In case you missed it, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic lately issued a report that finds Israel’s treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank amounts to the crime of apartheid. The study came out on February 28 in the wake of five longer, wider-ranging, apartheid reports published since 2020 – and just before the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine published yet another apartheid report on March 21. Despite its quiet rollout, the study’s high quality and association with Harvard likely mean it will play a significant role in establishing Israel’s apartheid, and represents a victory for Palestinian human rights.

Sahar Francis, the General Director of the Ramallah-based group Addameer, warns that the Israeli government’s efforts to undermine Palestinian civil society organizations may just be beginning.

Palestinian human rights activist Fadi Quran describes his detention by Homeland Security at the Dallas airport in October at the behest of the Israeli government as a supposed terrorist– a US lieutenant told Quran his hands were tied to interrogate Quran after an ally filed the claim. While Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace says the Biden administration will spend no energy on Palestinian rights.

The growing list of those who say Israel practices “apartheid” in occupied territories and west of the Green Line is joined by Michael Benyair, a former Israeli attorney general. But US advocates maintain a taboo on that word in the U.S. discourse, enforced by Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL and Rep. Ted Deutch.

More than 100 global foundations and donors, most of them U.S.-based, have signed on to an open letter expressing solidarity with Palestinian civil society after six leading human rights organizations were designated as so-called “terrorist organizations” by the Israeli military: “”As global funders of human rights and democracy, this attempt to ‘chill’ our funding and solidarity will not work. We stand with Palestinian civil society organizations and human rights defenders.”

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz is trying to ban leading Palestinian human rights groups as alleged “terrorist” groups and has bragged of bombing Gaza to “the stone age.” So why are Democrats Chris Coons and Steve Cohen meeting with him and standing for photo opps? They don’t want to be on the wrong side of the Israel lobby.

Great news. Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, a 25 year House veteran and co chair of the Human Rights Commission, issued a stiff letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying it is “urgent” matter for him to get past his “initial leeriness” and “firmly and unambiguously denounce” Israel’s hateful decree that six leading Palestinian human rights groups are “terrorist” organizations.

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.”

“The one thing that is common among these six organizations that have just been declared to be terrorist is that they have all been active, especially Al-Haq, in documenting and presenting dossiers to the International Criminal Court in the Hague regarding Israel’s violations of human rights,” and particularly of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza in 2014, led by Gantz, that killed more than 2200 Palestinians, the Palestinian-American lawyer Jonathan Kuttab, who co-founded Al-Haq said yesterday.

“[T]he occupation is not temporary, and there is not the political will in the Israeli government to bring about its end,” write Alon Liel and Ilan Baruch. “It is time for the world to recognize that what we saw in South Africa decades ago is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories too… and take decisive diplomatic action… and work towards building a future of equality, dignity, and security for Palestinians and Israelis alike.”