B’Tselem published a video today of a disturbing incident in Hebron on September 3 in which Israeli soldiers raided the home of an extended Palestinian family at about 8 PM and forced a dozen children, some of whom were sleeping, to line up for a photograph.
Most children in Gaza experience PTSD, and this has also impacted the children in Ahmed Dremly’s family, as he watches his young cousin, Little Mansour, struggle to cope with the loss of his grandfather.
In a new report, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem detailed the harrowing tale of a Palestinian teenager who was kidnapped and tortured by a group of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank this summer. The youth was burned, beaten, and handed over to Israeli soldiers unconscious.
New video footage released by B’Tselem of the moment that Israeli soldiers opened fire on a Palestinian family’s car, killing their 11-year-old son, contradicts the army’s accounts of the events.
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.
“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.
“[T]he occupation is not temporary, and there is not the political will in the Israeli government to bring about its end,” write Alon Liel and Ilan Baruch. “It is time for the world to recognize that what we saw in South Africa decades ago is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories too… and take decisive diplomatic action… and work towards building a future of equality, dignity, and security for Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
An important difference between apartheid in South Africa and Israel is that South Africans openly embraced white supremacy as law and apartheid. In the case of Zionism, the untruth of inequality is anything but transparent. It has been disguised and denied by a relentless barrage of shifting alibis, exculpations, mitigations, as well as heavy demonization of critics.
Israel just wiped out entire families in Gaza in the name of apartheid. So this is not the time to tone down the “rhetoric” about Israel in the west. This is precisely the time to articulate these grave matters. These are not petty matters – these are crimes against humanity.