And in the 60th year of Israel’s occupation.
JVL Introduction
We have entered the 60th year of Israeli’s brutal occupation and, writes Michael Sfard, “We have now entered the last year of the worst decade in the history of the occupation. A decade of pogroms and Jewish terror, enjoying political backing, public funding and various degrees of official cooperation by security forces. A decade of rampaging apartheid, official and unmasked, implemented by tens of thousands of Israelis, all of whom are accomplices to a crime against humanity.”
There is a racism endemic in most of Israeli society and not just the Kahanists but those who consider themselves to be “liberal” still too often do not see Palestinians as equal human beings to themselves. This enables ethnic cleansing to continue apace, alomg with the genocide with over 900 Palestinians in Gaza killed by Israel since the “ceasefire”. Within Israel there is also a turning inwards, attacking leftists and even those who simply want to lift the boot from Palestinians’ necks. Something has to change; voting out this far right government will be an important start but much more will be needed.
This article was originally published by Ha'aretz on Wed 10 Jun 2026. Read the original here.
Welcome to the 60th Year of Israel's Occupation of the West Bank
After 59 years of occupation, apartheid and Jewish terror, it’s obvious that, as with mold – plastering or a government of change will not uproot the blight without treating the root cause: racism
According to the human rights group B’Tselem, 24 Palestinian communities were completely uprooted and forcibly transferred from their place of residence in the 59th year of the occupation. Another 11 communities were partly displaced. 489 families, consisting of 2,700 individuals, lost their homes, their communities, their place on this earth. Jews in masks and Jews in uniform united their forces in evil in order to make 1,300 minors homeless. And this was only in the West Bank. In the 59th year of the occupation, the Israel Defense Forces demolished tens of thousands of structures in the Gaza Strip, thus destroying the living space of hundreds of thousands of Gazans.
Congratulations. The occupation commences its 60th year. What a lousy age, not young by any standard anymore, but also not yet retirement age. It only indicates that time is passing and that what was meant to be a temporary deviation from the sacred principle that people are entitled to participate in the decision-making processes that govern their lives was exploited to launch a storm of crimes against them.
We have now entered the last year of the worst decade in the history of the occupation. A decade of pogroms and Jewish terror, enjoying political backing, public funding and various degrees of official cooperation by security forces. A decade of rampaging apartheid, official and unmasked, implemented by tens of thousands of Israelis, all of whom are accomplices to a crime against humanity. This was mainly a decade in which, following a horrific and unforgivable massacre committed against us, we embarked on a dreadful war of annihilation, no less unforgivable, in which we stooped to a blood-chilling moral abyss, which painfully made us resemble those who persecuted and killed us throughout history.
Truth be told, there is nothing left to say. For almost two decades, I’ve been publishing articles in Haaretz ahead of the anniversary of the war, which made us occupiers of millions of people who lack any citizenship or political rights, people who are entirely dependent on our grace. For almost two decades, I searched every year for words, I struggled hard to be precise in using the most appropriate concepts, I was trying with language to break through the wall of indifference and Israeli cruelty. But it’s not working, at least not yet.
It’s difficult to keep running away from the unbearable conclusion, from the unavoidable insight that no matter how we turn the indifference, in the rotten basis of this wall, there is, let’s call a spade a spade, racism. A suffering Palestinian child just doesn’t do it for most Israelis. That’s why even the most “liberal” news program in Israeli media will have no interest in it (I put the word liberal in quotation marks since this term has been twisted in Israeli discourse, and if Yair “I’m a Zionist and a patriot not a leftist” Lapid is a liberal, then apparently, I didn’t understand a thing when I learned about liberalism at university).
Yes, no matter how we turn and how much we blame the conflict, terrorism and violent attacks on us, honesty obliges us to admit: naked, distilled racism, the concept of our supremacy and their inferiority, has spread through our bodies, residing everywhere. We (as a collective, obviously this is a generalization), do not see those who are not Jewish as our equals. We don’t consider a community that was uprooted from a wadi on the desert’s edge, with their pathetic belongings and strange clothes, as human beings equal to us. As people who deserve happiness no less than we do.
And I’m not talking about the Kahanists. I’m talking about those who perceive themselves as liberals, about journalists and jurists and high-tech people and politicians, including those in the “center” and “center-left.” How much does Israeli society really care? How much does it truly feel the pain of what is happening to the Ein Samiya and Ein Auja and Umm al Khair communities, as well as dozens of other communities in which the Jewish state, directly or through emissaries, beats, terrorizes, and dispossesses helpless Palestinians? Yes, once in a while, there’s a shock over the latest footage of Jewish terror, but this is a temporary interruption that leads to no deep reflection or accounting, no Tikun. It is a performance of shock, a ceremony meant to preserve one’s self-image, a correction of smeared makeup.
But during this decade, something else happened: The impulse of oppression has spread and has begun attacking inward. And all of a sudden, Jewish Israelis have also found themselves in the crosshairs and as targets of consolidation of power, of a process aimed at depriving them of their rights, of a dictatorship in the making. Being Arab is bad, but it turns out that being a leftist (or what the deep right wing labels as “leftist”) is also bad. Palestinians are the enemy, but so are the leaders of supremacy, determined, the Jews who wish to remove the military boot from the Palestinians’ neck. And so, the rivers of the occupation are the sources that fill the lakes of the constitutional coup, and the day when weapons that, today, West Bank farm outposts sheriffs are aiming at their Palestinian neighbors will be directed at their domestic political rivals, is not far.
Like dampness and mildew, no plaster or paint and no ‘government of change’ will uproot this scourge without addressing it at the source of our regime violence: the worldview of Jewish supremacy, the axiom that we’re eternally on the side of justice and a refusal to fully recognize the rights of the others living here.
The election has to be won and the Kahanist government must be removed from office. That’s a necessary condition for a future that isn’t the bleakest of darknesses. But we also need to realize that, although it’s a necessary condition, it is far from a sufficient one.
Welcome to the 60th year of the occupation.
Michael Sfard is a human rights lawyer who represents human rights organizations, Palestinian communities and Israeli and Palestinian activists.
Michael Sfard is a brave writer of powerful words and Haaretz is equal to the task of publishing those words. I hope to keep reading those words as they begin the journey to a resolution when
— We see those who are not Jewish as our equals. We consider a community from a wadi on the desert’s edge, with their belongings and strange clothes, as human beings equal to us. As people who deserve happiness no less than we do.—
Michael Sfard’s ongoing, lonely fight in Israel to uphold justice and humanity against near overwhelming odds puts him high amongst the heroes of humankind, in my view.
We MIGHT be closer to a “new Dawn” than now seems possible. Alistair Crooke, the retired UK diplomat, said in a recent Chris Hedges Report top-level Israelis were considering the abandonment of “expansionism” because they feared it was putting Israel’s survival (economic, military, political and demographic) at risk.
An Israel driven by self-interest to end its war mongering and its abuses of human rights will need to CONVINCE an angry, sceptical world it’s changed.