Apartheid is the fruit of Zionism, and the Israeli “left” will never be able to save their democracy until they overturn the fundamental inequality of their society.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken should publicize Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s call for a Palestinian village to be “erased” and use his global “megaphone” to discredit Smotrich, says Tom Friedman of the NYT. But Chuck Schumer is yucking it up with Netanyahu to please American Jews.
The media hypes threats by industry to leave Israel over Netanyahu’s “judicial coup.” But Palestinians have demanded divestment for years without press. The double standard shows anti-Palestinianism.
The Biden administration is determined not to criticize the extremist Israeli government even in the wake of settler terrorism licensed by officials. It wants no daylight between Democrats and Republicans on Israel.
The U.S. Ambassador to Israel says West Bank Palestinians can’t have equal rights because it would end the Jewish state, and his “biggest fear” is that Israel has “lost the narrative” on U.S. campuses.
The Israeli government’s moves to hamstring the judiciary and to steal more Palestinian land for Jewish settlements are causing further breakup in the pro-Israel consensus in the United States.
Two years ago, Israeli soldiers in the West Bank shot Harun Abu Aram as he protected his family’s generator. This week Harun died from his injuries, a great martyr to the cause of Palestinian steadfastness.
An Israeli government body that represents 72,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank has published a map of its jurisdiction that shows only Jewish settlements– simply removing scores of Palestinian villages and the cities of Ramallah and al-Bireh. The map was published by the Binyamin Regional Council on a webpage titled “Build Your Future With Us” that is designed to attract American Jews to move to “northern Jerusalem suburbs.”
My friend the late writer Yossi Gurvitz was an apikoros in the best sense of the word, the Jewish term for a freethinker. His heresy led him to support BDS. Educated in yeshivas, he broke out as a teen when he discovered Plutarch, reading real not bible history. That independence led him in time to become “Israel’s first serious anti-occupation blogger” and to point out the vicious ethnocentrism in the basement of Jewish religiosity that Israel was awakening– “and every demon that was pushed into the basement is up and has an M16.”