Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, along with a coalition of other leading Palestinian civil society organizations, has released a new landmark report on Israeli apartheid, titled ‘Israeli Apartheid: Tool of Zionist Settler Colonialism’.
The new report explores apartheid as a “structural element of furthering Zionist settler colonialism” – a framework previously overlooked by international and Israeli human rights organizations in their own reports on Israeli apartheid.
The racial profiling is rampant before your eyes. I sauntered through Damascus Gate at midnight. The young Palestinian just behind me got stopped by soldiers demanding his i.d. card. Abuse and invective are normal here. Just look at the picture the racist Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir posted of the Palestinian politician Ahmad Tibi wheeling a suitcase in Ben Gurion airport. “Great news. Leave and don’t come back.”
The Israeli political system is set up to perpetuate apartheid, not end it. The results of this week’s election won’t change this.
Yom Kippur begins tonight and I reflect that the most prominent moral voice in the extended American Jewish community is today Rashida Tlaib. Young Jews look to her for the appropriate response to apartheid. She inspires us. At a time when virtually every establishment Jewish organization has abandoned any pretense to universal moral values, Tlaib has led the way.
For Democrats in the United States and the political “centrists” in Israel—represented by Joe Biden and Yair Lapid, respectively—the loss of credibility for the two-state solution has meant losing more and more support for Israeli policies. This helps explain the theater we have witnessed in recent days at the United Nations General Assembly and in the American media scene, where the lone Palestinian woman ever elected to Congress has come under unrelenting attack from her own party as well as the opposition.
Rashida Tlaib hit a nerve. It is obviously very important to the Israel lobby to maintain the claim that you can be progressive and support Israel. Being truthful about Israeli apartheid undermines this effort. Liberal Zionists are divided. J Street has condemned Tlaib’s comment. But like nearly all the Dems who attacked Tlaib, they didn’t even mention the apartheid part of her comment. Democrats don’t want to address it. They don’t want to engage with what Israel actually does and how Palestinians live.
In a move that could have far-reaching impact, the World Council of Churches agreed to study the issue of Israeli apartheid despite a German church’s attempt to block the decision.
Burayr is the site of a terrible massacre, in which about 125 farmers and their families were killed by hand grenades thrown at them in their homes by the Zionist militia (the Haganah). The village was torched and went up in flames. Burnt bodies were strewn in the streets.
The liberal Zionist organization J Street is adamantly opposed to BDS, the nonviolent boycott campaign targeting Israel, and proudly declares that it is “Pro-Israel.” But one of its student leaders evidently disagrees with the organization. Eliana Blumberg supports BDS and says that the effort to say that being “pro-Israel means being pro-democracy, not pro-apartheid” is “futile.”
Ran Greenstein argues that Palestinians will not be able to challenge Israel as an oppressive ethnonational state in the same manner that South Africans did.