Mitri Raheb’s latest book is a provocative examination of how the Bible has been used to support Israeli settler colonialism. “The land of Palestine is colonized by the use of military hardware that is justified by theological software,” he writes.

Israel’s settler-colonial ideological mission not only impacts Palestinians but prevents the country from being a democracy for Jews as well.

The Palestinian call for BDS is a challenge to colonial infrastructures of knowledge and an invitation to help remake them. This challenge is central to our work as anthropologists in moving past colonial social science.

In the West Bank there is “apartheid by design,” two laws for two peoples, as the Amnesty report says. But inside Israel the situation is more complex, where Palestinians participate in non-segregated institutions, Tony Klug argues. “The Amnesty report calls for an end to apartheid, but absurdly does not call for an end to occupation. Yet the paramount need now is for a worldwide campaign to end the occupation.”

Israel has escaped accountability for apartheid because its friends have wielded the antisemitism charge against critics. But the Amnesty International report is a sharp blow to that strategy. Now global civil society is likely to become the major factor of changing the status of Zionism internationally.