Israel’s new government has cemented apartheid with the annexation of the West Bank and Biden doesn’t care; but American Jews who thrive in a secular democracy should be outraged by what is done in their name.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich published a shocking plan in 2017 to advance Israeli apartheid. Now that it is being put into action veteran journalist Ron Ben-Yishai finally recognizes the danger.
The past month has been nothing less than traumatic for the Palestinian people.
The massacre in Jenin, ongoing invasions, arrests, home demolitions; 36 people have been killed, eight of them children. Adam Ayyad, 15, was aware that a Palestinian under Israeli apartheid is always a potential target. The handwritten will he carried in his pocket the day he was shot began with the following words: “There were a lot of things I wished I could do, but we live in a country where realizing your dreams is impossible.”
Palestinians are enduring the rise to power of one of the most brazenly racist and brutal governments in the Israeli state’s history. But, however grim the reality looks for Palestinians, this may also be the moment of change.
The use of the word apartheid to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians just keeps growing. David Rothkopf, the former editor of Foreign Policy, baldly states that Israel is an apartheid state in a piece published by Haaretz last weekend.
The “demise” of the two state solution has made it untenable not to talk about Israeli apartheid, even inside the Washington establishment.
Calls for sanctions and BDS against Israel in the wake of its new government’s “bold” actions against Palestinians are causing that government to dig in. Netanyahu ally Danny Danon called on the United States to block any UN Security Council resolution against provocative Israeli actions at the holy sites in Jerusalem. While Netanyahu minister Amichai Chikli accused Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid of being the “spearhead of the BDS movement.”
2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in decades. We kept a record of all those who were killed by Israeli state and settler violence. These are their names, faces, and stories.
Eighteen years after the ICJ’s 2004 Advisory Opinion on the legality of the separation wall, the ICJ is now weighing in on the legality of the occupation itself.
“Unlike the Wall Advisory Opinion, which focused on a comparatively narrow set of factual and temporal circumstances […] the requested advisory opinion would entail an evaluation of the legality of Israel’s occupation as a whole,” Anna-Christina Schmidl, a staff member with Diakonia, told Mondoweiss.
Such an opinion would focus on “the impact of ‘colonial domination, alien subjugation and foreign occupation’, on the right to self-determination, and thus go to the very heart of the principles upon which the United Nations was founded.”
2022 was a moment of truth.
The year laid bare the political reality in Palestine from the river to the sea, dispelling any illusions that we may have had about the nature of “the conflict,” as it has been glibly called by the mainstream media. Two such illusions can be discarded immediately — for Palestinians, that the Palestinian Authority’s collaborationism can be maintained indefinitely, and for the Israeli state, that Zionism is anything other than a settler-colonial project that must constantly be at war with the Palestinian people.
Every year thousands of Christians from around the world travel to Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas. But just 46 miles away, an entire community of Palestinian Christians is banned from traveling to the city, even for the holidays.
It is surely shocking to hear advertisements for racial separation in an American progressive space, but last weekend’s J Street conference featured an Israeli politician, Yair Golan, offering just that as the only solution to the Palestinian problem: Israel must preserve the Zionist “dream” by separating from the Palestinian people and maintaining a “solid Jewish majority–and we need to admit that.”