Omer Bar-Lev, a Laborite who is Israel’s police minister, recently visited a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and posted a video showing border police training at a staged set of Damascus Gate. The video is a colorful proof of the apartheid reality of Israel’s rule of Palestinians and shows that there will never be a two-state solution. Even leftleaning Jewish pols bend over backward to appease the settlers.
Israel postponed its eviction of the Salhiya family in Sheikh Jarrah to make way for a Palestinian school after international outrage apparently caught the government by surprise. But it’s a familiar pattern. Israel gets away with whatever ethnic cleansing it can get away with, until the resistance, international critique, or condemnation become loud enough for it to delay and use other methods towards the same end.
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid says that in 2022 the debate over Israeli apartheid will be “unprecedented in its venom and in its radioactivity,” and Israeli journalists repeat the claim without reviewing the facts.
If there was no other way to have Judaism exist without Apartheid Israel, I would have to go against Judaism, Jonathan Ofir writes. But that’s not the case. There is a way out. Judaism and Jews can exist without Apartheid – and therefore, I fight against Apartheid and for Judaism simultaneously.
Israel has just approved a plan to double the roughly 25,000 settlers on the occupied Syrian Golan heights. Because Biden refused to reverse Trump’s decision on the illegally-acquired territory. And because leftwing Meretz, a government coalition party, went along too, saying the matter was “complicated.” Only Ahmad Tibi says the truth: the Golan belongs to Syria.
After an Israeli official tells an American diplomat that the country will treat settler violence against Palestinians “severely,” Prime Minister Naftali Bennett leaps in to defend the settlers, his political base. “There are marginal elements in every community… but we must not generalize about an entire community.”
This Saturday, a Palestinian man stabbed an Israeli Jew close to the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem (inflicting moderate wounds). He then ran towards Border Police officers who shot him several times – notably twice when he was already laying on the ground, incapacitated. Politicians all over the mainstream political spectrum hailed the act of murder.
In 1656, Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish community excommunicated Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza for heresy. Today, the same community banned world-renowned Spinoza scholar trying to make a film about the philosopher.
A response to Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s designation of 6 Palestinian civil rights groups as terrorist. “I understand the people who hate us so much that they want to kill someone. I understand people who want to kill me – not as a person they know, but simply as a Jewish Israeli, a representative of the master race that terrorizes them daily.”
Within Israel, Apartheid is so deeply entrenched that dismantling it appears as viable as dismantling Zionism itself. But this is what needs to happen. In fact, abolishing Apartheid means abolishing Zionism and burying the idea of Jewish supremacy, which for all the sugar coating, stands at the core of Zionism itself.