Omer Bar-Lev, a Laborite who is Israel’s police minister, recently visited a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and posted a video showing border police training at a staged set of Damascus Gate. The video is a colorful proof of the apartheid reality of Israel’s rule of Palestinians and shows that there will never be a two-state solution. Even leftleaning Jewish pols bend over backward to appease the settlers.
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid says that in 2022 the debate over Israeli apartheid will be “unprecedented in its venom and in its radioactivity,” and Israeli journalists repeat the claim without reviewing the facts.
If there was no other way to have Judaism exist without Apartheid Israel, I would have to go against Judaism, Jonathan Ofir writes. But that’s not the case. There is a way out. Judaism and Jews can exist without Apartheid – and therefore, I fight against Apartheid and for Judaism simultaneously.
What does the end of South African apartheid tell us about how Israeli apartheid can end? That sanctions on Israel are required, and that a civil society mass movement is the only way to get there.
2021 was a watershed year for Palestinians. The struggle for Palestinian freedom and liberation saw unprecedented levels of global solidarity and unity amongst Palestinians despite their forced fragmentation. The year did not come without its challenges, however.
When a former Jewish professional asked David Harris of the AJC about the emotional drain on people like herself of advocating for Israel with young people who don’t buy the story, the tonedeaf CEO responded: I live in a bubble… My grandchildren all are proud of Israel… And the Polish national anthem is pessimistic but the Israeli one is called “Hope.”
Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken: “The product of Zionism, the State of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic state, but has instead become an apartheid state, plain and simple.”
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.
B’Tselem published a video today of a disturbing incident in Hebron on September 3 in which Israeli soldiers raided the home of an extended Palestinian family at about 8 PM and forced a dozen children, some of whom were sleeping, to line up for a photograph.
Even the apartheid regime in South Africa never outlawed human rights defenders in the manner that Israel just did when it declared six Palestinian organizations to be “terrorist organizations.” South Africa sought to maintain a reputation that it respected the Rule of Law. Israel knows that it need not worry about its image because the West will not take action against it for any wrongdoing — in the name of Israeli exceptionalism.