Question for John Kerry — You say the US has provided Israel the ‘protection of legitimacy’. Why does it need so much protection? Is it because the world hates it? Or is it because it actually enacts illegitimate policy?

Israeli opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog said the UN resolution passed last week “seriously harms our capital Jerusalem, the settlement blocs and Israel’s status and diplomatic achievements accumulated over the years,” thereby expressing the strong Labor Zionist support for the illegal colonization project.

British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the UK is formally adopting a definition of anti-Semitism agreed to earlier this year by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Many of the definitions would bar criticisms of Israel that even Jewish Israeli critics have made, like likening Israeli conduct to that of Nazis.

The Torah command, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is thought to be a Jewish gift to civilization. In fact, there are so many requirements for who your neighbor is as to render the teaching meaningless in a tribal society.

At Texas A&M, alt-right leader Richard Spencer praises Israel for its intrinsically racist and exclusionist policies, and Hillel Rabbi Matt Rosenberg has no answer. No Zionist can have one, and no wonder Israel’s defenders are queasy these days.

Opposition to intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in Israel is not confined to the far right. State funds support a shelter to “rescue” Jewish women who are married to “Arabs,” and the idea of conversion is linked to annihilation and betrayal in Hebrew tradition.

A call for boycott of the Israeli settlements by liberal Zionists including Michael Walzer, Peter Beinart, and Kai Bird in the New York Review of Books shatters a traditional taboo on such measures; and we should do everything to foster this debate and point out the limitations of actions that don’t target the state that promotes these settlements.

Israeli new historian Benny Morris writes himself into a scholary cul-de-sac by stating that there was “no ethnic cleansing” by Zionist forces in 1948, after he stated in a 2004 interview that it was “ethnic cleansing” and it was necessary and didn’t go far enough to make peace.

Israel is not an occupier, says Israel’s former ambassador to Canada, Peter Baker. But the history of Israeli expansion since 1948 could not be clearer: it seeks more and more land with as few Arabs on it as possible, and destroys not just the villages but the memory of those places.

Twice in the last ten days, the Netanyahu government has adopted a new spin-strategy: taking the term “ethnic cleansing”, which the world has increasingly become aware that Israel enacts, and turning it against its Palestinian victims.