As the word “apartheid” grows in popularity to describe Israeli oppression of Palestinians it is helpful to revisit another concept defined in the mid 20th century: genocide.
Leading Israeli human rights attorney Michael Sfard responds to South Africa’s Chief Rabbi Zeev Warren Goldstein, who recently argued that the term “apartheid” should only apply to South Africa.
The percentage of scholars who believe that Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory constitute one state “akin to apartheid” jumped from 59 percent to 65 percent following reports by two leading human rights organizations stating as much.
Two Palestinian teenagers were killed by Israeli gunfire in the span of just a few days in the occupied West Bank, bringing the death toll of Palestinian youth killed by Israel in 2021 to 77.
The New York Times’s Mideast expert Thomas Friedman blames the Palestinian uprising on Tik-Tok vidoes rather than on the racist landgrabs by Israel that Palestinians have resisted for decades and that are at the heart of the Human Rights Watch report that the New York Times is determined to flush down the memory hole.
US media bury the truth of Palestinian protests in Jerusalem: Israeli leaders aim to seize homes in Sheikh Jarrah in a naked colonization strategy: “the way to secure the future of Jerusalem as a Jewish capital for the Jewish people,” as one apartheid advocate who happens to be the deputy mayor of Jerusalem told the New York Times.
Normally, the New York Times trusts Human Rights Watch and relies on the organization often. But the Times’s respectful view disappeared suddenly yesterday — after Human Rights Watch released a landmark report finding that “Israeli officials have committed the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.” The paper’s slanted report quotes two people in support of the finding, one of them Palestinian, and five people attacking the charge. Imagine writing a report on apartheid South Africa and quoting only one black South African.
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has labeled Israel as an ‘apartheid regime’ for the first time in the group’s 30 year history of documenting human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. “What happens in the Occupied Territories can no longer be treated as separate from the reality in the entire area under Israel’s control,” B’Tselem says. “The terms we have used in recent years to describe the situation – such as “prolonged occupation” or a “one-state reality” – are no longer adequate.”
“How do 3 million West Bank Palestinians feel about the fact that their ‘neighbors,’ several hundred thousand Jewish settlers, are getting vaccinated and they are not?” The New York Times is unable to ask that simple question about apartheid in an article gushing over Israel’s rollout of vaccinations.