We think that in the coming year, there will be debate that is unprecedented in its venom and in its radioactivity around the words ‘Israel as an apartheid state’,
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said during a Zoom briefing with Israeli journalists, as reported today by The Times of Israel.
Lapid called the apartheid appraisal “a despicable lie” and added that “in 2022, it will be a tangible threat”.
The briefing included Israel’s pet-drama, the “Iranian nuclear threat”, which really is just a political “threat” related to “loss of Israeli hegemony”, as Ian Lustick puts it in his eloquent and sober appraisal of the matter. When it comes to Israel, we don’t even talk about its nukes. Lustick:
So, what really perturbs Gantz, Bennet, Netanyahu, and so many other Israelis who speak about Iran in such apocalyptic in frenzied terms? Simply put, they fear the loss of Israeli hegemony. An Iranian state capable of perhaps using a nuclear weapon would end Israel’s status as the confidently preponderant military power in the region.
But Lapid is now applying nuclear terms to the mere appraisal of Israel as an Apartheid state. This is on the one hand hilarious. On the other, it is a serious example of just how much populism is applied by Israel apologists in order to counter the well-documented appraisal of Israel as an Apartheid State. After all, it was Israel’s own prominent human rights NGO B’Tselem which came out less than a year ago with a detailed report on Israeli Apartheid from the river to the sea. Human Rights Watch reached similar conclusions in its Apartheid report which came only a few months later.
Lapid calls this venomous, and it’s even radioactive. Don’t you even dare touch those reports, you’ll die of radioactive poisoning!
These people don’t want to face the truth. It’s an insane level of denial. But there’s another important point here: the audience. Notice that these are Israeli journalists who are being briefed. This speaks to the notion that Israeli hasbara, while often thought of as propaganda towards the rest of the world, is actually a main tool of self-denial. Given, Lazar Berman, The Times of Israel’s diplomatic reporter, is also one of these journalists and it’s printed in English, so that suggests there’s also an external propaganda purpose. But Lapid’s outrageous message needs messengers to get out. Indeed, Berman does not counter the nerve of Lapid’s claims with facts, but rather extends it in his own appraisal:
Israel has long adamantly denied accusations of apartheid, saying its Arab minority enjoys full civil rights, as well as the term “occupation” to describe its activities in the West Bank and Gaza. It views Gaza, from which it withdrew soldiers and settlers in 2005, as a hostile entity ruled by the Islamic terror group Hamas, and it considers the West Bank to be disputed territory subject to peace negotiations — which collapsed more than a decade ago.
This is whataboutism. Lazar does not once relate to the above referred reports nor their solid findings of Apartheid as consistent Israeli policy. A responsible journalist should at least do that. And while we could get into all those details once again, I think we should just let Yair Lapid shoot himself in the foot with his desperate hyperbole.
Israel is an Apartheid state. I’m saying it and I didn’t die, nor was I poisoned. You know who does get poisoned by Israeli Apartheid? Children. Gazan children. Like Professor Sarah Roy of Harvard said:
“Innocent people, most of them children are daily being poisoned” – by the water they are forced to consume.
That’s what we should really be speaking about.
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For the record:
UK Actress Emma Watson Expresses Solidarity with Palestinian People – Palestine Chronicle
The Palestine Chronicle, January 3/22
“English actress and activist Emma Watson has expressed her solidarity with the Palestinian people via a post on her Instagram official page on Monday, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
“The 31-year-old Harry Potter star took it to her massive platform on the popular photo-sharing website, Instagram, and posted a photo from a solidarity protest with Palestine ‘Solidarity is a Verb’.
“’Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future,’ the actress said in the photo caption.
“’Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/12/23/americas-foreign-policy-death-spiral/
COUNTERPUNCH – DECEMBER 23, 2021America’s Foreign Policy Death SpiralBY WALTER L. HIXSON
EXCERPT:
“Finally, postwar US foreign policy in the Middle East, anchored by support for reactionary regimes throughout the region—notably Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—has been an unmitigated disaster replete with forever wars, horrific blowback, and perennial instability. The only “success” in the region was to keep the oil flowing, which produced the existential crisis we now face.
“Now, because the Biden administration is bowing to the Trump policy of torpedoing the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the possibility of yet another Middle East war has emerged before the dust has even settled in Afghanistan. Israel of course is the only country in the Middle East that actually has nuclear weapons, which it developed in the 1960s in defiance of the US-led nuclear non-proliferation agreement (1968). Israel and its lobby—by far the most powerful lobby of any foreign nation in American history–prefer war to diplomacy hence the openly racist former Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and now his successor, Naftali Bennett– who likes to boast about the number of Arabs he has killed–strive relentlessly to overturn the 2015 accord with Iran. The multilateral agreement was an excellent piece of diplomacy that would have kept Iran verifiably bomb-free in return for sanctions relief. (cont’d)
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“Israel, now widely and accurately recognized as an apartheid state, has with the assistance of the AIPAC-led lobby—which controls the US Congress as fully as Putin controls the Russian duma—every intention of provoking a war with Iran. Blinken, a longtime dedicated Zionist, might just accommodate them, pulling sleepy Joe along, rather than resurrecting the nuclear accord.
“What is certain is that Congress will continue to give Israel, a tiny little country of some nine million people, more money than it gives any other country and even whole continents–$3.8 billion a year and $146 billion since 1948. This ongoing and absurd level of military assistance has made Israel the colossus of the Middle East, the world leader in targeted assassination with a specialization in waging indiscriminate warfare against Arabs especially in the captive Gaza strip, the site of repeated war crimes. For decades Israel has made a laughingstock of the mythical ‘peace process’ as more than 700,000 ‘settlers’ intruded into the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. Israel is in the process of taking over East Jerusalem, which was supposed to be the capital of an independent Palestinian state.
“US foreign policy has enabled and funded these actions by the Jewish state, which Israel proclaimed itself to be in 2018. The Jewish State Law made apartheid official, marginalizing Israel’s Arab population, 20 percent of the total, as well as the repressed Palestinians in the occupied territories.”
I’m fascinated by the claim that israel is an apartheid state. Isn’t it the Palestinians who from the beginning have denied the history of Jews in the region, have laws preventing the sale of land to Jews, and seek to deport or kill all the Jews of israel and the territories? If a Palestinian state is set up will it dismantle its terrorists organizations sworn to murder every Jew? Will it change its education system aimed at delegitimization of jewish history? Will it allow Jews to become citizens in its state or will it do as it says and drive them into the sea?