Do not put on glasses
Neither dark nor joyful ones
Look with your eyes
With your eyes open
One must see evil in order to fight it
(Nathan Alterman)
Israel is deep into an election year and the outcome is already clear. Next year the next racist government of Israel will rise. The only question is whether it will be the loud official version or the muted and more dangerous one.
Listening to politicians, and just as importantly listening to what they do not say, reveals everything. In Israel of 2025 the word Zionism has become a political code that everyone understands. It is no longer the set of ideas that motivated Herzl the secular visionary or Jabotinsky the liberal thinker. It has become a blunt signal meaning one thing: without Arabs. When all those who consider themselves fit to lead pledge to form a Zionist government they are not expressing a commitment to model society, regional solidarity, peace, Equality, or coexistence. Some of them are not even aware that such options ever existed within any strand of Zionist thought. What they mean is an Arab free regime space, Arabfrei , one cleansed of Arab presence. This is said openly, in their own voices and in full view of voters. None of these so called leaders object. The conclusion is unavoidable. For all of them Zionism is racism.
The shocking part is not the Israeli right wing that proudly embraces this racist identity. They are consistent. The real disgrace lies with the miserable center and the apologetic left that have adopted the same stance in practice. Exclusion of Arabs is an old tradition of theirs, dates back to the era of Ben Gurion. His fearful heirs have never dared break from it. Time and again they draw imaginary coalitions based on a Zionist democratic index. From which the Arab citizens and their representatives are absent. Not because of forgetfulness but by deliberate political design. Arabs out. Jews only in.
There is not a single political figure in the entire Zionist spectrum willing to say clearly: I will not sit in any government without Arab partners. Nor is anyone willing to declare that a government that excludes citizens because of their national identity must not be formed at all. Occasionally one of the worn out centrist figures mumbles a vague sentence. But taking a principled democratic stand is too much for them. Some speak about the tactical stupidity of trying to form a government without Arab votes, as if Arab citizens were migrant workers brought in to clean up the filth Netanyahu leaves behind. But the issue is not what is politically convenient. It is about what is morally required. The one they are unwilling to fight for.
The coming election forces Israel to confront a foundational question. Is there a single leader willing to state the basic truth that a government that discriminates against its own citizens on the basis of national origin is a government no democrat can join. So far the answer is no. This is the gravest consequence of years of polarization. Not the rise of the radical right, but the moral collapse of all the rest who pretend to be democrats while surrendering their principles.
Basic values of civic partnership have become ideological luxuries. Equality, citizenship, rights, reconciliation, justice and dignity have become forbidden words. These timid politicians hope the question will disappear, that no one will force them to speak aloud the name of those whose very identity has become unspeakable. Arabs have become the Voldemort of Israeli politics.
This is where the difference lies between the noisy racism of the current government and the quiet racism surrounding it. The explicit racists boast about their views. They believe in national superiority and treat Arab citizens as a problem to be managed or reduced. They are direct and offensive. At least they are honest. The muted racism is far more dangerous. It hides behind a civilian sounding language of moderation, a vague patriotism and an appearance of liberalism. Its representatives do not wave flags but they also refuse to stand on the barricades against growing racial Chauvinism. In doing so they maintain the system that allows racist politics to thrive. The quiet racism is the murky water in which the political fish rots.
The difference between the two is like the difference between a street assault and domestic violence. The first is visible and elicits condemnation. The second is hidden, silenced and lifelong, its victims have no defender. Quiet racism is embedded in the fabric of Israeli political life, ever since. In state institutions, party structures, in everyday discourse. Once the political conversation assumes that a government based on Jewish Arab partnership is illegitimate, the room has already gone dark and the door has closed.
Some will argue that this is only a political tactic, an attempt not to anger voters, a temporary measure. The question is not whether Arab representatives will join a coalition. The question is what a society reveals about itself when the participation of a fifth of its citizens becomes a source of shame or a political inconvenience. A society that cannot declare openly that excluding its Arab citizens from power is a moral red line has lost the right to call itself democratic.
Zionism was not destined to be racist. But Israeli politics has turned the term Zionism into a doctrine of exclusion. Zionism in 2025 does not ask how to build a shared civic home. It solicits how to segregate the home from its non Jewish residents. It uses patriotic language to justify a regime of separation and discrimination.
If the next government is formed on the foundations of ethnic exclusion it will not matter who heads it or how it looks. It will carry the moral stain of a structure built on malignant foundations. No state can endure for long on such foundations without imploding inward.
Israel must choose a different path. It must redefine Israeli identity not as a cult of national homogeneity but as an invitation to full civic partnership. It must recognize that Jewish Arab partnership is the key to a better future, stability and political morality. For this to happen someone must say the sentence no one has yet dared to say. Not as a tactical move, but as a basic principle of a living society.
Until that sentence is spoken we must call the illness by its name. The beating heart of Zionism in 2025 is discriminatory exclusion. There is no other word for it except racism.
