market miracle" began with state planning.
In the 1990s about 1 million migrants came from the Soviet Union. A large part of them were engineers, mathematicians and scientists trained by the Soviet education system. The Israeli technology sector, that is, largely inherited a stock of knowledge produced by a socialist education system.
US military aid. Under the memorandum signed in 2016, the United States pledged Israel 3.8 billion dollars a year between 2019 and 2028, 38 billion dollars in total, in military aid. In wartime, additional packages were added to this.
The occupation is a testing ground. Surveillance, biometric recognition, drones and targeting systems are developed on Palestinians and sold to the world with a "battle-tested" label. The journalist Antony Loewenstein named this model "the Palestine Laboratory". (We take this up in detail below, in the section on the Palestine laboratory.)

Artificial intelligence and war

In 2023–2024 the independent Israeli outlet +972 Magazine documented two artificial-intelligence systems used in Gaza: "Gospel" (Habsora), which marks buildings as targets, and "Lavender", which scores tens of thousands of people as possible militants. According to the reports, approving target recommendations sometimes took seconds. This is the darkest form of what we call the "digital panopticon": an automated chain running from surveillance to targeting, and from targeting to killing.

Global technology monopolies also stand behind these systems. In 2021 Google and Amazon signed the Nimbus cloud contract with the Israeli government, worth 1.2 billion dollars; workers who opposed it, in the "No Tech for Apartheid" movement, were answered with dismissals. After The Guardian revealed in August 2025 that Palestinians' phone calls were being stored in bulk on the Azure cloud, Microsoft in September 2025 cut some of the services it provided to Unit 8200. What made this decision possible was, to a large extent, pressure from the company's own workers. What we said when we discussed the Palantir manifesto becomes concrete here: the most advanced products of techno-capitalism enter the service of the oldest colonial methods.

A record in arms exports

Israel's arms exports broke a record for the fifth year in a row in 2025, at 19.2 billion dollars; a rise of about 30 per cent on the previous year (Times of Israel). The distribution was as follows:

By region: Europe 36 per cent, Asia-Pacific 32 per cent, the Middle East and North Africa 15 per cent, North America 13 per cent.
By product: air defence, missiles and rockets 29 per cent; surveillance and optoelectronics 22 per cent (it had been 6 per cent the previous year); radar and electronic warfare 11 per cent.

It is no coincidence that the share of surveillance systems more than tripled in a year: being "tested" in Gaza turned into a marketing argument. It should also be noted that Europe is one of the largest buyers: on one side a genocide case and debates over an embargo, on the other the Arrow 3 missile-defence system sold to Germany. We pointed to this contradiction when we described, in the piece on the Ulm 5 trial, the prosecution of activists who targeted the Elbit factory.

Agriculture and water: a real achievement, an unequal distribution

Israel's achievements in agricultural technology are real, and they have spread across the world:

Drip irrigation: Netafim, founded in 1965 at Kibbutz Hatzerim from an idea of the engineer Simcha Blass, turned drip irrigation into a worldwide industry. (In 2018, 80 per cent of the company was sold to the Mexican group Orbia; a typical example of a collective enterprise of kibbutz origin passing to global capital.)
Reuse of treated water: about 85–90 per cent of wastewater is treated and used in agriculture; this is the highest rate in the world.
Desalination of sea water: large plants on the Mediterranean coast provide a large part of household water.
Greenhouses, seed breeding, desert agriculture and agricultural-technology ventures.

But the story "we made the desert bloom" has two problems.

The first is history: Palestine was an agricultural country before Zionist immigration as well. The Jaffa orange, famous across the world in the nineteenth century, was the product of Arab gardeners and was exported to Europe. The myth of "empty land" is the ideological tool by which those who lived there were made invisible.

The second is distribution: water in Israel is in the hands of the state company Mekorot, and the same company also supplies water to the settlements in the West Bank. In the order set up by the Oslo II Agreement (1995), control over the West Bank's groundwater remained largely with Israel; Palestinians' digging of new wells was made subject to permission. According to the reports of human rights organisations, the daily water consumption per person of Palestinians in the West Bank stays below the minimum recommended by the World Health Organization, while the consumption of neighbouring settlements is several times that. In Gaza, meanwhile, the water infrastructure was almost entirely destroyed with the war.

There is also the dimension of labour: Israeli agriculture rests largely on migrant workers, especially tens of thousands of Thai workers. In the 7 October attack dozens of Thai agricultural workers were killed or taken hostage. With the war, Palestinian workers were banned from working in Israel; the gap was filled with new migrant workers brought from Asia. However advanced the technology, the hand working in the field is still the hand of a migrant without citizenship rights.

The class pyramid of Israeli society

Layer	Who	Situation
The top	Holding families, technology capital, the defence industry, the banks	A narrow group of capital controlling a large part of the economy; the target of the social protests of 2011
Upper-middle	Secular Ashkenazi professionals, technology workers, managers of army origin	Centred on Tel Aviv; the tendency to emigrate is growing
Lower-middle	Mizrahi workers, migrants of Soviet and Ethiopian origin, the development towns	The base of Likud and of Shas
The bottom	The Haredi community (high poverty, low employment), Arab citizens	Haredi poverty is managed by subsidy; the Arab towns are left alone with crime organisations and neglect
Outside the law	Migrant workers, African asylum seekers	No citizenship, and a visa often tied to the employer
Outside any rights	Palestinians under occupation	Military rule, blockade, no right to vote

In the summer of 2011 tents were set up on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv against rents and the cost of living; about 400,000 people joined the demonstrations of 3 September 2011. This was the moment in recent years when class demands were voiced in Israel in their most massive form. But the movement left the question of the occupation outside as "political", and it dispersed in a short time. The lesson is plain: a social movement that does not discuss the occupation cannot discuss why its own country's budget is transferred to the army and the settlements either.

Palestine Is a Laboratory: What Is Israel Testing There?

Above we said "the occupation is a testing ground". Let us open that. What Israel does on Palestinian land is not only to seize land; it is to develop the methods of governing millions of people without recognising their rights, but also without destroying them completely, to test those methods, and then to sell them to the world as a product. We see this experiment in six fields.

Population management: the permit regime

The life of a Palestinian in the West Bank is organised by permits: a work permit to go to a job, a medical permit to go to hospital, an agricultural permit to go to one's own olive grove, a planning permit to build a house (in Area C it is almost never given). Under the Oslo Accords the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B and C; Area C, about 60 per cent of the land, remained entirely under Israeli control. Hundreds of checkpoints, separate roads and the separation wall divided one land into disconnected islets.

The "novelty" of this system is this: to turn every movement of people into a permit application, every permit application into a data record, and every data record into an instrument of pressure. A Palestinian who wants a permit may be asked to inform for the intelligence service. Freedom of movement becomes a reward, and its restriction a punishment.

Surveillance: facial recognition and databases

Blue Wolf and Red Wolf: systems documented by The Washington Post in 2021 and by Amnesty International in 2023 in its report "Automated Apartheid". Soldiers photograph Palestinians' faces with their phones and add them to a database; the cameras at the checkpoints in Hebron scan the face of every Palestinian who passes and decide whether they may pass. It was reported that competitions were organised among soldiers for those who photographed the most people.
Bulk interception: as The Guardian revealed in 2025, millions of Palestinians' phone calls were being stored on Microsoft's Azure cloud.
Spyware: NSO's Pegasus software was found in 2021 on the phones of people working in Palestinian human rights organisations. The same year Israel declared six of these organisations "terrorist organisations". The United States blacklisted NSO the same year. Pegasus was later found on the phones of journalists and dissidents from Mexico to India, from Saudi Arabia to Hungary.

The mathematics of the blockade: the calorie calculation

From 2007 Gaza was placed under blockade by land, sea and air. In a 2008 document that the Israeli human rights organisation Gisha brought out through the courts, Israel's Ministry of Defence had calculated, through the calories needed per person, how much of the food that would enter Gaza was enough for people not to die of hunger. The document was called "Food consumption in Gaza: red lines". An Israeli official's words in those years, "we are putting the Gazans on a diet", became the summary of this policy.

This is the spreadsheet of governing a people without killing them, but also without allowing them to live. In 2025 the distribution points of the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation" (GHF), backed by Israel and the United States, became the militarised form of this logic: hundreds of people were killed in fire opened on crowds gathered to receive aid.

Doctrines of war: "mowing the grass" and the "Dahiya doctrine"

"Mowing the grass": the expression used in Israeli military circles for the regular operations in Gaza. The capacity of Palestinian resistance is "mown" at set intervals; the problem is not solved, it is managed. Gaza lived this cycle in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, 2021 and from 2023 to today.
The Dahiya doctrine: the doctrine, named after the destruction of Beirut's Dahiya district in the 2006 Lebanon war, was formulated openly in 2008 by the then Northern Commander: "disproportionate force" would be applied to every village from which an attack came, civilian infrastructure would be targeted, and the people would thus be turned against the resistance. The commander who formulated this doctrine is Gadi Eisenkot, today the leader of the opposition. The military biography of "Netanyahu's alternative" also tells the limits of the Israeli opposition.

Targeting by artificial intelligence

The Gospel and Lavender systems we described above are the newest stage of this experiment: handing to a statistical model the authority to decide who is a "militant", setting in advance the number of "acceptable civilian casualties" for a target, reducing human approval to seconds. This is the industrialisation of war; the military counterpart of what we call mental Taylorism: the decision to kill is broken into parts, each part is sped up, and responsibility dissolves inside the machine.

Demographic engineering

The common aim of all these tools is the management of a "demographic" problem: seizing the land while not making the people on it citizens. The revocation of Palestinians' residency permits in Jerusalem, house demolitions in East Jerusalem, the emptying of villages in the Jordan Valley and in the South Hebron Hills (Masafer Yatta) by declaring them military training zones, the squeezing of the population in Gaza to the south, and plans of "voluntary emigration" are parts of this strategy.

From the laboratory to the market

The last link of the experiment is export. Systems used for the first time on the Gaza border, the facial-recognition cameras tested in Hebron, the drones tested in the West Bank and the crowd-control tools (such as the "Skunk" stink bomb) are sold to the world with a "field-proven" label. The rise in the share of surveillance systems within arms exports from 6 per cent to 22 per cent in 2025 is the most striking indicator of this. US police forces training in Israel, Israeli-made sensors on Europe's border walls, and India's surveillance infrastructure in Kashmir show that this laboratory has turned into a technology of government on a global scale.

The Palestine question is therefore not only the question of the Palestinians. What is tested there is a model of government that can be applied tomorrow in a neighbourhood of Istanbul, at a factory gate, on a protest site. Between the chip-based tracking at the Astor factory and the facial-recognition camera in Hebron there is a difference of scale, not of logic: turning the worker's body and movement into data, and controlling them.

What Is Israel Trying to Do in the World?

The United States' "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the region

At the centre of Israel's foreign policy is the strategic alliance with the United States. This alliance was built in the Cold War against Arab nationalism and the Soviet Union; today it continues against Iran and against China's influence in the region. The war against Iran in 2026, together with the United States, was the clearest expression of this relationship. Trump's open support for Netanyahu ten days before the election is the same relationship reflected into domestic politics.

Normalisation and a regional economic architecture

With the Abraham Accords signed in 2020, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan normalised relations with Israel. The aim was to build a regional economic bloc, without the Palestine question being solved, between Gulf capital, Israeli technology and the US security umbrella. The India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is also part of this architecture. In the competition between blocs that we discussed in the BRICS piece, Israel is positioning itself as the Western bloc's technology and security node in the region.

The export of arms, surveillance and ideology

Historically Israel also worked with regimes to which the West could not openly sell arms: apartheid South Africa, the military juntas in Latin America. Today India, Azerbaijan and European countries are among the largest customers. The relationship with Azerbaijan matters for Türkiye as well: a significant part of Israel's oil imports comes through the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, that is, through Türkiye; this also shows the limits of the trade restrictions Türkiye announced in May 2024.

But it is not only arms that are exported. Israel's "counter-terrorism" model, that is, the method of keeping a population under constant surveillance, scoring a crowd with artificial intelligence and legitimising this in the name of "security", is sold to police and intelligence services all over the world. And an ideology is exported too: the discourse of defending "Judeo-Christian civilisation" against Islam is the common language of the alliance built with Europe's far right, with Orbán's Hungary, with Milei's Argentina and with India's Hindutva nationalism. The bitter irony of history: a part of the European far-right currents that were once the most ardent carriers of antisemitism are today among the closest allies of the Israeli government.

Conflict with international law

The International Court of Justice: in December 2023 South Africa brought a case against Israel under the Genocide Convention; in January 2024 the Court ordered provisional measures. The case continues.
The International Criminal Court: in November 2024 it issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and the former Defence Minister Gallant, on grounds of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
From inside Israel: in a report titled "Our Genocide", published in July 2025, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel defined what was happening in Gaza as genocide. This was the heaviest accusation to come from inside Israel.
The death-penalty law passed in 2026 introduced a penal order that in practice will be applied almost only to Palestinians.

So what is it trying to do?

Let us make a short summary. The strategy of Israel's ruling class appears to have three layers:

Land: making a Palestinian state physically impossible; de facto annexation in the West Bank instead of formal annexation, and long-term military control in Gaza.
The region: weakening Iran and its allies militarily, economic integration with Gulf capital, and making the US military presence in the region permanent.
The world: becoming an indispensable supplier in arms and surveillance technology; and thus balancing diplomatic isolation with commercial dependence.

The weak point of this strategy is inside the country itself: half of society poured into the streets against judicial reform, the Haredi exemption is creating anger inside the army, technology workers are going abroad, and the Arab population of one fifth raised the strongest voice in its history at the ballot box.

The Greater Middle East Project, the CIA and Mossad: Between the Document and the Conspiracy

In Türkiye, concepts such as the "Greater Middle East Project", the "blood borders map" and "Mossad's finger" are much discussed. On this subject we have to avoid two traps. The first is to ignore imperialism's plans for the region; because these plans are real, and most of them are written in open documents. The second is to look for a hidden hand behind every event, one that knows everything and runs everything; because this makes invisible the class relations, the local rulers' own interests, and the peoples' own struggles. The language of "Mossad is behind everything" also slides easily into hatred of Jews.

The scientific attitude is this: to tell what is documented with its documents, and to mark what is a claim as a claim.

The Greater Middle East Project (BOP)

What was it? The programme the Bush administration announced, after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, under the name "Greater Middle East Initiative", and which was formalised at the G8's Sea Island summit in June 2004 under the name "Broader Middle East and North Africa Partnership". In a region stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan it aimed at "democratisation", free-market reforms, support for civil society and education reform.
Its real content: the neoliberal restructuring of the region's economies under the discourse of "exporting democracy", support for "moderate" governments close to the United States, and the integration of Israel into the region. The invasion of Iraq became the military leg of this project.
Türkiye's role: statements that the government of the period was positioned in the project as "co-chair" or "model country" were debated in Türkiye for a long time. The "moderate Islam" model was one of the political formulas the United States envisaged for the region.
Israel's place: the open texts of the project treated Israel not as a target but as a natural part of the regional order. During the 2006 Lebanon war, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defined the destruction as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East".

Maps and strategic texts

Let us separate what some texts that circulate often in Türkiye are, and what they are not:

Text	What it is	What it is not
The Yinon Plan (1982)	The essay "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties", published in the journal Kivunim by Oded Yinon, who had previously worked at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs; it argues that the division of Arab states into sectarian and ethnic units would be in Israel's interest	It is not documented as an official state policy; but it is the open expression of a tendency in Israeli strategic thought
"A Clean Break" (1996)	The report prepared for the newly elected Netanyahu by figures such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser: abandon Oslo, overthrow Saddam, push Syria back	Not a secret document; it was published openly. But the fact that several of its authors later took places in the cadres of the Bush administration that designed the Iraq war is a document of the strategic intertwining of the US and Israeli right
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC, 1997–2000)	A think tank arguing that military superiority should be made permanent so that the United States would remain the single superpower; it openly proposed regime change in Iraq; most of its members took office in the Bush administration	Not a secret organisation; an open neoconservative lobby
The "Blood Borders" map (2006)	The essay and map published in Armed Forces Journal by the retired US lieutenant colonel Ralph Peters; it proposes redrawing the Middle East along ethnic and sectarian lines, and shows a "Free Kurdistan" that also includes the south-east of Türkiye	Not official US policy; one writer's view. But the display of this map in a NATO training programme had caused a great reaction in Türkiye

The lesson that comes out of these texts is not a secret "master plan". The lesson is this: in US and Israeli ruling circles there is an open strategic tendency that finds it in its interest for the region to consist of weak, divided states in conflict with one another. This tendency is sometimes realised (the fragmentation of Iraq, the Syrian civil war, Libya) and sometimes fails. But these plans alone do not determine the fate of the region; the interests of local ruling classes, popular uprisings and the calculations of regional powers are at least as determining.

The CIA–Mossad relationship: documented events

The relationship between the two intelligence organisations has been a deep but tense partnership since the 1950s.

The 1950s, the founding period: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's legendary counter-intelligence chief, personally ran the Israel desk inside the agency. In 1956 Mossad obtained the text of Khrushchev's "secret speech" criticising Stalin and passed it to the CIA; this became one of the founding moments of the relationship.
The Lavon affair (1954): a cell that Israeli military intelligence set up in Egypt carried out bomb attacks on British and American targets, trying to pin the blame on Egyptians and to prevent the British withdrawal from Suez. The cell was caught. The affair led to a political crisis in Israel that lasted for years, and passed into history as a documented example of "false flag" operations.
The periphery doctrine and "Trident" (1958): Ben-Gurion developed a strategy of alliance with the non-Arab states surrounding the Arab world: Türkiye, the Shah's Iran and Ethiopia. In 1958 a secret cooperation called "Trident" was set up among the intelligence services of Israel, Türkiye and Iran. In this period Mossad also took part in the training of Iran's secret police, SAVAK. Türkiye's intelligence relationship with Israel, that is, goes back to the 1950s, the period of the Menderes government.
The relationship with the Kurdish movement: in the 1960s and 1970s Israel, together with Iran, gave military and intelligence support to the Kurdish movement in Iraq led by Barzani; the aim was to keep the Iraqi army occupied. When Iran and Iraq reached an agreement in 1975, this support was cut overnight and the Kurdish movement collapsed. This is a bitter lesson in how great powers use oppressed peoples as a "tool" and then abandon them.
Iran-Contra (1985–1986): the scandal in which the United States secretly sold arms, via Israel, to Iran under embargo, and transferred the proceeds to the Contras in Nicaragua. Israel acted as intermediary in the first stage of the arms shipments. It was documented by congressional investigations.
The Pollard espionage (1985): the capture of Jonathan Pollard, an analyst working in the US Navy, while spying for Israel showed that the two allies also spied on each other.
Stuxnet (2010): the computer worm that sabotaged Iran's uranium-enrichment centrifuges. According to the US press, especially The New York Times, it was the product of a joint US–Israeli operation code-named "Olympic Games". It is regarded as the first major cyber attack by one state on another state's infrastructure.
The 2020s: the killing in 2020, with a remote-controlled weapon, of Fakhrizadeh, the scientist at the head of Iran's nuclear programme; the simultaneous explosion in September 2024 of thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah; and the killing of Iran's religious leader in the war on Iran launched together with the United States in February 2026. These operations show a new form of war in which intelligence, technology and military power are intertwined.

Points that concern Türkiye

The Mavi Marmara (2010): ten people were killed in the raid, in international waters, on the flotilla carrying aid to Gaza. Relations froze for a long time; they were normalised in 2016 with a compensation agreement.
The Kürecik radar (2012): it was debated in Türkiye for a long time whether the data collected by the NATO early-warning radar installed at Kürecik in Malatya would also serve Israel's missile defence; this debate returned to the agenda in the Iran–Israel clashes of 2024–2026.
Trade and energy: despite the trade restrictions announced in May 2024, the flow of Azerbaijani oil to Israel via Ceyhan is the most concrete indicator of the difference between discourse and interest.
The capture of Öcalan (1999): the role of the United States is generally accepted; on the involvement of Israel or of Mossad there are claims and official denials. In matters of this kind, what is documented and what is claimed have to be separated.

Through a class window

Intelligence organisations are the most secret but the most "rational" apparatuses of class states. To understand what they do, one has to look not at hero films or conspiracy books, but at which capital, which energy line, which arms contract and which regional order is being protected. The relationship of Mossad and the CIA is born of the common interests of two states and two ruling classes; when those interests diverge, espionage scandals break out as well.

The language that says "Mossad is behind everything" is misleading twice over: it hides the role and the interests of the ruling classes in Türkiye and in the region in these processes (it was Türkiye that signed Trident; it is Türkiye that lets the oil flow from Ceyhan), and it disregards the peoples' own will. History is not written only at intelligence desks; it is also written in the streets, in the factories and at the ballot boxes.

Those Who Stand Against Nationalist Politics

In Israel the word "opposition" is misleading. The Eisenkot–Bennett–Lieberman bloc, which is the opposition on paper, does not hold a principle on the occupation and on nationalism different from the government's. We can gather those who really stand against it in five groups.

The parties of Arab/Palestinian citizens

Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality): a front whose core is the Israeli Communist Party (Maki), with Jewish and Arab members. In the Knesset since 1977. Today the leadership has passed from Ayman Odeh to Yousef Jabareen. Hadash is the only parliamentary force in Israel that writes Jewish–Arab workers' unity into its programme.
Ta'al (the Arab Movement for Change): a secular-nationalist party under the leadership of Ahmad Tibi.
Balad (the National Democratic Assembly): the party that argues Israel should be "a state of all its citizens" instead of the definition "a Jewish state". The candidacy of its leader, Sami Abu Shehadeh, was blocked in this election.
Ra'am (the United Arab List): the political extension of the southern branch of the Islamic Movement. Under Mansour Abbas's leadership it became, in 2021, the first Arab party to enter a government. In this election it placed a Jewish candidate (the former deputy minister of internal security, Yoav Segalovitz) in second place on its list for the first time.

What do they want?

Equal citizenship; the repeal of the Nation-State Law.
The state to act against the crime organisations ravaging the Arab towns: in 2026 only 12 per cent of the murders in Arab society were solved.
The budget, planning and housing problems of Arab municipalities to be solved; the Bedouin villages to be recognised.
An end to the war in Gaza, an end to the occupation, and an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders.
Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir to be removed from power.

Joint Jewish–Arab movements and the left

Omdim Beyahad (Standing Together): an organisation of Jewish and Arab activists that defines itself as a grassroots movement. It defends the demands of peace, equality and social justice together; it organised anti-war marches on the Gaza border, and organised "humanitarian guard" actions against settlers blocking aid convoys to Gaza. Its national co-director, Alon-Lee Green, was detained in anti-war actions.
Mesarvot (the refusers): a network supporting young people who refuse military service. There are young people of 18 and 19 who choose to enter military prison again and again instead of serving. In 2025 more than 1,000 former and serving pilots signed an open letter saying the war was being continued for political purposes (Al Jazeera / Yahoo).
Academia for Equality, Zochrot (the organisation that tells and recalls the Nakba in Hebrew), Ta'ayush (a Jewish–Arab partnership working together with Palestinian villagers in the West Bank).

What do they want? An immediate end to the war, an end to the occupation, the right to refuse military service, and a politics built on the common economic interest of Jewish and Arab workers.

Human rights organisations

B'Tselem: the organisation that documents human rights violations in the occupied territories. In 2021 it defined the Israeli regime as apartheid, and in 2025 it defined what was happening in Gaza as genocide.
Breaking the Silence: the organisation that collects the testimonies of soldiers who have served in the occupied territories.
Yesh Din, Peace Now (Shalom Achshav), Combatants for Peace, the Parents Circle (the joint organisation of Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost a child in the conflict).

What do they want? Compliance with international law, a halt to the settlements, the investigation of crimes, accountability.

The liberal-Zionist democracy movement

In 2023, against judicial reform, hundreds of thousands of people gathered every Saturday on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. This movement was the largest street movement in Israel's history. The hostage families' forum was also one of the most effective pressure groups against the government throughout the war.

What do they want? Judicial independence, Netanyahu's departure, a state commission of inquiry into 7 October, military service for the Haredim, the return of the hostages.

What is its limit? A large part of this movement does not question the formula of "a Jewish and democratic state"; it keeps the occupation and the rights of Palestinians outside the discussion of democracy. The "anti-occupation bloc" inside the movement, which tries to cross this limit, remained a minority. This is another form, in Israel, of the tension we discussed in the Serbia piece: the form of organising is advanced, the political content is limited.

Religious opponents and the diaspora

Anti-Zionist Haredi groups (small groups such as Neturei Karta) do not see the state as legitimate on religious grounds. The refusal of military service by a wide section of Haredi society rests on a different motivation, the wish to protect the closed structure of the community; this should not be confused with a progressive stance.
Diaspora Jewish movements: Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow in the United States, and similar organisations in Europe, were among those who organised the most massive actions against the Gaza war, saying "not in our name". These movements can be counted as today's heirs of the Bund's "doikayt" tradition: they look for Jewish safety not in a state's army but in equality and solidarity in the societies where they live.

A comparison: two kinds of "opposition"

The main opposition (Eisenkot–Bennett–Lieberman)	Those who really stand against it (Hadash, the Arab parties, the Jewish–Arab left, the refusers)
Let Netanyahu go, let us run the war more competently	Let the war stop, let the occupation end
The government is formed with a "Zionist majority"	The equal vote of all citizens is counted
A state commission of inquiry into 7 October	An independent investigation both of 7 October and of the destruction in Gaza
Market competition against monopolies	Public control of the monopolies and of the war economy, workers' rights
Military service for the Haredim	The right to refuse military service
A Palestinian state is not on the agenda	A Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, or equal citizenship in a single state
Leadership of army origin	A base of Jewish and Arab workers and youth

Our Class Position

Dear young comrades, when we look at Israel we have to avoid two mistakes.

The first mistake: reading Israel as "the state of the Jews" and identifying the Jewish people with Israel's ruling class. This is both contrary to the facts and opens the door directly to antisemitism. Inside Israel too there is a working class, poor Mizrahi neighbourhoods, oppressed Haredi women, exploited Thai agricultural workers, and young objectors who accept going to prison. One of the brightest pages of Jewish history is the internationalist legacy of the Bund and of the Yiddish labour movement.

The second mistake: reading the Palestine question as a fight between religions or between civilisations. The matter is not religious; it is a matter of land, labour and sovereignty: on whose land, with whose water, with whose labour, under whose control and for whose benefit an order is built. Let us apply Bilgi Müşterekleri's three questions here:

Question	Its answer in Israel
In whose hands?	Land, water and the technology infrastructure are in the hands of a narrow group of capital and army elites intertwined with the state
Under whose control?	Under the control of a state apparatus that half the population living from the river to the sea cannot reach with the right to vote, and of the United States that supports it
For whose benefit?	For the benefit of the defence industry, the settler economy, the global technology monopolies, and a ruling class that wants to integrate with Gulf capital

The lesson we should draw from this election is this: what can stand against nationalism is not another nationalism, but the unity of workers across national borders. The Arab voters who went to the ballot box in record numbers, and the Jewish leftists who stood with them, made the racial boundary of Israeli politics visible. This boundary cannot be crossed at the ballot box; it can be crossed only by common organising, by common unions, by a common struggle. The principle of the October Revolution, "the right of oppressed nations to self-determination", is a guide today as well: a people that oppresses another people cannot be free.

Concrete Tasks

Let us clean up the language. Let us openly reject, in our own circles, hatred of Jews, the discourse of a "Jewish conspiracy", and every expression that turns criticism of Israel onto the Jewish people. Let us teach the separation of criticism of Zionism from antisemitism.
Let us get to know the voices inside Israel, and translate them. Let us read sources such as +972 Magazine, B'Tselem, Omdim Beyahad and Mesarvot, and bring them into Turkish. Solidarity with Palestine also includes solidarity with the dissidents in Israel.
Let us ask the class of the technology. As information workers, let us investigate how the companies we work for, and the cloud and surveillance infrastructure we use, are used in the occupation and the war. The example of the workers at Google and at Microsoft shows that those who know the answer to this question best, and who can build the most effective pressure, are the people who work in those companies.
Let us follow Türkiye's relations. Despite the trade restrictions, let us document the relations that continue through pipelines, oil and indirect trade. Let us expose the difference between the discourse of governments and their practice.
Let us keep the export of arms and surveillance on the agenda. Let us follow which countries and which police forces the "battle-tested" surveillance technologies are sold to, Türkiye included.
Let us face our own nationalism as well. While opposing the discourse of a "Zionist majority" in Israel, let us oppose, with the same principle, every discourse in our own country that leaves a people's vote, language or existence out of the account in the name of "the majority". Consistency is the first condition of internationalism.

Closing

Dear young comrades,

A community that lived without a state for thousands of years stood by its mutual-aid funds, its common texts, its workers' organisations and its newspapers. The most advanced sections of this community, the workers of the Bund, the strikers of New York's garment workshops, the fighters of the European resistance, looked for liberation not in a state's army but in a togetherness built with all the oppressed. The Holocaust destroyed this world; the calculations of the great powers settled the survivors on another people's land. In that state's election today, two blocs, while wanting to bring each other down, unite on a single matter: not counting the vote of a people who are one fifth.

But another voice also came out of the ballot box. The old woman who walked to the polls in Umm al-Fahm, the young person keeping watch at the election office in Tel Aviv that was attacked, the young woman refuser serving her third term in a military prison, the Jewish and Arab youth marching on the Gaza border saying "no to the army, no to the occupation". This voice is still a minority. But history has taught us this: every majority was once a minority, and every wall is one day brought down from both sides at once.

For a better future, for a world in which everyone from the river to the sea lives equal, free and in safety, all together.

Sources

The election

Gaza, the West Bank, the region

Technology, arms, the economy

The Palestine laboratory, the Greater Middle East Project and intelligence (reports and documents)

Amnesty International, Automated Apartheid: How facial recognition fragments, segregates and controls Palestinians in the OPT (May 2023)
The Washington Post, report on the "Blue Wolf" surveillance system (November 2021)
Gisha, publication of the document "Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines" (2012)
+972 Magazine, the "Lavender" (April 2024) and "Gospel / Habsora" (November 2023) investigations
The Guardian, investigation into Unit 8200 storing Palestinians' phone calls on the Azure cloud (August 2025)
B'Tselem, A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid (January 2021); B'Tselem and PHRI, Our Genocide (July 2025)
Oded Yinon, "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties", Kivunim (1982)
IASPS, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (1996)
Ralph Peters, "Blood Borders", Armed Forces Journal (June 2006)
G8 Sea Island Summit, Broader Middle East and North Africa Partnership document (June 2004)
US Congress, Iran-Contra investigation report (1987)
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, "The Iron Wall" (1923)
UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 (1975) and its revocation, Resolution 46/86 (1991)

The opposition and the movements

History and theory (books)

Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1843)
Abram Leon, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (1946)
Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (1896)
Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)
Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory (2023)
Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-up Nation (2009), as the source of the "start-up nation" narrative, for a critical reading

Related pieces from Bilgi Müşterekleri

Bilgi Müşterekleri — Knowledge Belongs to Everyone. This piece is a living document. The election results will be updated with the final count on 4 November and with the course of the coalition talks. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Topics:Artificial Intelligence and Technology Law, State and Politics Labour and Organising World and Imperialism Surveillance and Digital Rights

Tags:#middleeast #elections #technocapitalism #racism #labour #class #surveillance #artificialintelligence #imperialism #usa #law