Author

Jonathan Ofir

Browsing

Witnessing a wave of public calls for action, western governments and institutions have enacted sweeping boycotts and cancellations of Russian artists and Russian products over the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. But for many years the Palestinian BDS call has been rejected by European governments and U.S. states despite public support and the reports of human rights groups. If supermarkets removed Israeli products and theaters canceled performances by those who vocally support Israeli actions, we would hear the actions denounced as antisemitic for “singling out the Jewish state.”

In 2015, a Palestinian woman was raped and sodomized by Israeli soldiers under orders from high-ranking army and Shin Bet commanders. The horrible case exemplifies Israeli apartheid.

A new documentary featuring at Sundance this weekend demolishes the official denial of the Tantura massacre, when more than 200 Palestinians in a seaside community were gunned down by a Zionist militia days after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Members of the militia were successful in 2000 in quashing a crusading academic’s documentation of the atrocities.

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.

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.”