This multipronged process of depopulation, fragmentation, and minoritization amounts to political and cultural violence. ![]() Those living within the boundaries of “Israel proper” (or the territories associated with the Armistice or “ Green Line” of 1949) became a “minority,” and those living in the Occupied Territories of 1967 became subjects of a military regime (the Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem have “residency” status, which is revocable, and Palestinians in Gaza have been under blockade for over sixteen years). Majoritization of Jewsīy creating the category of the “Palestinian citizen of Israel” and establishing a bureaucratic regime of identification cards, Israel effectively fragmented Palestinians. This project has relied on settler-colonial violence framed as a redemptive “return” to the Land of Zion. From its inception in Europe, where Jews as minorities were the target of genocide, Zionism was a movement to create a Jewish-majority polity in Palestine. ![]() Israel’s case exposes what is often concealed in discussions about minorities-namely, the violence that creates minority groups and how their political grievances and visions are diminished when minorities are viewed as “religious” or “cultural.” Scholars and analysts of Israeli society produce knowledge on Israeli “Arab minorities” (they deploy the generic “Arab” rather than the specific identification as Palestinian) in abstraction, as if their minority status were an unproblematic given, such as flora and fauna, rather than the product of violent processes of minoritization. How Jews became a majority or majoritized in Israel/Palestine is central to the story of “minority rights” or the minoritization of Palestinians. This coalition targets Palestinian minorities (Christians, Muslims, and others), pursues an annexationist agenda (intent on annexing the territories occupied in 1967), and advocates conservative sexual politics framed as “Jewish.” This essay examines the blinders operative in constructing the Palestinian citizens of Israel as minorities, or as the “Arab sector,” and how these blinders have enabled spinning a Jewish Zionist supremacist regime as “Jewish and democratic.” In the early months of 2023, Jewish Israelis flooded the streets of Israel in a massive display of civil disobedience to save their “Jewish democracy.” They referred to the crumbling of democratic checks and balances as a “judicial coup” engineered by an extremist coalition that came to power in the Knesset at the end of 2022.
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