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FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT AND GLOBAL APARTHEID: THE UNITED STATES AND
ISRAEL  
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Aviva Chomsky
June 10, 2025
TomDispatch
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_ Most of the world agrees that apartheid inside a country’s
borders is the epitome of injustice. Why, then, are we so ready to
accept a global version of it? _

, Protect_Immigrants_IMG_1295-1 by Peg Hunter is licensed under CC
BY-NC 2.0 / Flickr

 

In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John
Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a
journey or a stranger comes to town.

Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire history of
the human race in two words: people move. Everything else is just
elaboration on that basic plot.

Some of history’s worst atrocities can be attributed to certain
people trying to control other people’s movements, whether by
capturing them, herding them into prison camps (concentration camps,
strategic hamlets, model villages), enslaving and transporting them,
or warehousing them in besieged countries or regions while barricading
the borders of anyplace to which they might want to flee, often
consigning them to death in treacherous deserts or seas for trying to
exercise the basic human right of freedom of movement.

EUROPEAN FREEDOM AND COLONIAL DOMINATION

In February, President Trump astonished the world by proclaiming
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the United States should “take over” Gaza and rid it entirely of
its Palestinian population. Yet in many ways, as startling as that
might have seemed, his proposal fit right in with his drive to remove
millions of people from the United States. Both reflected a colonial
arrogance that the U.S. and Israel share: the idea that some people
(Americans/Europeans/Whites/colonizers) have the right to move
themselves as they desire while moving others against their will.
Consider it, after a fashion, a contemporary (as well as historic)
version of apartheid.

Forcing people to move or prohibiting their mobility are two sides of
the same colonial or neocolonial coin. Colonizers invade and drive
people out or enslave, transport, enclose, and imprison them while
barricading off the privileged spaces they create for themselves. In a
vicious cycle, colonizers or imperial powers justify their borders and
walls in the name of “security” while protecting themselves from
those desperate to escape their domination. And such ideas, old as
they may be, are still distinctly with us.

European imperial actors from Christopher Columbus on claimed the
right to freedom of movement on this planet. Today, the flyer
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get in the mail with your passport proudly insists that, “with your
U.S. passport, the world is yours!”

Or consider historian and scientist Jared Diamond’s nonchalant
claim
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“no traditional society tolerated the relatively open access enjoyed
by modern American or European citizens, most of whom can travel
anywhere… merely by presenting a valid passport and visa to a
passport control officer.”

Diamond argued that Americans and Europeans exemplify the freedoms of
modernity, while more “traditional societies” oppress people by
restricting their travel. But if Americans and Europeans enjoy the
freedom to travel, it’s not because they are so much more modern
than other inhabitants of this planet. It’s because other countries
don’t restrict their freedom. On the other hand, it’s the U.S. and
Europe, Diamond’s symbols of modernity, that tend to impose the
greatest restrictions with their militarized borders and deportation
regimes.

Perhaps we could better define modernity as the European drive to
control mobility, forcing others to accept their intrusions while
denying free mobility to the rest of the world. The United States and
Israel offer a spectrum of examples of how the right to deport, the
right to transport, the right to enclose, and the right to exclude
tend to complement one another on this strange planet of ours. Both
countries claim to be liberal democracies and celebrate their
commitment to equal rights, while reserving those rights for some and
excluding others.

COLONIALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

While it’s easy to imagine that colonialism is part of our past,
think again. Its structures, institutions, and ideas still haunt our
world. And one of the defining powers of colonizers always was the way
they reserved for themselves (and only themselves) the right to move
freely, while also reserving the right to move those they had
colonized around like so many chess pieces.

Moving (and moving others) has been inherent in every colonial
project. The roots of today’s deportation regimes — particularly
in the United States, Europe, and Israel — lie in the determination
of colonializing countries to wrest wealth from the lands and labor of
those they colonized and enjoy that wealth in their own privileged
spaces from which the colonized are largely excluded.

The “rules-based world order” that emerged after World War II
created institutions for international cooperation and international
law, ended colonial empires (as the former colonies gained
independence), and dismantled segregation in the United States and,
eventually, apartheid in South Africa. But none of that truly or
totally erased what had existed before. Global postwar decolonization
and the struggle for equality proved to be lengthy and sometimes
extremely bloody processes.

In the U.S., people of color are full citizens and can no longer, as a
group, be legally enclosed or removed against their will. Europe, too,
has dismantled its colonial empires. But the post-colonial world has
developed a new form of global apartheid, where the racialized drive
to enclose and remove is now directed at immigrants, the vast majority
of them escaping the ongoing ravages left by colonialism (and more
recently climate change
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in their own countries.

Israel is in some ways an anachronism in that twentieth-century
trajectory. Its colonizing project was carried out just as other
colonized peoples were throwing off their rulers. Its expulsions of
Palestinians, which began in the 1940s, have only accelerated in our
own time. Meanwhile, Israel created its own legal version of apartheid
(even as South Africa’s was dismantled), with those Palestinians who
were not expelled increasingly surrounded by prisons and walls.

THE RIGHT TO DEPORT: ISRAEL

Zionists began to assert the right to expel
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before the state of Israel was created in 1948.

In 1895, in an often-quoted passage, Zionism’s founder, Theodor
Herzl, proposed
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shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border… The
removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and
circumspectly.” During the post-World War I British Mandate in
Palestine, Zionist, Arab, and British officials agreed
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could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless
there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants.”

Palestine’s British colonial authorities advocated
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displacement in their 1937 Peel Commission Report. It was then
enthusiastically endorsed by Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion,
later Israel’s first prime minister (“The compulsory transfer of
the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give
us… an opportunity which we never dared to dream in our wildest
imaginings”) and Chaim Weizmann (“If half a million Arabs could be
transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place”).

Israel compounded its right to deport with the right to imprison,
enclose, and kill. A plethora of laws and walls continue to restrict
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movement, and residence of Palestinians. Israeli historian Ilan
Pappé described
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Israeli occupation regime in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 as
having created “the biggest prison on earth.”

In the older settler colonial countries, the days of Trails of Tears,
imprisonment on reservations, the forced removal of children to
boarding schools, and wars of extermination are mostly in the past.
But in Israel, we are witnessing such a project happening before our
very eyes. The eliminationist project there is proceeding apace with
the tens of thousands
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in Gaza, and in President Trump’s
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
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proposals for the complete removal of the Palestinian population from
that strip of land, as well as in the restrictions on mobility and
the thousands
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home demolitions and displacements in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem.

THE RIGHT TO DEPORT: THE UNITED STATES

In the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
this country ended slavery and enclosure and granted previously
enslaved Africans and their descendants, as well as Native Americans,
the right to citizenship.

Until after the Civil War, however, “immigrants” meant White
Europeans — the only people then allowed to become citizens.
Citizenship by birth, mandated by the 14th Amendment after the Civil
War, complicated that picture because non-Whites born in U.S.
territories also became citizens. To avoid this, the country quickly
began to racially restrict immigration. By the late twentieth century,
the right to immigrate and more equal rights inside the country were
extended to non-Whites. But those rights were always fragile and
accompanied by anti-immigrant and deportation campaigns, increasingly
justified with the concept of “illegality.”

Developments in the twenty-first century clearly suggest that the arc
of history [[link removed]] does not
necessarily bend toward justice, as a racial deportation regime
resurges in a major fashion under President Donald Trump. He, of
course, has long distinguished
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“shithole countries” and “countries like Norway” as he
continues to tighten the screws around most immigrants from Africa,
Asia, and Latin America, while recently ostentatiously welcoming
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Afrikaaners from South Africa.

The Trump administration’s repressive treatment of immigrants
includes endless border militarization
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the stripping of legal status
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hundreds of thousands of immigrants, inventing increasingly
draconian excuses
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deportation, expanding
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incarceration, and pursuing exotic extraterritorial imprisonment and
deportation schemes, including pressuring and bribing countries
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from Costa Rica and Venezuela to Libya and South Sudan to take people
forcibly deported from the United States. Others are being disappeared
into prisons in Guantánamo
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Salvador
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Strangely — or maybe not so strangely — at the same time that the
United States is deporting such “despicable human beings
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it’s demanding the extradition of others, including dozens of
Mexicans. “The previous Administration allowed these criminals to
run free and commit crimes all over the world,” Trump complained
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“The United States’ intention is to extend its justice system,”
a Mexican security analyst explained
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so that the U.S. can prosecute Mexicans for crimes committed in
Mexico. Forcibly moving people works both ways.

CONNECTING THE U.S. AND ISRAEL THROUGH IMPORTATION-DEPORTATION

The colonial importation-deportation-incarceration regimes of the
United States and Israel are intertwined in many ways. Of course, the
U.S. decision to strictly limit Jewish (and other southern and eastern
European) immigration in the 1920s contributed to the desperate search
of European Jews for refuge in the Hitlerian years to come — and to
the growth of Zionism, and the postwar migration to Israel.

The new United Nations — made up primarily of colonizers who had
been keen to deport (or, in the case of the United States, make sure
they didn’t add to) their own Jewish populations — partitioned
Palestine to create Israel at the end of 1947. As the only powerful
country to emerge from World War II unscathed, the United States would
play an outsized role in that organization.

President Trump’s proposal to take Gaza and eliminate its population
expresses his own (and Israel’s) settler-colonial dream for what
Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe famously called
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“elimination of the native.” Trump initially suggested deporting
Gaza’s population to Egypt
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then to Sudan
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Somalia, and Somaliland, and then to Libya
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proposals enthusiastically
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by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. By mid-March of this year, Israel
was creating
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new migration authority to oversee the planned expulsion and 80% of
Jewish Israelis found
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plan “desirable” (though only 52% thought it was “practical”).

As of late May, none of those countries had accepted Trump’s
proposal, though negotiations with Libya were evidently ongoing. But
Trump’s plan to pressure or bribe poorer, weaker countries to accept
Palestinian deportees mirrored his deals to deport “unwanteds”
from the United States. In addition to the several Latin American
countries where his administration has already sent deportees, it
is looking
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Angola, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Libya, Moldova,
and Rwanda
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possibilities. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained
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“We are working with other countries to say, ‘we want to send you
some of the most despicable human beings to your countries…Would you
do that, as a favor to us? And the further away from America, the
better.’”

Another connection between the deportation regimes of the U.S. and
Israel is the way the Trump administration has mobilized charges of
antisemitism to imprison and deport Palestinians and their supporters.
In ordering the deportation of protester Mahmoud Khalil
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Rubio claimed
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their “condoning antisemitic conduct” undermined American foreign
policy objectives.

The United States and Israel share another dystopian project as well:
ratcheting up fear and suffering to inspire people to
“self-deport.” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi
Noem flooded
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other media with a “multimillion dollar ad campaign” threatening
immigrants: “Leave now. If you don’t, we will find you and we will
deport you.” In this respect, MAGA Republicans differed little from
liberal Democrats, as Noem was echoing Vice President Kamala
Harris’s words
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“Don’t come… If you do, you will be turned back.” In an eerily
similar fashion, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank
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“settler advertisements appear on screens and billboards telling
Palestinians, ‘There is no future in Palestine.’” Though their
tactics differ in scale — the United States is not massacring
immigrants and bombing their neighborhoods — they share the goal of
eliminating a population.

One apparent difference makes the comparison even more revealing. The
United States is aiming its repression at immigrants; Israel against
the native population. But the earliest history of deportation in the
United States began with the pushing out or slaughtering of the
indigenous Native American population in order to clear the land for
White settlement. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Africans were
forcibly imported to provide labor, many of them even before the U.S.
became an independent state. They then remained enslaved and their
mobility restricted for almost a century. Colonial control of freedom
of movement, in other words, can take different forms over time.

Both the United States and Israel also disproportionately imprison
their minoritized populations — another denial of freedom of
movement. In the United States, this means people of color. Black
people make up
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of the population but 41% of the prison and jail population. Native
Americans are incarcerated
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four times the rate of White people. The United States also maintains
the world’s largest
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detention system, with expansion
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already underway.

In Israel, it’s Palestinians who are disproportionately imprisoned,
both inside that country and in its occupied territories. While
Palestinians constitute about 20% of Israel’s population,
they constitute
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60% of Israel’s prisoners. (Such statistics are hard to come by
today, so that figure doesn’t include the thousands taken prisoner
since Oct. 7, 2023.) Many Palestinian prisoners languish in what
Israel calls “administrative detention
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created for Palestinians that allows lengthy detention without charge.

BORDERS, WALLS, AND GLOBAL APARTHEID

We are so accustomed to imagining a world of equally sovereign
countries, each creating its own immigration policy, that it’s easy
to miss the colonial dimensions of immigration flows and the ways that
colonial histories, immigration restrictions, expulsions, and
incarceration are connected.  Settler countries like Israel and the
United States have particular similarities (and particular
connections), but most European powers that have benefited from the
world’s colonial order now barricade their borders against potential
migrants.

Most of the world agrees that apartheid inside a country’s borders
is the epitome of injustice. Why, then, are we so ready to accept a
global version of it?

_AVIVA CHOMSKY, a TomDispatch regular
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of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State
University in Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Is Science
Enough?  Forty Critical Questions about Climate Justice
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_Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch in October 2001 as an informal
listserv offering commentary and collected articles from the global
media to a select group of friends and colleagues. In November 2002,
it gained its name and, as a project of the Nation Institute (now the
Type Media Center), became a web-based publication aimed at providing
“a regular antidote to the mainstream media.”_

_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter
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Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands
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final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s
novel Every Body Has a Story
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Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
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as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World
War II
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Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
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* Immigration
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* Borders
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* settler colonialism
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* apartheid
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* Israel
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* United States
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* European Union
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