Occupation From Within: How Israel’s Oppression of Palestinians Turned Inwards (Critical Israel Studies, 1)

Occupation from Within is a work of political analysis and personal reflection on the dialectic between decades of deepening Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, its associated practices of systematic discrimination and dispossession, and the deterioration of Israel’s internal governance system toward an anti-democratic, racist, fascist, and ultimately genocidal end.

Drawing on the author’s experience litigating human rights cases defending Palestinian communities in Israeli courts, the narrative unfolds in reverse: beginning with the constitutional coup, moving back through pivotal moments in Israeli history―the 2010 opening shot in the crackdown on civil society, the 1967 occupation, the 1948 war and the Nakba, and ultimately the trauma of the Holocaust―before returning to the present: October 7th and the devastating war on Gaza.

At its core, the book advances a stark argument: that Israel’s long-standing domination of Palestinians―both under occupation and as citizens―has cultivated an ideology of Jewish supremacy that now turns inward to silence dissent and dismantle the state’s core democratic features. This same ideology has enabled the spiraling cruelty of occupation, apartheid, and the war of annihilation in Gaza.

While the book offers an account of the unfolding of an authoritarian regime in one country, it provides deep insights into the global democratic recession reshaping our world.

Michael Sfard, Tel-Aviv, Israel.