10.07.25
Editorial Note
Professor Asad Ghanem, a political scientist at the University of Haifa, was the topic of a recent article in Wattan, an Egyptian daily newspaper. The article titled
“Ass’ad Ghanem: Israel’s Genocidal War on Gaza Is Rooted in Deep Structural Shifts,” discusses his lecture in Nazareth about his new book, “Gaza: An Entry to the Prolonged War.” He talked about Israel’s “genocidal war on Gaza” and emphasized that “Israel bears primary responsibility, though Palestinians also share part of the burden.”
Ghanem explores the structural causes behind the “war of genocide and ethnic cleansing,” attributing them to “long-brewing changes in Israeli society.” In his view, “This barbaric war would not have happened without deep changes in both societies: the rise of fascism and extremism in Israel and the collapse of the Palestinian national liberation movement, as well as the internal division between the West Bank and Gaza.” Ghanem warned that “this existential war targets not just Gaza but also the occupied West Bank—through settler violence, forced displacement, and systematic Judaization.” He noted that “this existential war also affects Palestinian citizens of Israel, seen in the ethnic cleansing of Bedouins in the Naqab, their marginalization, and the silent encouragement of emigration through state-enabled criminal violence and systemic pressure.”
Ghanem describes Israel as an “increasingly right-wing and violent state that no longer fears Western criticism.” He argues that “post-October 7, Israel has shown daily willingness to commit massacres in the name of vengeance and strategic control—working to establish a Jewish state from the river to the sea through apartheid, the erasure of equal citizenship, and the elimination of the two-state solution.”
For Ghanem, “Hamas’s October 7 attack must be seen in the context of internal Palestinian competition without any unified national framework or consensus. Palestinians are not just passive victims but have also contributed to their current crisis through fragmentation.” Gaza “has been abandoned—not just by Arab regimes but by other Palestinians.” For him, “Palestinians, even amid genocide, have failed to reach a national consensus on how to respond.”
According to Ghanem, “Hamas launched the Al-Aqsa Flood operation without sufficient strategic foresight, while the Palestinian Authority has failed to protect its people. Both have isolated Gaza.” Ghanem “criticizes Arab states for prioritizing their own national interests over the Palestinian cause.”
Ghanem believes that the “Palestinians now face a more existential threat than even the Nakba of 1948… [The current war] is placing all Palestinian projects at risk amid the broader colonial and apartheid agenda.” The urgent task, he stresses, is “for Palestinians to agree on a unifying vision to confront this strategic threat, including a radical shift in resistance strategies.”
Recently, Ghanem also co-authored an article titled “The Other War on Palestinians: How Israel Scapegoats Its Arab Citizens,” together with Basel Khalaily, a graduate student in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, on the pages of Foreign Affairs in April 2025. They discussed the fate of Palestinian citizens of Israel since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. They stated that “since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, their place in Israeli society has become increasingly untenable. As Jewish Israelis have lurched further to the right, their Palestinian fellow citizens have faced unprecedented levels of persecution and abuse from an Israeli government that includes overt Jewish supremacists.”
For Ghanem and Khalaily, Israeli universities, “which market themselves as liberal institutions dedicated to equality and diversity and in some cases have partnerships with Western universities, monitored their Palestinian students, suspending some from their courses and, in a few cases, even filing police complaints against them for expressing their opposition to the war or solidarity with Gazans under Israeli bombardment. Israeli high academic institutions have punished 160 Palestinian students for antiwar social media posts, including by suspending or expelling some, but have disciplined few, if any Jewish Israeli students for racism against Palestinians. The targeting of Palestinian citizens of Israel has not been limited to students: in March 2024, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suspended the Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian after she accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, comments for which she was arrested and detained; the university then pressured her to resign.”
The authors claim, “Jewish Israelis are increasingly rejecting the uneasy coexistence of pre–October 7. Israeli society, leading to more explicit calls to revoke the citizenship of Palestinian citizens and expel them from Israel. This turn has made it even more difficult for Palestinian political parties to operate within Israeli politics, where they already faced significant constraints.” For the authors, “the rights of Palestinian citizens will not truly be protected until Israel becomes a democracy for all its citizens.”
According to the authors, the war in October 2023 prompted the Israeli government to launch “an unprecedented campaign of persecution and intimidation against Palestinian citizens of Israel, seen as a ‘fifth column’ of internal enemies who threatened the safety of Jewish Israelis.”
For the authors, Israeli public officials “issued calls for the surveillance and, in some cases, expulsion of Palestinian citizens.” And that Israel Police “declared a total ban on antiwar protests in Arab towns and villages in Israel. The prohibition, which did not apply to Jewish Israelis, remained in effect until March 2024.” The Israeli police “began monitoring the social media accounts of Palestinian citizens for expressions of sympathy for the suffering of Gazans, as well as what it deemed to be support for Hamas. The dragnet ensnared hundreds of Palestinian citizens, particularly activists and social media influencers targeted by the newly created Task Force for Monitoring Incitement Online… in order to track down critics of the official Israeli position on the war.”
For Ghanem and Khalaily, the Israeli government “seized the opportunity to advance its vision for an Israel free of Palestinians. It has used the pretext of the state of emergency to enact new antidemocratic and anti-Arab laws targeting the citizenship of Palestinian Israelis. A law passed in November 2023 grants Israeli authorities the power to revoke the citizenship of and deport relatives of those convicted of committing or supporting terrorism, charges that are almost exclusively applied to Palestinians.”
The authors ended by stating, that the Palestinian citizens of Israel, “will not find lasting justice until Israel ends its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, recognizes the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, and transforms from a hollow democracy built on Jewish supremacy to a genuine liberal democracy that serves all its citizens equally.”
Ghanem is a veteran Palestinian activist with very negative views about Israeli democracy, even though he has enjoyed complete academic freedom as a full professor at the University of Haifa.
Ghanem’s lack of criticism of Hamas shows he is morally corrupt.
He has used his position to claim “Israel is an apartheid state” and that the war with Hamas is a “genocidal” war. This perception raises questions about his academic neutrality; his books have been published by highly respectable presses, including Cambridge University Press and Routledge.
As noted, his co-authored article was published by Foreign Affairs, arguably the most prestigious and influential journal in international relations and foreign policy, published by the Council on Foreign Relations. It is widely read by U.S. and international government officials, diplomats, defense and intelligence professionals, academics, think tank experts, business leaders, and military experts.
Ghanem’s views have also been picked up by Arab language media, including Al Jazeera. More troubling from an Israeli perspective, he has been featured by the vast public relations enterprise of the Islamic Republic of Iran, including specialized pro-Palestinian forums.
Ghanem delegitimizes Israel by framing it as an “ethnic democracy” rooted in settler colonialism, rather than a legitimate nation-state, and by advocating for a one-state model that would dissolve its Jewish national character. Through his academic and media work, he presents Zionism as inherently racist, aligning Israel with global systems of oppression such as apartheid and genocide. There is a striking irony in the fact that Ghanem’s critiques are not only tolerated but openly published and debated within the very academic and civic institutions of the state he so vehemently condemns. It is equally noteworthy that the academic freedom and civil liberties Ghanem enjoys in Israel—including his ability to criticize the state harshly—are freedoms he would not be granted in Arab countries, where such dissent is often met with censorship, persecution, or imprisonment.
REFERENCES:
Ass’ad Ghanem: Israel’s Genocidal War on Gaza Is Rooted in Deep Structural Shifts
In his new book “Gaza: An Entry to the Prolonged War”, political scientist Ass’ad Ghanem examines how internal Israeli and Palestinian transformations made genocide possible—and why the war is likely to continue for years.
July 3, 2025
Professor Ass’ad Ghanem’
Watan-Professor Ass’ad Ghanem, a political scientist at the University of Haifa (inside the 1948 territories), argues that Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza cannot be understood without examining the deep internal transformations on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides over recent decades. He emphasizes that Israel bears primary responsibility, though Palestinians also share part of the burden.
Speaking during a lecture in Nazareth based on his new book “Gaza: An Entry to the Prolonged War”, Ghanem delved into the structural causes behind the war of genocide and ethnic cleansing, attributing them to long-brewing changes in Israeli society that culminated before October 7. He believes the war is far from over, as reflected in the book’s title, and insists that fire must cease at all costs to ensure the survival of Gaza and its people.
He argued:“This barbaric war would not have happened without deep changes in both societies: the rise of fascism and extremism in Israel and the collapse of the Palestinian national liberation movement, as well as the internal division between the West Bank and Gaza.”
Ghanem warns that this existential war targets not just Gaza but also the occupied West Bank—through settler violence, forced displacement, and systematic Judaization. He noted that ten ministers from the Likud party recently demanded Netanyahu impose full Israeli sovereignty by the end of the month.
He added that this existential war also affects Palestinian citizens of Israel, seen in the ethnic cleansing of Bedouins in the Naqab, their marginalization, and the silent encouragement of emigration through state-enabled criminal violence and systemic pressure.
Professor Ass’ad Ghanem’s new book explores the deep structural shifts in Israeli and Palestinian societies behind the Gaza genocide
Fascist State and Strategic Shift
Ghanem describes Israel as an increasingly right-wing and violent state that no longer fears Western criticism. He argues that post-October 7, Israel has shown daily willingness to commit massacres in the name of vengeance and strategic control—working to establish a Jewish state from the river to the sea through apartheid, the erasure of equal citizenship, and the elimination of the two-state solution.
He warns that the ideological shift in Israel is not just a drift to the right, but a full-blown fascist transformation. Ghanem points to the recent exclusion of Arab MP Ayman Odeh from the Knesset—with support from center-left figures like Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid—as indicative of Israel’s radical shift.
He concludes:“There is no partner for Palestinians in the Israeli left, which is itself intimidated by the dominant Zionist right. Netanyahu’s far-right bloc—along with Smotrich and Ben Gvir—believes in crushing Palestinians by force. Contrary to many analyses, Netanyahu will not fall. He’s one of the most dangerous prime ministers Israel and the region have ever seen—more influential than even Menachem Begin.”
Palestinian Role and National Collapse
Ghanem also highlights the collapse of the Palestinian national movement, noting two key consequences:
- Hamas’s October 7 attack must be seen in the context of internal Palestinian competition without any unified national framework or consensus.
- Palestinians are not just passive victims but have also contributed to their current crisis through fragmentation. Gaza, he asserts, has been abandoned—not just by Arab regimes but by other Palestinians.
He argues that Palestinians, even amid genocide, have failed to reach a national consensus on how to respond.
According to Ghanem, Hamas launched the Al-Aqsa Flood operation without sufficient strategic foresight, while the Palestinian Authority has failed to protect its people. Both have isolated Gaza. He criticizes Arab states for prioritizing their own national interests over the Palestinian cause.
He asks:“What have Palestinians gained from the Al-Aqsa Flood, given the immense sacrifices? Hamas, nearly two years later, is now calling for an end to the war and an Israeli withdrawal.”
Ghanem concludes that both armed struggle and negotiations have reached dead ends, predicting a long, unresolved conflict and the emergence of a de facto one-state reality.
Hamas
A Historic Moment of Existential Danger
Ghanem believes that Palestinians now face a more existential threat than even the Nakba of 1948. The war, he says, is placing all Palestinian projects at risk amid the broader colonial and apartheid agenda.
The urgent task, he stresses, is for Palestinians to agree on a unifying vision to confront this strategic threat, including a radical shift in resistance strategies.
Arab Citizens of Israel
Ghanem criticizes the political leadership of Palestinians inside Israel for failing to respond morally and nationally to the Gaza war. He argues that they must defend themselves and their future by holding onto citizenship, resilience, and organization.
He advocates for the revival of positive steadfastness—not just survival, but community building and unity, drawing inspiration from the 1950s–70s within Israel and the West Bank.
He proposes structural reform of the High Follow-Up Committee inside Israel and greater Palestinian coordination overall, urging a grassroots strategy of building institutions and communal strength rather than waiting for a final solution.
In his final reflections, Ghanem suggests that the historic confrontation with Zionism has entered a new strategic phase—armed struggle has collapsed, negotiations have failed, and only a one-state reality looms ahead with no near solution in sight.
The book, written months before and published just one year into the war, represents a bold intellectual endeavor by an engaged scholar who bridges theory and activism in the Palestinian public sphere.
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The Other War on Palestinians
How Israel Scapegoats Its Arab Citizens
Asad Ghanem and Basel Khalaily
April 9, 2025
ASAD GHANEM is Professor of Political Science at the University of Haifa.
BASEL KHALAILY is a graduate student in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter.
Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli war on Gaza, the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories has rightfully attracted the attention of observers in the Middle East and beyond. Lost in these discussions, however, is the fate of Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 16 percent of the total Palestinian population and around 20 percent of Israel’s population. They occupy a unique position in Israeli society. By virtue of their Israeli citizenship, they enjoy more rights than Palestinians in the occupied territories. But because of their Palestinian identity, they are confined to second-class citizenship by laws enshrining the country’s Jewish character and by discriminatory practices intended to prevent them from achieving equality with Jewish Israelis.
Palestinian citizens of Israel have always endured de jure and de facto discrimination, living in largely segregated communities with limited access to state resources. Their political parties have navigated the limits of participation in a system built on the ethnopolitical supremacy of Jewish Israelis, advocating in the Knesset for equality, civil rights, and greater government investment in Arab communities. But since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, their place in Israeli society has become increasingly untenable. As Jewish Israelis have lurched further to the right, their Palestinian fellow citizens have faced unprecedented levels of persecution and abuse from an Israeli government that includes overt Jewish supremacists. Jewish Israelis are increasingly rejecting the uneasy coexistence of pre–October 7 Israeli society, leading to more explicit calls to revoke the citizenship of Palestinian citizens and expel them from Israel. This turn has made it even more difficult for Palestinian political parties to operate within Israeli politics, where they already faced significant constraints.
The current Israeli government and its far-right supporters among Jewish Israelis have a clear intention: to subject Palestinian citizens of Israel, to the extent possible, to a version of the apartheid-style oppression that Palestinians face in the West Bank and Gaza. Only a shared effort by international institutions, Arab countries, Palestinians inside and outside Israel, and Jewish Israelis committed to equality will be able to pressure Israel to uphold its commitments to civil, political, and legal equality. Ultimately, however, the rights of Palestinian citizens will not truly be protected until Israel becomes a democracy for all its citizens.
SAME AS IT EVER WAS
In recent decades, despite the backdrop of increasing suppression by the Israeli government following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to government in 2009, Palestinian citizens of Israel had made meaningful if incomplete progress: reducing the earnings gap with Jewish Israelis, fighting to address the systemic underfunding of Arab communities, and becoming a powerful force in the Knesset following the creation of the Joint List, a bloc of the four main Arab parties, in 2015. But these successes were short-lived.
The Joint List attempted to integrate more deeply into Israeli politics and gain access to decision-making circles by supporting the centrist Benny Gantz for prime minister and engaging in negotiations to support a government coalition opposing the right. But its efforts were ultimately thwarted by the center-left camp in Israel, after Gantz decided to form a coalition with Netanyahu rather than a government supported by the Arab parties. The dissolution of the Joint List in 2022 led to a more polarized Arab vote and an overall decline in Arab voter turnout, and left the insecure position of Palestinian citizens of Israel unresolved.
The declaration of a state of war in Israel in October 2023 and the start of Israeli military operations in Gaza shortly after heralded a fundamental shift in this already precarious status. The Israeli government launched an unprecedented campaign of persecution and intimidation against Palestinian citizens of Israel, seen as a “fifth column” of internal enemies who threatened the safety of Jewish Israelis. Political figures, such as the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Knesset members, and other public officials, issued calls for the surveillance and, in some cases, expulsion of Palestinian citizens. Kobi Shabtai, then commissioner of the Israel Police, declared a total ban on antiwar protests in Arab towns and villages in Israel. The prohibition, which did not apply to Jewish Israelis, remained in effect until March 2024.
In recent decades, Palestinian citizens of Israel had made meaningful if incomplete progress.
The Israeli police also began monitoring the social media accounts of Palestinian citizens for expressions of sympathy for the suffering of Gazans, as well as what it deemed to be support for Hamas. The dragnet ensnared hundreds of Palestinian citizens, particularly activists and social media influencers targeted by the newly created Task Force for Monitoring Incitement Online, overseen by Ben-Gvir in order to track down critics of the official Israeli position on the war.
The days following October 7 saw a wave of arrests targeting dozens of Palestinian citizens of Israel, in some cases merely for posting images of children in Gaza or expressing their opposition to the war. The popular singer Dalal Abu Amneh was detained and accused of “incitement” for sharing a social media post that read “There is no victor except God.” An Arab standup comedian was arrested for writing “The eye weeps for the residents of Gaza” in an Instagram post. These high-profile arrests have created an atmosphere of relative silence that has prevailed among Palestinian citizens in the 18 months since Israel’s ground invasion began. From October 2023 to May 2024, police indicted more than 150 Palestinian citizens for incitement to terror; no Jewish Israelis were indicted for incitement to racism or calling for genocide, both of which are considered crimes under Israeli law.
The Israeli government, with its coalition of hard-right members, including Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, seized the opportunity to advance its vision for an Israel free of Palestinians. It has used the pretext of the state of emergency to enact new antidemocratic and anti-Arab laws targeting the citizenship of Palestinian Israelis. A law passed in November 2023 grants Israeli authorities the power to revoke the citizenship of and deport relatives of those convicted of committing or supporting terrorism, charges that are almost exclusively applied to Palestinians. The government has also proposed a law that aims to impose further limits on the political representation of Palestinian citizens in the Knesset and on their participation in local elections. Several Jewish Israeli municipal leaders and the mayors of several cities have closed down or restricted access to construction sites in order to prevent Palestinian citizen workers from accessing them, effectively choosing not to build in their own communities in order to not interact with Palestinian citizens of Israel.
NO ROOM TO MANEUVER
Scarred by the shock of Hamas’ attack and seeking vengeance, sections of Israeli civil society have engaged in their own attacks on the civil liberties of Palestinian citizens. Israeli universities, which market themselves as liberal institutions dedicated to equality and diversity and in some cases have partnerships with Western universities, monitored their Palestinian students, suspending some from their courses and, in a few cases, even filing police complaints against them for expressing their opposition to the war or solidarity with Gazans under Israeli bombardment. Israeli high academic institutions have punished 160 Palestinian students for antiwar social media posts, including by suspending or expelling some, but have disciplined few, if any Jewish Israeli students for racism against Palestinians.
The targeting of Palestinian citizens of Israel has not been limited to students: in March 2024, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suspended the Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian after she accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, comments for which she was arrested and detained; the university then pressured her to resign. Violent racially motivated attacks on Palestinian citizens have also become more common, the most notable among them an incident in which a mob chanting “Death to Arabs!” trapped Arab students at the Netanya Academic College in their dormitories in October 2023.
Palestinian citizens’ leadership, accustomed to working within the confines of Israeli society, has been forced to confront unprecedented limits on political activity. The High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, the public body that represents Palestinian citizens of Israel, voiced its opposition to the war by organizing several demonstrations against it, although they were only permitted many months after the war began and faced many limitations. The committee also provided support to civil society organizations in their efforts to combat persecution in the labor market, academia, and the broader public sphere.
Meanwhile, Arab parties and their representatives in the Knesset have resumed protests against the war within the halls of parliament and in the streets. But these measures pale in comparison to prewar activism. Israel’s criminalization of opposition to the war has created an atmosphere of widespread fear. Even as activism ramps back up among Palestinian citizens and their political leadership, the chilling effect of Israeli policies and violence has foreclosed the possibility of mass mobilization. Palestinian politics in Israel remains paralyzed, with no obvious domestic solution to the enduring discrimination or its latest intensification on the horizon.
DUTY TO PROTECT
The latest wave of persecution reflects the increase in anti-Palestinian attitudes among Jewish Israelis that tracks with the country’s rightward shift and long predates the war in Gaza. In fact, the impunity with which Israeli lawmakers and right-wing Jewish Israelis have targeted Palestinian citizens of Israel has been enabled by the mainstreaming of anti-Palestinian prejudice in Israeli society. According to an Israel Democracy Institute poll from 2022, 49 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that they should have more rights than non-Jewish citizens, and 79 percent of the total Jewish population in the country oppose including Arab parties in Israeli government coalitions and appointing Arab ministers to government positions. The war has only increased the prevalence of such attitudes.
Surveys conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute between September 2024 and February 2025 reveal that the majority of Jewish Israelis do not think the Israeli army is committing war crimes or acting immorally in Gaza, and 83 percent believe that its conduct during the war has been ethical. Over 73 percent of Jewish Israelis have said that they support Trump’s deportation plan for Palestinians from Gaza.
As a result, Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot rely on the Israeli government to protect them. They should, of course, continue to organize by building institutions, strengthening grassroots initiatives, and community solidarity, and participating, to the extent possible, in Israeli civil society. They should also deepen their tactical and strategic partnerships with Jewish Israelis dedicated to fighting for democracy and against Jewish ethnic supremacy in Israel. But they need help from outside, as well.
Arab states must renew their engagement with Palestinian citizens of Israel after decades of isolation and disconnection by amplifying their voices in international forums, supporting their cultural and educational institutions, and, for those Arab countries with whom Israel has relations, demanding an end to state-sanctioned discrimination. And international institutions, including the EU and the United Nations, should demand that Israel uphold international law on minority rights. If Israel refuses to reverse its latest anti-Arab laws and continues to ignore Jewish Israeli extremism, these organizations should urge international, economic, and academic institutions connected to Israel to make their relationship with Israel contingent on the protection of Palestinian citizens.
Palestinian citizens of Israel must coordinate with one another and with supporters abroad. The best they can hope for in the near term, however, is to temporarily alleviate their suffering. They will not find lasting justice until Israel ends its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, recognizes the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, and transforms from a hollow democracy built on Jewish supremacy to a genuine liberal democracy that serves all its citizens equally.
israel-academia-monitor.com 