Israeli politicians’ thin pretext for the latest attack on Gaza doesn’t add up, and the willing media doesn’t seem to care.

Amos Yadlin, a retired Israeli general who is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, praises onslaught on Gaza that killed 15 children as an “exceptional achievement.” Yadlin was protested at Harvard earlier this year. But he is excited now that PM Yair Lapid has passed the manhood test.

Merav Michaeli, leader of Israel’s Labor Party, taunts two million Palestinians who are under siege in Gaza: “No sovereign state would accept a siege on its residents by a terror organization.” She is showing that the “change” government in Israel can be as good at “mowing the lawn” — which means killing civilians who have nowhere to flee in Gaza– as Netanyahu so that it can hold him off in the November election.

The successful effort by the Israeli government and its American friends to overturn the Ben & Jerry’s boycott of the settlements as a supposed “antisemitic” action shows that it is pointless for activists to selectively boycott the illegal settlements. No– boycotts should be aimed at Israel. There is no such thing as a good Israel on one side of the Green Line and a bad one in the occupation. It is all one apartheid state.

Support for apartheid is the one thing that unifies Israeli Jewish parties. The prime minister likens the separate-and-unequal law in the West Bank to Solomon’s baby, while the leader of the left Zionist Meretz Party says that a Palestinian colleague who voted against extending the law “was malicious and unfair… despicable.”

The Bennett/Lapid “government of change” has collapsed under pressure from Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party. New elections are set for October, but there is no alternative to apartheid on the Israeli horizon.

The context behind Israeli government minister Matan Kahana’s shocking statement that he would like to send all Palestinians “to Switzerland” deserves close scrutiny, because it proves it was not a mere slip of the tongue and actually reflects an Israeli consensus.

The Palestinian towns of Iqrit and Birim in the Galilee were destroyed by the Israeli army in the 1950s so as to prevent Palestinian villagers from returning under a court order. The case haunts Israeli government to this day, as Rinawie Zoabi, a Palestinian lawmaker in Meretz, demands the return of the residents as a condition of her staying in the coalition. But Foreign Minister Yair Lapid is having none of it.

In a dramatic day for the Israeli parliament, legislators failed to renew the extension of an emergency order that affords Jewish Israeli settlers in the West Bank civil governance, while Palestinians in the same area are governed by military rule. This is one of the most blatant Apartheid laws, regularly renewed every five years since Israel began its 1967 occupation. When Palestinian lawmaker Mazen Ghanaim voted against it Nir Orbach of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s party charged at him and shouted that “the experiment with you has failed!” “You” is of course Palestinians in general, and the experiment is the idea of including Palestinians in government.

“The army and the settlement enterprise are one and the same” — a general in Israel’s occupying army says the quiet part about Zionism out loud. It has always been a messianic religious movement to establish Jewish supremacy in as much land as it can conquer. Gen. Roy Zweig was later reprimanded for speaking out, on Jerusalem Day.