“The sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews,” and added, “They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat,” the reaction outside Israel was basically: “Wait… what?”

Posted by Umar Willis

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There is something darkly absurd about watching modern politicians say openly supremacist things and then watching respectable media outlets scramble to explain why everyone else is overreacting.

When former Israeli Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef reportedly declared in 2010 that “The sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews,” and added, “They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat,” the reaction outside Israel was basically: “Wait… what?”

Because if literally any Muslim cleric anywhere on Earth said, “The purpose of non-Muslims is to serve Muslims,” CNN would still be running the clip every six hours with dramatic music and an expert panel called Is Islam Compatible with Civilization?

But somehow, when supremacist rhetoric comes from certain Israeli religious or nationalist figures, suddenly everybody becomes a graduate student in theological nuance.

The deeper issue is not one old rabbi saying something ugly. Every religion has extremists. Every country has fanatics. The problem starts when this mentality stops being fringe and starts getting government security details.

Over the last decade, Israel’s far-right ultranationalist movement has increasingly normalized rhetoric that would get politicians labeled neo-fascists almost anywhere else. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now one of the most powerful men in Israel, literally used to keep a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, the man who walked into a mosque in Hebron in 1994 and massacred twenty-nine Muslim worshippers during prayer.

Imagine an American politician hanging up a framed portrait of the guy who shot up a church and then saying, “No, no, you don’t understand. He’s a hero.” Their political career would end before lunch.

Ben-Gvir also publicly stated:

“My right, my wife’s right, my children’s right to move around Judea and Samaria is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

That quote matters because it is honest. Horrifying, but honest. No euphemisms. No polished diplomatic language. Just the blunt declaration that one ethnic group’s freedom matters more than another’s.

Then there is Bezalel Smotrich, who in 2023 said the Palestinian town of Huwara should be “wiped out” after settler violence erupted there. Not arrested terrorists. Not armed militants. An entire town. He later attempted to soften the statement after international backlash, which has increasingly become the ritual of modern extremism: publicly endorse collective punishment, wait for global outrage, then issue a carefully worded clarification pretending everyone misunderstood what was plainly said the first time.

The deeper problem was not the phrasing. It was the mindset underneath it: the idea that Palestinian civilian suffering is politically acceptable so long as Palestinians themselves are viewed less as human beings and more as an obstacle to somebody else’s nationalist project.

None of this means Judaism itself is supremacist. It does not. And criticizing extremist Zionist ideology is not hatred toward Jews any more than criticizing ISIS is hatred toward Muslims. In fact, many Jews inside and outside Israel have condemned this rhetoric for exactly what it is: racist, dehumanizing, and morally dangerous.

The issue is ethnonationalist supremacy. Period.

History has seen this disease before. Once populations become “demographic threats” instead of neighbors, cruelty becomes easy. First the language changes. Then the laws change. Then human beings slowly become abstractions.

Part of the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that Zionist propaganda has spent decades trying to frame Muslims as uniquely incapable of living alongside Jews, as though Jews and Muslims were eternal enemies since the dawn of time. But history completely wrecks that narrative.

For centuries under Muslim rule, Jewish communities existed throughout Palestine and the wider Islamic world with legal recognition, communal autonomy, scholarship, businesses, courts, and religious continuity. Jerusalem, Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo, Hebron, and Safed all contained Jewish communities that survived and often flourished under Muslim governance. Was it perfect? No. No premodern civilization was perfect. But Jews were not facing industrial racial extermination campaigns under Muslim rule the way they later did in parts of Christian Europe.

In fact, after the Spanish Inquisition expelled Jews from Spain in 1492, many fled into Muslim lands under the Ottoman Empire because Muslims were willing to take them in while Christian Europe was busy turning religious persecution into a continent-wide hobby.

That historical reality completely complicates the modern propaganda narrative that Muslims are somehow genetically incapable of coexistence with Jews. Much of today’s hatred is not ancient theology. It is modern nationalism, occupation, war, trauma, propaganda, and decades of dehumanization feeding itself in circles.

The Qur’an attacks racial and tribal supremacy directly:

“O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.”

— Qur’an 49:13

And Prophet Muhammad ﷺ declared:

“No Arab has superiority over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab; neither a white person over a black person, nor a black person over a white person, except through righteousness.”

— Musnad Ahmad

That principle is profoundly threatening to every ideology built on ethnic entitlement.

Because supremacist movements always begin the same way. They insist they are merely defending themselves. They claim victimhood. They claim security concerns. They claim historical necessity.

But eventually the mask slips, and the real belief underneath becomes visible:

that some human beings simply matter less than others.

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Posted by Umar Willis to the Norman Finkelstein group page. (Not officially connected to Norman Finkelstein)