Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom does the right thing for J Street at Passover by admitting that the Tantura massacre of Palestinians took place in the early days of Israel’s existence. But he cannot acknowledge that Israel was then and is now an apartheid state that continues to push Palestinians out of their homes. The rabbi’s view that “Israel’s challenge is to reclaim the ‘child we prayed for'” is simply a delusion, especially in light of rightwing governments that are all committed to maintaining military occupation.

Idit Silman has quit the Israeli government saying she “will not abet the harming of the Jewish identity of the State of Israel.” Her issue? Allowing leavened bread in hospitals.

There is one angle of the Ukrainian crisis that may turn out to boost Israel’s legitimacy and bolster its international impunity – weapons.

Israel’s rightwing parliament overwhelmingly passed a permanent law barring the naturalization of Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza married to Israeli citizens yesterday. The law in earlier forms has been cited as an “apartheid” law by human rights organizations, but even Israeli centrists voted for it with “a heavy heart.” While the Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked celebrated the law as a triumph of the Jewish state.

Israel is now walking a tightrope above very unpredictable waters of public opinion in the west. The overwhelming wave of opposition to Russian aggression is justifying boycott, divestment and sanctions as well as resistance as responses to the Russian military occupation, measures for which Palestinians have vainly sought western approval. And meanwhile, Israel is playing footsie with Russia so as to maintain its freedom to conduct missile attacks in Syria against Iranian targets.

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.