Liberal Zionists open the New York Times these days with shivers of anxiety. Last week, Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem, declared for the first time that Israel is an apartheid regime, a move that sent shock waves around the globe.
Liberal Zionists know that if the “apartheid” designation spreads even more widely, they will have some public squirming to do — such as explaining why they continue to oppose the worldwide campaign for Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS).
But so far in the New York Times: not a word. Liberal Zionists have nothing to fear yet from the Washington Post either. Nearly a week has passed, but neither the Post, nor the Times, has published a single word about B’Tselem’s announcement in either news reports by their own correspondents or in opinion columns.
The news blackout fortunately did not extend to all the U.S. mainstream media. National Public Radio, to its credit, promptly broadcast a report by its Israel correspondent, Daniel Estrin; his dispatch included the standard both-sides-ism, but NPR listeners did get to hear words like “apartheid regime” and “Jewish supremacy.”
And CNN’s website also immediately added a report on the B’Tselem designation, although it’s unclear how much its television audience was informed.
What’s mysterious about the Times/Post blackout is that B’Tselem’s (Jewish) executive director, Hagai El-Ad, is eminently quotable. Here he is in the British Guardian, in the lead sentence of his own opinion piece:
One cannot live a single day in Israel-Palestine without the sense that this place is constantly being engineered to privilege one people, and one people only: the Jewish people. Yet half of those living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are Palestinian. The chasm between these lived realities fills the air, bleeds, is everywhere on this land.
The New York Times has long had difficulty finding B’Tselem’s telephone number. Nearly 7 years ago, this site noted that Times reporters rarely quoted its reports on human rights. We said:
It is an Israeli group, not connected to any political movement, and its accuracy has never been successfully challenged over the more than two decades since it was founded. It relies on hundreds of supporters and volunteers to monitor human rights violations in occupied Palestine.
Since then, there was some improvement in the Times. In 2019, for instance, Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger quoted B’Tselem 5 times. The citations were perfunctory, and Halbfinger did not profile the group, but at least readers got to briefly hear its point of view. Then, in 2020, he lost their phone number again; no input the entire year, even though there were plenty of human rights violation in Israel/Palestine.
So, finally, what does B’Tselem actually mean? Here’s from the group’s website, is the explanation:
B’Tselem in Hebrew literally means “in the image of,” and is also used as a synonym for human dignity, The words are taken from Genesis 1:27: “And God created humans in His image. In the image of God did He create him.” It is in this spirit that the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “All human beings are born equal in dignity and rights.”
CORRECTION: On January 12, the Washington Post did run an Associated Press article on the B’Tselem apartheid designation. But the AP dispatch is not listed on the paper’s home page under “World,” and the Post never followed up with its own correspondents.
It’s bizarre. I read the print version of the NYT every day and since B’tselem’s announcement there’s been nothing, not a word of it in the Sunday edition or on any other day. I just used every search trick I know to see if NYT has posted an article about B’tselem – nothing.
1 of 2
Israel: “A Regime Of Jewish Supremacy” | by Rima Najjar | Jan, 2021 | Medium
Israel: “A Regime Of Jewish Supremacy” by Rima Najjar, Jan. 14/21
EXCERPT:
“The criminal political reality of Israel has now been detailed in unambiguous language that pairs ‘Jewish’ with ‘supremacy’ by B’Tselem, the largest human rights organization within Israel itself: ‘One organizing principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians.’
“The slow, agonizing and ongoing transformation of Jerusalem into a predominantly Jewish city at the expense of its Palestinian Muslim and Christian inhabitants is perhaps the most dramatic example of how Israeli Jewish supremacist policies and practices manifest themselves, an anathema to the very soul of this magnificent city. But these structures are deeply embedded in every aspect of the Jewish state, as B’Tselem shows.
“The B’Tselem position paper (released Jan 12, 2021) is creating the same kind of push-back that the report submitted by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley to the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) in 2017 elicited from Israel and its allies. In that report too, the Israeli practices towards the Palestinian people were examined at length and the verdict was clear: ‘This report establishes, on the basis of scholarly inquiry and overwhelming evidence, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid.’
“In the Falk and Tilley 74-page report, the term ‘supremacy’ is not mentioned a single time. Great pains are taken in the report to reject the anticipated false accusation of anti-Semitism in the strongest terms. (cont’d)
.
2 of 2
“The concern is that recognizing the reality of Jewish supremacy in Palestine-Israel (as Palestinians and other Arabs have done since 1948) would fuel anti-Semitism, especially in the current climate in the United States and elsewhere, by somehow tarring all Jews with the same brush. But as Tony Greenstein wrote in Al-Jazeera in 2019, ‘recognizing Israel as a Jewish supremacist state does not mean rejecting Jews or Judaism.’
“Calling out the hatefulness, the bigotry and sense of entitlement of Jewish supremacy while at the same time disavowing anti-Semitism is often difficult to chart, but it is necessary to do so. Right now, the vigor and lengths to which many go in order to denounce anti-Semitism far outstrip efforts made to denounce Jewish supremacist policies in Israel. Academic terms like ‘colonialism,’ ‘nationalism’ and ‘political Zionism,’ despite their usefulness in advocating for the Palestinians’ struggle for liberation, often end up inadvertently camouflaging the fascistic force that the term ‘supremacy’ encapsulates.
“Jewish supremacy and anti-Semitism must both be resisted at the same time. The only way to de-radicalize Jewish supremacists (many, like the Christian Evangelists who embrace Jewish supremacy in Palestine in the service of their own QAnon-like fantasies, are obviously not even Jewish) in Israel and abroad is by exposing them to the truth, the whole truth, about their beliefs/values and Israel as an apartheid Jewish state from the river to the sea and by giving them options, such as the option of one democratic state in Palestine-Israel.
“Let’s call the existence of Israel as an apartheid Jewish supremacist state in Palestine for what it is — a crime against the Palestinian people, a Jewish-state Nakba (‘catastrophe,’ in reference to Israel’s brutal establishment in 1948 on 78% of Palestine); let’s be willing to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth in order to be able to effect a behavioral shift, if not in those in power, at least among Zionist Jews of conscience (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) across the world.”
An interesting and important article on the topic.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n02/nathan-thrall/the-separate-regimes-delusion
It notes that apartheid need not be applied throughout the entire territory for it to be criminal.
And a couple of quotes:
“…discriminatory policies within Israel, where tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens live in villages that Israel refuses to recognise or connect to water and electricity, and where hundreds of Jewish-only towns have admission committees that are permitted by law to reject Palestinians on the pretext of ‘social suitability’ “
and
“Israel has seized more than three-quarters of the land of its Palestinian citizens. This expropriation is a continuous project, particularly in the Negev and Galilee, but most of it took place, as in the West Bank today, while Palestinians were under military rule. In the seven decades of Israel’s existence, there have been only six months, in 1966-67, when it did not place members of one ethnic group under military government while it confiscated their land. “
I just wrote to the NY Times. I doubt that they will print it.
It is a week since B’Tselem, the Israeli human-rights organization, released its report in which it (at last!) calls Israel an apartheid regime. Not a word from the “paper of record,” the New York Times.
Why? Has the Jewish Defence League, those brave men with the courage to intimidate women old enough to be their grandmothers, threatened to beat you up?
If you’re afraid to use the word “apartheid,” you could call Israel a Jewish Supremacist regime. It is one.
Elizabeth Block
3 Washington Ave.
Toronto ON M5S 1L1
Canada
(416) 979-2398
I do not consider myself indigenous to the land of Israel/Palestine