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.
Former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy told the U.N. Security Council this week that the two-state solution is over. “75 years ago, this United Nations offered partition as the political paradigm for the Holy Land. Today that land is de facto united under one dominion.” And it’s apartheid. And influential Jewish organizations who denounce such allegations as antisemitic are a “threat to freedom,” Peter Beinart writes in the New York Times.
In the West Bank there is “apartheid by design,” two laws for two peoples, as the Amnesty report says. But inside Israel the situation is more complex, where Palestinians participate in non-segregated institutions, Tony Klug argues. “The Amnesty report calls for an end to apartheid, but absurdly does not call for an end to occupation. Yet the paramount need now is for a worldwide campaign to end the occupation.”
In May 2022 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled to expel the Palestinians living in the South Hebron Hills of the occupied West Bank and hand their land over to the Israeli military. Meet the Palestinians fighting to stay in their homes and resist what rights groups are calling a war crime under international law.
Tonight’s Michigan primary is historic. The war between two branches of the Israel lobby, AIPAC and J Street, will break out in the sunlight in the race between Andy Levin and Haley Stevens for a Congressional seat. And it looks like the rightwing Israel lobby will win the battle, not the war. Hillary Clinton endorsed Stevens over Levin in Michigan because she knows that AIPAC’s money is key to the Democratic Party. But Rashida Tlaib has supported Levin because the Democratic Party rank and file want aid to Israel conditioned over its human rights abuses.
Today we are witness to what can only be described as the unstoppable momentum of church opposition to Israel’s program of discrimination, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing. Together with the BDS call, the Kairos call from Palestinian churches has awakened the global church to the urgency of the Palestinian plight and to the theological imperative to act.
UN Human Rights Commissioner Miloon Kothari explains why Apartheid is a useful paradigm but not enough to explain the root causes of the Palestinian crisis.
Meet Francesca Albanese, the UN’s new Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory
In a decisive vote, 266-116, commissioners attending last week’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) approved a resolution titled, “On Recognition That Israel’s Laws, Policies, and Practices Constitute Apartheid Against the Palestinian People.”