Rabbi Angela Buchdahl says she was “angry and embarrassed” that 94 rabbinical and cantatorial students wrote a letter accusing Israel of “violent suppression of human rights” and “apartheid” during its last Gaza onslaught, and said she would not “hire anyone who signed that letter.” Buchdahl was letting slip a policy that many Jewish organizations maintain, not to hire or give a platform to those who question Zionism.
The fifth day of the Palestinian prisoners’ escape from an Israeli prison has sparked joy, pride and resistance in Palestinians. Israelis have cracked down on the protests even as they pour troops into the West Bank to try to find the six escapees. A Palestinian doctor was killed near Al-Aqsa mosque today.
Progressive groups condemned Joe Biden’s embrace of Israeli PM Naftali Bennett yesterday and the president’s vow to continue military aid to Israel, with no reference to its apartheid policies against Palestinians. Israel’s advocates say that Bennett got everything that he wanted from the meeting, including a suggestion the U.S. would use force against Iran.
Israel’s Diaspora Minister Nachman Shai tells the American Jewish Committee: “if we see more of the radical left or the progressive liberal Jews continuing to support BDS and Black Lives Matter, as similar to the Palestinians, and they relate to Israel as a genocide state or an apartheid state, we may lose America.”
Palestinian citizens of Israel are 20 percent of the population. But not a single one was on Israel’s 90-member Olympic team. “Sports Apartheid” is the correct term for preventing 20 percent of your fellow citizens from competing internationally. What’s also amazing is that until now, no one in the U.S. mainstream press has even bothered to report on this injustice.
The Palestinian people have not only been fragmented by Israel, but also by its own corrupted leadership. It is up to grassroots activists and intellectuals to correct the capitulation of the Oslo elite.
More than 1000 academics, artists and intellectuals have signed a “Declaration on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid in Historic Palestine.” There used to be a mainstream prohibition on the word apartheid. In 2021, that logjam has broken. The world’s civil societies have had enough. Across countries and continents, across age groups and ethnicities, the marches, the manifestos, the opeds, the motions passed overwhelmingly have swelled into a torrent.
Ben & Jerry’s historic decision not to sell in occupied territories, and the fragile, response from Israeli leaders and their American enablers shows: The long-anticipated “tsunami” of international delegitimization of Israel has begun. And the dream of an Israeli F.W. De Klerk– the politician who leads the country away from apartheid — is a fantasy.
“We reject Israel’s apartheid system of laws and legal procedures,” the United Church of Christ stated at its general synod, in a resolution approved by 83 percent of members despite an appeal by the American Jewish Committee that the resolution should mention “Israel’s relentless pursuit of peace for 73 years.”
“You are very fat. And ugly,” an Israeli soldier says to a Palestinian woman as he raids her home in occupied Palestine May 13. While the same day another Israeli soldier shouts homophobic abuse at a household and threatens to rape a woman. Two new videos from the human rights group B’Tselem document its charge that Israel maintains an “apartheid regime”. While settlers hurl anti-Muslim racism as soldiers do nothing.