Masar Badil and the Indictment of Israeli “Democracy”
by Rima Najjar
From symbolic inclusion to strategic refusal: Masar Badil confronts the architecture of settler democracy.
Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, does not petition for recognition — it engineers rupture. On March 28, 2025, aligned with International Al-Quds Day, the movement issued a global directive: flood the streets, occupy public squares, and refuse silence. From Berlin to Bogotá, Montreal to Marseille, Masar Badil summoned mosques, churches, unions, and student groups — not to express solidarity, but to deliver indictment. The message was clear: do not mourn quietly. Do not beg for ceasefires. Name the genocide. Confront the collaborators. Refuse the partition.
Jaldia Abubakra, a member of Masar Badil’s Executive Committee, made the stakes explicit:
“If only 1% of the millions of mosques and churches in the Arab and Islamic world join the protests, this movement will have a major impact to halt the Zionist aggression.”
Her words were not metaphor—they were strategy. Masar Badil’s call extended beyond Palestine, demanding support for the Yemeni resistance and confronting Zionist-imperialist aggression across the region. It did not seek permission; it issued a summons.
In moments of historic trauma, some communities respond with organized resistance, while others are forced into silence. Today, as Israel’s settler-colonial genocide grinds Gaza into dust—live-streamed, unstopped, industrialized and normalized—Palestinian communities around the world have mobilized in fierce opposition: organizing, protesting, documenting, and refusing. Yet within the Green Line—where proximity to Israeli state power should invite resistance—political inertia persists.
Despite its propaganda, those following the news in the Middle East have always known that Israel is no democracy. It is a regime of Jewish supremacy, settler domination, and the systematic destruction of Palestinian life, memory, and political agency. As Israeli forces bomb Gaza into oblivion, starve families in Rafah, hunt survivors in Khan Younis, and bury entire generations beneath rubble and siege, the state is not malfunctioning—it is operating exactly as designed: to annihilate bodies, erase memory, break testimony, and punish resistance.
This is not a sudden break or unexpected event; it is the intended result of a system designed to prevent the emergence of a secular democratic state.
Inside the Green Line, Palestinian presence is not tolerated—it is instrumentalized. Israeli institutions parade Palestinians of 1948 as proof of “diversity” while denying them the tools of political life. Their citizenship functions as a trap: not a gateway to rights, but a mechanism of containment, a performance of inclusion that conceals the violence of exclusion.
Masar Badil steps into this terrain not as a permitted voice, but as a strategic refusal—confronting a system built on domination and subordination, where inclusion is wielded as a tool of control. It indicts the entire architecture of Israeli democracy and the global complicity that sustains it. Masar Badil’s call is not symbolic—it is insurgent. It demands that we confront not just the genocide in Gaza, but the ideological scaffolding that makes such genocide legible, permissible, and repeatable.
Israeli democracy does not malfunction—it performs containment. It offers Palestinians of 1948 the illusion of civic access while stripping their political tools to the bone. It grants citizenship without sovereignty, visibility without voice, and proximity without power. The regime does not tolerate dissent—it designs its disappearance.
The condition of Palestinians behind the Green Line is one of engineered paralysis: surveilled, censored, and punished for dissent. Their lived reality is drowned out by a calculated distortion. They live under a regime that demands loyalty to a state that defines itself as exclusively Jewish. They are asked to love a government that criminalizes their memory, surveils their mourning, and punishes their refusal. In Gaza and the West Bank, the demand is even more grotesque: love the blockade, love the checkpoints, love the drones that hunt your children. Across historic Palestine, the message is the same—submit or vanish.
Inside the Green Line, the tools of political life are not broken—they are blunted by design. Civic education teaches obedience, not history. Legal recourse offers delay, not justice. Public platforms reward mimicry, not resistance. Arab political parties are permitted to exist only if they renounce the right of return, accept the Jewish character of the state, and speak in the language of compromise. The regime does not fear participation—it fears refusal.
The media landscape enforces this containment with surgical precision. Arabic-language outlets like Hala TV in Nazareth, Radio A-Shams in Haifa, and Panet—the most widely read Arabic news site—operate under the shadow of the Second Authority for Television and Radio. Licenses are conditional; editorial autonomy, precarious. A single segment deemed “incitement” can trigger investigations, funding cuts, or advertiser boycotts. The Nakba Law prohibits state-funded institutions from acknowledging Palestinian dispossession, criminalizing historical memory itself.
This apparatus does not merely subdue daily life—it forecloses the future and criminalizes its imagination. The vision of a secular democratic state—from river to sea—is not postponed; it is actively dismantled. If Palestinians inside Israel must internalize erasure to keep jobs, if Palestinians in Gaza must accept starvation in silence, and if Palestinians in exile must prove their humanity to re-enter their own country, then democracy is not a promise—it is a weapon.
And yet, from this collapse rises clarity. The very extremity of the repression clarifies the stakes of liberation. Movements like Masar Badil, the One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC), and declarations like “Tomorrow’s Palestine” refuse managed coexistence or sectarian compromise. They reject bi-national illusions and insist on decolonization—not just of land, but of memory, narrative, and the ideological machinery that demanded Palestinians love their dispossession or vanish from history. A single secular democratic state is not simply an answer to partition—it is a rupture in the grammar of the occupier, a refusal to perform gratitude for survival, and a demand that Palestinian testimony no longer be symbolic, but codified as the foundation of law and justice.
Israel’s vaunted claim to be “the only democracy in the Middle East” collapses under the weight of its own architecture. If this is democracy—where citizenship is a trap, memory is criminalized, and survival demands silence—then democracy is not a promise. It is a weapon. And the movements rising from the rubble do not seek to reform it. They seek to replace it.
Originally published in Medium
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.