This week we saw the inevitable debate over Israeli apartheid begin to come to the U.S. Congress. Rashida Tlaib found herself being attacked by fellow Democrats for saying, “you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel’s apartheid government.” You would think this would be obvious, but again this is the U.S. Congress we’re talking about.
To actually get an idea of how out of touch the discussion of Israel is in the Congress it helps to go back to a story from last week when the House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously passed a bill that bars “claims that Israel practices apartheid” from curriculums in Palestinian schools funded by the United States. This was a bipartisan affair with Democratic bill sponsor Rep. Brad Sherman offering this mind boggling argument against the apartheid label for Israel: “To condemn Israel because it wants to be a Jewish state should be done right after we condemn the Netherlands because for wanting to be a predominantly Dutch state.” You can read Sherman’s whole argument here. Suffice it to say it doesn’t get any clearer, but this was exactly the dynamic, and ignorance, that Tlaib was responding to.
Phil Weiss made the great point this week that Tlaib hit a nerve because to refute her means you need to defend Israel’s system of apartheid over the Palestinian people, and that is something that none of Israel’s defenders in Washington DC, or elsewhere, want to do. So they attack the messenger, and pretend apartheid doesn’t exist. Tlaib’s face off with the Israel lobby actually comes at the time when the lobby is trying to stay hidden more than ever. They know they’re selling some unpopular goods, and common sense statements like Tlaib’s are forcing them out into the open.
Shifting to Palestine, we saw incredible scenes this week in Nablus where resistance fighters took on the Palestinian Authority’s own forces as it fulfilled its role as Israel’s proxy army. Mondoweiss‘s Mariam Barghouti filed a chilling report from Nablus:
The battleground was almost identical to what the city had grown used to during Israeli army raids. Most striking of all was the sight of the PA’s armored vehicles, resembling those of the Israeli army, while their tactics in quelling the protests seemed to be lifted from the Israeli playbook. Truly, it was as though Israel were delegating its task of colonial domination to its PA proxies.
And finally, new evidence emerged this week that Israeli forces deliberately targeted Shireen Abu Akleh. Please take time to watch the incredible video created by Al Haq and the organization Forensic Architecture which lays out the proof in detail. The Abu Akleh family was in the Netherlands this week calling on the ICC to take up the case. At a press conference, Anton Abu Akleh called out the stark double standard Palestinians face when he said, “It seems that the reason [Shireen’s] case has not been a priority for the US government is because who she was and who she was killed by.” What a brutal indictment of the Biden administration’s inaction, and like what Tlaib said, obviously true.
