This year’s Israeli Apartheid Week is taking place in the context of increased repression from the UK government, but students continue to pave the way for a positive, powerful and collective resistance.
Palestinians are evidently not entitled to the same rights as other people. This is the only Western standard that has been applied in the last hundred years.
On March 18th, 2022, the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America officially dechartered the DSA’s BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group. This disciplinary action constitutes the latest development in an antagonistic relationship between the Working Group and the highest political body of the DSA in the fallout over the organization’s relationship to Rep. Jamaal Bowman.
Thomas Nides, Joe Biden’s ambassador to Israel, spoke to Americans for Peace Now last week and made clear his stance with the Israeli government. He won’t buck Israel by pushing to reopen the American consulate in Jerusalem for Palestinians. “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel… I’m not going to reverse the clock.” Though Nides did reverse Trump’s policy of U.S. officials visiting illegal West Bank settlements. “I said that and my phone blew up,” Nides related. In the past he never had a twitter account. “Now I’m like a Kardashian with everything I say.”
American society does not treat enslavement with the same response as the Jewish Holocaust, Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler writes, but his method is comparative, which is not the method one wants to use when discussing crimes against humanity. Rather than unifying diverse peoples around common forms of political pain and suffering, the comparative method used in this way divides them.
“Regime change in Iran shouldn’t be a taboo” is an idea that gets traction in the Washington foreign policy establishment. Ukraine’s brave resistance to Russian invasion ought to dispel that idea forever. Even people who don’t like their rules won’t accept foreign control.
Palestinians are reacting to the difference in how the Western media is covering Ukraine from how it covers Palestine. This has been most obvious in two places: the issues of refugees and resistance. “When I see double standards like this I feel that I as a Palestinian don’t exist on this planet,” Sabreen Abu Libdeh, a college lecturer from Ramallah, tells Mondoweiss.
Israel’s “untenable occupation just goes on and on” and has “parallels” to apartheid, Rep. Jared Huffman of California reports after a visit to the country. But he says he got in an argument with Rep. Brad Schneider, who said that Palestinian prime minister Mohammed Shtayyeh offended American congresspeople by using the word “apartheid” and said Huffman and others should have taken the prime minister “to task” for using the word. Huffman said almost every Palestinian he met shares Shtayyeh’s view.
Israel wants to whitewash its history to alleviate its responsibility for the Palestinian plight. But this will never work because Palestinians will never forget who they are and where they come from.
A Google employee in California says she was relocated to Brazil after calling on the company to terminate its contract with the Israeli government.