Jayapal might not have said that Israel is a “racist state” if not for her politician’s instinct to talk down protesters by presenting herself as being on their side. But what serious argument can be made that IsraelSeveral hundred thousand Palestinians were driven out of the country during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence—a process that it’s hard to coherently describe without using terms like “ethnic cleansing.
In 1993, Bill Clinton became the first American president to implicitly recognize the legitimacy of at leastPalestinian complaints by hosting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat at the White House to sign the Oslo Peace Accords. The plan—officially, according to the prime minister—is for these people to continue to be subject to military rather than civilian law, continue to be denied the right to vote in Israeli elections, and never get a state of their own. What else could you call that but apartheid?Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jew.