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.
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.
Biden will have little choice but to turn up the heat on Israel for human rights violations given shift in establishment opinion in DC and mass movement to address racial inequities in U.S. And human rights group B’Tselem’s recent report that Israel is an apartheid regime will soon be echoed by a global human rights organization, according to a Carnegie Endowment panel.
Israel watchers are predicting a government openly committed to one “Jewish” state between river and sea, with no interest in allowing even a shadow of Palestinian sovereignty in the occupied territories. Indeed, the Israeli “center” and “left” are shattered, and the possibility exists that the Labor party that founded the state will disappear from the parliament in the next election.
Netanyahu will go forward with annexation once he sorts out the battle over its dimensions within the rightwing Israeli camp. Then he will unleash Sheldon Adelson to bring it to the White House and any thought Jared Kushner will stop it — do you believe Alice in Wonderland? The insights of Daniel Levy of the Middle East Project.
Palestinians in Israel are far more liberal than Jews. Nearly 90 percent say they would support a Palestinian party being part of the government, while Israeli Jews reject that idea overwhelmingly. So the one group that doesn’t buy into Zionism is the only hope to save Israel from its rightwing intolerance; and it is time that American Jews understand that reality.