How can you blame Zionist left political parties for embracing Israeli generals, despite their assorted war crimes, when Israeli human rights organizations are doing the same?

Even a scholar who opposes the label says, “Israel does not have a case against apartheid.” That is the power of the apartheid framing. The label for Israel has gained broad acceptance because of the widening awareness of the death of the Two State Solution — that Israel never really wanted a legitimate, contiguous Palestinian state. Because of American support for Israeli impunity, it may take years for the apartheid name and frame to achieve the result we are hoping for. But at least we now have a tool for organizing and persuasion of great potential potency, if we bang the apartheid drum often and loudly. 

CPAC’s rightwing gathering in Hungary this week was rightly criticized because of the ethnonationalist bigotry of Hungary’s prime minister. But the racist rhetoric Israeli politicians regularly deploy against Palestinians is not very different– they are a demographic threat or deserve another Nakba — and has helped to earn Israel the label of apartheid state. Democrats ought to heed the example, and stay away. But Biden is bound and determined to visit this summer.

Pro-Palestine activists have repeatedly been beaten back at Harvard, and sure enough, today the school paper’s endorsement of BDS is facing intense backlash. But this time round the pro-Israel arguments feel familiar, and have lost their bite. Faculty and alumni letters claim the endorsement will cause Jewish students to feel alienated. One alum warns angrily that Harvard will lose Iron Dome protection. Gosh.

The rightwing Israel lobby is enraged by the new report by the Special Rapporteur to the U.N. accusing Israel of “apartheid”– a “landmark moment of recognition of the lived reality of millions of Palestinians,” says Amnesty International. But J Street has had nothing to say about the report. It surely hopes it will go away, because these reports foster demands among progressives to actually do something about human rights violations beyond acknowledging their existence.

New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley used a fresh apartheid report, by U.N. special rapporteur Michael Lynk, to finally slip Amnesty International’s apartheid finding into the paper. Kingsley wrote that Lynk, a distinguished Canadian law professor appointed by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, had “accused Israel of committing the crime of apartheid in the occupied territories.” He quickly summarized Lynk’s finding, gave Israel’s foreign ministry and other critics a chance to respond — and then, right at the end, mentioned that Amnesty, among others, had produced a “similar” report.

Amnesty International USA Executive Director Paul O’Brien is being attacked by lawmakers for saying Israel “shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state.” 25 Jewish Congressmen put out a statement condemning the remarks as allegedly antisemitic. O’Brien “has added his name to the list of those who, across centuries, have tried to deny and usurp the Jewish people’s independent agency, the statement reads.

Israelis hope that their comprehensive military and economic alliance with the apartheid regime in South Africa is forgotten now that Amnesty International is leveling the apartheid accusation against Israel. But in 1976 Israelis were willing to ignore South African Premier John Vorster’s support for the Third Reich during World War II, which earned him imprisonment in Britain.

Brian J. Brown, a Methodist minister who was banned in his native South Africa in 1977 for anti-apartheid work, writes that apartheid in Israel/Palestine is in many ways more brutal than it was in his country, including checkpoints and barriers and expulsions. His new book says that recognition of that apartheid and total opposition to it is mandatory for any person or church that claims to follow Christian teachings.

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.”