A leading American human rights group will declare this week that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, according to the Algemeiner website. The Human Rights Watch report titled, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” is said to accuse Israel of practicing apartheid appears to be part of a trend in which mainstream organizations come out for an end to Israeli impunity. It follows Carnegie Endowment call on governments to pressure Israel to give Palestinians equal rights.

COVID-19 did not invent systematic injustice, but it has exposed and sharpened injustices already there. Israel’s refusal to vaccinate Palestinians is but the latest chapter of its decades-long practice of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and, of course, apartheid against the Palestinian people. The U.S. is itself a settler-colony with centuries of systematic racism to its name, and the tolls of COVID-19 remain systematically centered around Indigenous, Black and brown people. There is a name for this, and it’s medical apartheid. It’s time to take a stand to end all military funding to an apartheid regime overseas and to demand the end to apartheid right here.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s denunciation of disparities in medical access in the U.S. will sound hollow if he accepts the Dan David Prize from Israel, a country that is denying people under its illegal military occupation access to life-saving vaccines while bribing allies with the extra doses.

Anthony Fauci has been awarded a $1 million Israeli prize to be given in May. Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council doubts he would have been an apologist for South African apartheid. “We urge you to decline the prize and to respect the call for a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions. This call was issued by Palestinians who are most affected by Israeli policy.”

Many seem to see Netanyahu as an illiberal, corrupt, anti-democratic leader. But we must also see, that he is part of a regime that itself is illiberal, corrupt and anti-democratic. It’s always been the case. Who is the new hope? Gideon Sa’ar who is even to the right of Netanyahu? Naftali Bennett who is even to the right of Sa’ar? Or Yair Lapid, who is to their left, alas with the “principle” which says “maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians”?

Tom Friedman says that Israel and the US are in the same boat, trying to build “pluralistic.. idealistic” societies. This is a rhetorical strategy to suppress the apartheid charge against Israel from a leading human rights group. And Friedman has freely acknowledged that his job entails promoting Israel. “Israel had me at hello,” he has said.

Racist violence is not natural or everlasting. Last year, millions took to the streets around the world to protest systematic racism and inequality. Israeli Apartheid Week seeks to continue that effort to rebuild our society from the ground up.

The two elections in Israel and Palestine this spring are meaningless because they only reinforce an unequal structure in which Jewish nationalists contend on one side, Israel, and dictate the terms of the election to the subject population in occupied Palestine. And that’s the news. There’s no news under the burning sun of the Apartheid state.

The immediate and urgent task is to move international solidarity for Palestine beyond the grassroots and implement the S section of the BDS call — sanctions against apartheid Israel until it complies with international law.

Palestinians are wondering why, after seven weeks, the New York Times hasn’t published a single word on B’Tselem’s landmark “apartheid” report.