Ending the ‘racial contract’ in Israel/Palestine

Racism plays a huge role in how Israel is able to get away with apartheid and ethnic cleansing without facing major backlash from the international community. White supremacy is the political system that has shaped our world for hundreds of years, and this is why racism is not seriously examined or acknowledged by major world powers in the Global North.

Charles Mills, a political philosopher, theorized the notion of the racial contract. The racial contract is a heuristic tool in helping to understand the racialized context of Israel/Palestine. Mills has three claims within the racial contract that are useful. The first is the existential claim of white supremacy, the second is the conceptual claim of white supremacy being viewed as a political system, and the third is the methodological claim, white supremacy should be theorized as within a “contract” between white people, ergo, a racial contract.

Mills is useful in understanding Israeli apartheid because his racial contract is political, moral, epistemological, a historical actuality, as well as an exploitation contract that has created Global North economic domination and national white racial privilege. Israel’s existence and continued apartheid practices are sustained by the racial contract.

Global white supremacy and white supremacy in Israel

The existence of white supremacy is a historical actuality. Mills points to it being easily locatable in the process that created the modern world: European colonialism and slavery.

Through colonialization, the racial contract created a separation between ‘men’ and ‘natives’ where men are white and natives are nonwhite. In the context of Israel/Palestine, Israeli settlers are racialized as white, whereas the Palestinians are racialized as nonwhite. Most important here is not an actual color, but the power that comes with being considered white or nonwhite. According to Mills, “whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.”

As a settler-colonial state, Israel was founded on inequality and separate citizenship for Jewish people. Jewish citizens of Israel receive special privileges on the basis of their ethnic-religious identity. This power difference and privilege between Jewish and non-Jewish people living in Israel and Palestine is no coincidence. Palestinians, or the native, seen as a nonwhite racial polity, are instead viewed as a threat and a security hazard by the state.

White supremacy in Israel manifests itself in international politics as well as domestic politics. On the international scale, Israel has had ties to white supremacist groups such as apartheid South Africa’s Nationalist party, and white supremacist leaders including Richard Spencer and Donald Trump in the US.

Domestically, the plight of Ethiopian Jews highlights the intense racism that exists within the state of Israel, even despite the privilege of being Jewish. Whiteness is prioritized over one’s Jewishness, giving more privilege to white Jews.

Additionally, Mizrahi Jews face intense discrimination for being of Middle Eastern heritage. Israel’s Ashkenazi Jews, those of European origin, are those with the most sociopolitical privilege and therefore power. In both these instances, color does come in to play since Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahi Jews are not deemed as fully white within Israel.

The political system

Israel is often lauded as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ when in reality Israel is far from being a democracy. There also exists the racist trope that Israel just happens to be in a ‘tough neighborhood’ which justifies their violent occupation and apartheid practices.

Although the conflict has long predated 9/11, Palestinians, as Arabs, have been racialized as nonwhite. Palestinians are portrayed as ‘the other’ and along those lines, terrorists in today’s political and ideological framings.

Palestinians who resist discrimination, occupation and apartheid in ways that cannot be classified in the terms“nonviolent” or “peaceful” are labeled terrorists and are not seen as legitimate. 

Israel is able to remain the victim through the racial contract, despite their military campaigns to wipe out entire villages and destroy land, water, and agriculture. Israel is seen as the white, civilized society that embraces modernity that is expected to fight to protect itself against uncivilized, barbaric terrorists.

Within this narrative, the reasons why Palestinians resist is never asked or considered. It is automatically assumed that as nonwhites, they are acting irrationally or simply because they hate the racialized white people, or Jewish Israelis.

Settler-colonies         

The racial contract is a heuristic tool in analyzing settler-colonies. In settler-colonies, such as Israel, the United States, Canada, and Australia, people who are considered people are white people. The contract is not between every person in the society, but every white person. The racial contract is between those categorized as white over nonwhites. Nonwhites become the objects, and not the subjects of the contract.

White settler colonies were all founded on similar policies of the extermination, displacement, and herding of native populations on to some type of reservation. In these white settler-states, Mills asserts that space is oftentimes represented as empty and unoccupied, essentially virgin territory.

Natives to the land are not counted as human because they are viewed as obstacles to development and incapable of development themselves. Extermination, or at least the moving away of the indigenous population, is necessary for the success of the settler-colonial state.

This logic is evident in the early Zionist movement’s propaganda campaigns. Zionism claimed all the land of Palestine and created a myth of indigeneity. The propaganda campaigns were meant to encourage Jewish settlers to come to Palestine to nourish the ‘unoccupied lands’ that needed to be cultivated, that were actually very much occupied.

Indigenous Palestinians’ invisibility, as human beings and as political and social claims-makers, is greatly exemplified in British-born playwright Israel Zangwill’s famous slogan, describing Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land.”

Mills brilliantly explains the racial contract’s ability to link space with race and race with personhood. He asserts in his work that “where indigenous peoples were permitted to survive, they were denied full or any membership in the political community, thus becoming foreigners in their own country.” One can see this play out in Israel, where Palestinians are not given the same legal rights or status as Jewish Israelis.

Enforcing the racial contract through coercion

In order to establish itself as a state and later to reproduce itself, a state steeped in the racial contract such as Israel relies on two weapons of coercion: physical violence and ideological conditioning. Physical violence is overt in Israel’s air strikes, shelling, detainment, torture, home demolitions, and unlawful murders of Palestinians.

Official state violence is sanctioned by the racial contract. Israel is able to use its police, the penal system, and its army as enforcers. The enforcers work to supposedly ‘keep the peace’ while maintaining the racial order and surveilling those who are deemed nonwhite. This helps explain Israel’s tradition of detaining Palestinian prisoners without legal reason or trial.

Ideological conditioning comes from the racial contract’s victims being turned into subhuman objects. Those who benefit from the racial contract, white people, (Israelis), get to look at Palestinians as “nonwhite sub persons.” Through the use of unjust laws, illegal occupation and apartheid, these systems all aid in making Palestinians accept their subhuman-ness within the racial contract.

The way forward

It is brutally obvious that there is necessary work to be done to end white supremacy, the racial contract, and thus Israeli apartheid. While Mills does not provide us with a way to upend the racial contract, he does say that there is huge importance in learning and teaching the reality that the racial contract produces. 

Mills advises us that:

“those who pretend not to see them, who claim to not recognize the picture I have sketched, are only continuing the epistemology of ignorance required by the original Racial Contract. As long as this studied ignorance persists, the Racial Contract will only be rewritten, rather than being torn up altogether.”

To move forward, to tear up the racial contract, the beneficiaries of the racial contract must do more to question their role, education, and rights given to them. Justice must be extended to all victims of the racial contract. This includes Palestinians.