That letter initiated by Israeli scholars calling out American Jewish leaders for supporting “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “Jewish supremacy” is getting more and more signatures, 1,600 and counting in ten days, and it is sparking media attention.
The Jewish letter is giving the media cover to speak a heresy– Israeli apartheid.
In the Washington Post, Ishaan Tharoor writes that the “elephant in the room” is the “’regime of apartheid’ that prevails for Palestinians living under Israeli control.”
And it offers yet more evidence of a shifting discourse on Israel among even some of the Jewish state’s staunchest supporters in the United States.
Tharoor quotes Brown University historian Omer Bartov, who was born and raised in Israel.
“You can call me a self-hating Jew, call me an antisemite,” Bartov responds. “People use those terms to cover up the reality, either to deceive themselves or to deceive others. You have to look at what’s happening on the ground.”
The letter had a similar effect on MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan in a segment broadcast last Sunday. Describing the letter as “a very major intervention,” Hasan tracked the trendiness of the apartheid designation and gave a speech about the hypocrisy over apartheid in the U.S. Democratic establishment.
Let’s talk about the a-word. For years now anyone accusing the state of Israel of being guilty of apartheid in its treatment of Palestinians has been immediately condemned as an antisemite, an Israel-hater, someone who doesn’t understand what apartheid even is… The Anti-Defamation League says that the apartheid label is inaccurate and offensive….
And yet now with a government in Israel that is demonstrably far right and openly racist, increasing numbers of Israelis and American Jews are starting to use the a-word…
The tragedy however is that while former Israeli generals and liberal Israeli journalists finally come around to seeing how badly the Palestinians have been mistreated, and how that mistreatment meets the definition of apartheid under international law, according to a plethora of leading human rights groups, we have liberal Democrats from the United States including House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries turning up in Israel this week with the rightwing lobby group AIPAC to reaffirm the special relationship, to praise Israeli democracy while ignoring the protesters in the streets, and to do fawning photo ops with Benjamin Netanyahu…
In years to come, we will say these Democrats were on the wrong side of history.
Hasan then hosted Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street. Ben-Ami has denied that Israel practices apartheid. But he tacitly accepted Hasan’s characterization of the “apartheid” letter:
Its a very major intervention, and it’s really true, how can you possibly talk about democracy if you are not talking about the rights of millions of Palestinians who are living under Israeli control without the right to vote, the right to water, the right to build in their own communities, property rights, all the essentials of having equal rights to your neighbor who is of a different racial and ethnic background.
And that’s what’s missing on the West Bank and you can’t fight for democracy if you aren’t fighting against occupation.
That comes pretty close to an apartheid accusation. J Street later tweeted the comment without citing the apartheid framing from Hasan.
Hasan went on to criticize the Hakeem Jeffries-led trip by 24 Democratic congresspeople to Israel for praising Israel’s “democracy,” while failing to meet the Israeli protesters. “It’s not just a bad look, that’s indefensible.”
Ben-Ami offered a backhanded defense of the Democrats, saying that Republicans also don’t go to the West Bank. He said the problem was the influence of money in American politics. AIPAC represents “a small percentage of the American Jewish community but they hold a great deal of power,” because of money.
P.S. The American Jewish Committee has recently published a defense of Israel from various “lies” told in social media and on college campuses. “For more on why Israel is nothing like apartheid South Africa,” the AJC writes, go to South African-born Israeli author Benjamin Pogrund’s “compelling piece” in the New York Times in 2017.
But Pogrund wrote last week that he had changed his mind, in part due to the 2018 Nation State Law that grants Jews the exclusive right of self-determination in the land of Israel. So Pogrund now believes Israel practices apartheid, as Hasan pointed out.
So even the American Jewish Committee’s experts are turning on it!
There is some humor to be found in the whole phenomenon of people tentatively dancing around the obvious, looking over their shoulders to see if it’s ok to state the self-evident.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/departing-eu-envoy-i-wont-accuse-israel-of-apartheid-but-its-worthy-of-discussion/
“Departing EU envoy: I won’t accuse Israel of apartheid, but it’s worthy of discussion…Israel sparred with Kühn von Burgsdorff throughout his three-and-a-half-year tenure leading the EU mission in East Jerusalem, as the 65-year-old German-born diplomat regularly used his platform to highlight the Palestinian plight…He has gone further in his criticism of Israel than just about any Western representative…At a May event hosted by his mission to mark Europe Day, he told the hundreds in attendance that “growing concern about what more and more people around the world see as the crime of apartheid will keep the unresolved Palestinian cause on the international agenda.”…Kühn von Burgsdorff avoided saying whether he thinks the politically charged term accurately describes the reality in the West Bank, but in a wide-ranging interview with The Times of Israel, he did insist that “one should not suppress the discussion of whether what we’re seeing on the ground constitutes the crime of apartheid.” “
It’s not apartheid yet, but maybe we should discuss it!
Meanwhile, at the NYT, it’s good to see Friedman’s latest article being torn apart by readers’ comments. The most recommended comment ridicules his idiotic anecdote about a friend of his having to wait until an ultra-Orthodox nurse went off shift before he could help his wife during labour as an example of how tolerant Israeli society is.
Make no mistake. Ben-Ami basically spelled out the word Apartheid (like a hostage blinking in Morse code) while he was describing the reality and actions of Apartheid in Israel. J-Street knows it’s Apartheid and have now walked right up the line in the sand and stuck a flag in the ground. The problem is, like so many things when it comes to Israel, all about money. J-Street has backers too, and those main backers clearly just aren’t quite there yet with them in terms of crossing that line. The operative word being “yet”.
Thing is, time is simply not on Israel’s side. The most wealthy and prolific backers of the Apartheid state are old now. Like REALLY old. The average age of these ‘whales’ has got to be close to 80. Just browsing through a recent list of 25 top Jewish donors, maybe 2-3 were under 70. With a few in their 90s. Statistically speaking that means in the next 10-20 years, most of them will be pushing up daisies. Sure, some of their less ideological children might take up the torch and do their best to prop up the regime and its enablers in the US. But it’ll be Sodastream Cola in comparison to the real deal Coca-Cola, and those millions will be watered down into hundreds, maybe only tens of thousands instead. When that money inevitably starts drying up, so will the iron wall of support for Apartheid Israel. Almost overnight, a whole new (and old) generation of groups, media, and politicians will rediscover their backbone when they discover the spigots have been turned off and the that the Emperor is still not wearing any clothes.
Sooner or later a very dear price is to be paid by israel.
Ah, Hakeem, Hakeem! An Arab friend of mine just informed me that Hakeem in Arabic means ‘wise one’. Whoops! Better he should be named Ahbal, which in Arabic means ‘stupid’.
I’m not so sure he’s stupid as much as he is nakedly opportunistic, much like Bakari Sellers (Sellout) and Ritchie Torres. These are Black men that are dedicated to climbing the political ladder by any means necessary, including selling their souls to the Zionist lobby – no matter how many dead Palestinians they have to climb over to reach the top!