Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappé, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, Oren Yiftachel, and the Politics of Analytical Honesty
“If we use the term white supremacy and male supremacy, but refuse to use the term Jewish supremacy, then we are not being careful—we are being dishonest.”¹ (Prof. Norman Finkelstein)
The destruction of Gaza marked a political and moral rupture. Tens of thousands of Palestinians—disproportionately women and children—were killed; entire neighborhoods were erased; starvation was openly deployed as a weapon. In the aftermath, familiar evasions collapsed. “Security,” “self-defense,” and “tragic necessity” proved incapable of explaining a campaign so systematic and so indifferent to civilian life. What Gaza exposed was not merely a military crime, but an ideology of domination that had long been present yet rarely named.
It is in this context that Professor Norman Finkelstein’s insistence on the term “Jewish supremacism” becomes unavoidable. For Finkelstein, Gaza stripped away the last excuse for linguistic caution. After such devastation, euphemism is no longer neutrality—it is complicity.
Finkelstein’s argument is straightforward. If political analysis freely uses terms such as white supremacy or male supremacy to describe systems of structural domination, then intellectual honesty requires the same clarity when Jewish identity is elevated into a framework of legal, political, and moral superiority.
Supremacism as Structure, Not Slur
The debate is not about rhetoric but diagnosis. Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law declares that the right to national self-determination belongs exclusively to Jews, downgrades Arabic, and elevates Jewish settlement as a constitutional value. For Finkelstein, this removes all ambiguity.
“Jewish supremacy is not implicit in Israeli law. It is explicit.”²
Gaza revealed how such hierarchy translates into practice. When a population is legally subordinate, its destruction can be rationalized. Siege becomes policy. Starvation becomes leverage. Civilian death becomes background noise.
Finkelstein rejects liberal euphemisms—ethnocracy, illiberal democracy, security state—because they soften what must be confronted.
“Supremacy means one group has superior rights by virtue of identity. If that is not the case here, then words have no meaning.”³
The Double Standard of Language
Why is the term resisted? Finkelstein locates the answer in exceptionalism. Supremacy is condemned everywhere except where accusations of antisemitism are used to foreclose analysis.
“If every criticism of Jewish power is antisemitism, then antisemitism becomes meaningless—and injustice becomes untouchable.”⁴
This does not protect Jews. It shields power.
Gideon Levy: Naming the Regime
Few Israeli journalists have been as direct as Gideon Levy. Writing in Haaretz, Levy has repeatedly insisted that between the river and the sea there exists a single governing principle:
“Israel today is a regime of Jewish supremacy. One people has rights; another lives without them.”⁵
For Levy, Gaza is not an aberration but the extreme expression of a system that has long denied Palestinians equality and life itself.
Amira Hass: Supremacy as Daily Practice
Amira Hass, whose reporting is grounded in decades of lived experience among Palestinians, describes Jewish supremacy not as abstraction but as routine administration—permits, closures, land law, and military rule.
“The superiority granted to Jews is the organizing principle of the regime.”⁶
Gaza represents what happens when this principle operates without restraint or political cost.
Ilan Pappé: From Nationalism to Supremacism
Historian Ilan Pappé situates Jewish supremacism within Zionism’s historical trajectory. What began as ethnic nationalism hardened, he argues, into a regime sustained by expulsion, segregation, and force.
“Zionism has evolved into a system of Jewish supremacy maintained through violence and law.”⁷
For Pappé, Gaza is inseparable from this evolution. The logic of the Nakba did not disappear; it matured.
Oren Yiftachel: Crossing the Threshold
Political geographer Oren Yiftachel, long associated with the concept of “ethnocracy,” argues that the post-2018 legal order marks a qualitative shift.
“Israel has crossed from ethnic dominance into explicit Jewish supremacy.”⁸
Gaza, in this reading, is a laboratory of unrestrained supremacist power.
After Gaza, Euphemism Is Complicity
What distinguishes the post-Gaza moment is not only the scale of death, but the collapse of plausible denial. When children are killed by the thousands and starvation is deliberate, refusing to name the governing ideology becomes a political act.
As Finkelstein puts it:
“You cannot oppose the crimes while refusing to name the creed that makes them possible.”⁹
Conclusion: The Ethics of Naming
“Jewish supremacism” is not an insult. It is an analytical term, no different in principle from white or male supremacy. It names a system in which rights, dignity, and life are allocated and decided by identity, by religion & ethnicity.
After Gaza, the stakes of language are no longer academic. Either supremacy is wrong everywhere—or nowhere. To refuse the term now is not caution. It is evasion.
And evasion, after genocide, is a silence history will remember.
Feroze Mithiborwala is an expert on West Asian & International Geostrategic issues. He is the Founder-Gen. Sec. of the India Palestine Solidarity Forum. He was among the key organisers of the First Asian Convoy to Break the Siege of Gaza (2010) and the First Global March to Jerusalem (2012). He is also the Vice-President of Hum Bharat Ke Log, an organisation committed to Communal Harmony, National Unity and a Constitutional Democracy.
Footnotes & References
1. Norman Finkelstein, lectures and interviews on Israel’s Nation-State Law, 2019–2021; The Grayzone interview; university talks.
2. Israel, Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People (2018).
3. Norman Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much (OR Books); public lectures on power and law.
4. Norman Finkelstein, commentary on antisemitism and political language, 2020–2024.
5. Gideon Levy, Haaretz, columns on apartheid and Jewish supremacy, 2020–2024.
6. Amira Hass, Haaretz, reporting on occupation and structural inequality.
7. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; lectures and interviews, 2019–2023.
8. Oren Yiftachel, academic writings on ethnocracy and post-Nation-State Law Israel.
9. Norman Finkelstein, commentary on Gaza and international accountability, 2023–2024.
