Nicholas Kristof in today’s Times describes the "blunt" truth about the West Bank:
[T]he ugly truth [is] that our ally, Israel, is using American military support to maintain an occupation that is both oppressive and unjust. . . .
[A] pregnant 19-year-old Palestinian woman in the village of At-Tuwani was hospitalized this month after an attack by settlers.
Israel has a point when it argues that relinquishing the West Bank would raise real security concerns. But we must not lose sight of the most basic fact about the occupation: It’s wrong.
Kristof’s column leads Andrew Sullivan to ask "how is this not apartheid?":
These Palestinian Arabs were subject to constant harassment and violence from the Jewish settlers nearby. Kristof adds every caveat – about security, about double-standards, etc. But I fail to see how this kind of governing system, brutally punishing people for being the wrong ethnicity and religion and using the apparatus of the state to impoverish and marginalize them, is somehow in a different moral zone than apartheid.
