From US government officials, to our biggest news broadcasters, and social media networks, Ukrainians were being applauded as heroes for going to whatever lengths to protect their land. The same exact things that Palestinians are labelled as terrorists for, imprisoned, and even killed.

“The Zionist left is the real enemy of freedom, of fighting the occupation in Israel, much more than the right wing is,” says Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy. “They are the founding fathers for the settlement project. Who started it? Netanyahu, Begin, Sharon? No no no no no! Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin– Nobel Peace Prize winners, peacemakers– they are responsible. They also enable us Israelis to feel so good about ourselves. Because they were always the laundry of any crime. We have this prestigious, world-famous Supreme Court, this castle of liberalism and freedom, part of the Zionist left, and this Supreme Court enabled any crime of war, from the settlements to the tortures, everything went through the Supreme Court and everything was washed there, and it was accepted. If the Supreme Court says there are no torturing or the settlements are legal– so who are we to say or to think different?”

In 2015, a Palestinian woman was raped and sodomized by Israeli soldiers under orders from high-ranking army and Shin Bet commanders. The horrible case exemplifies Israeli apartheid.

The Israeli spyware firm NSO Group was blacklisted by Biden administration because foreign governments were using its products to surveil academics, journalists and human rights activists. A top Israeli defense official has said that Israel encouraged the exports because they served the national interest. At a closed conference the official said, “We should have defended NSO rather than caving to the Americans.” –From the media watch by JVP’s Health Advisory Council.

Mainstream media are at last humanizing Palestinians with great potential political consequences. Ali Velshi of MSNBC met the Palestinian activist Hajj Suleiman in 2019 and when Israel killed him last week, Velshi honored his resistance with a searing report describing an Israeli occupation of nearly 700,000 illegal settlers encroaching on traditional villages and destroying their bread ovens.

Omer Bar-Lev, a Laborite who is Israel’s police minister, recently visited a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and posted a video showing border police training at a staged set of Damascus Gate. The video is a colorful proof of the apartheid reality of Israel’s rule of Palestinians and shows that there will never be a two-state solution. Even leftleaning Jewish pols bend over backward to appease the settlers.

Israel postponed its eviction of the Salhiya family in Sheikh Jarrah to make way for a Palestinian school after international outrage apparently caught the government by surprise. But it’s a familiar pattern. Israel gets away with whatever ethnic cleansing it can get away with, until the resistance, international critique, or condemnation become loud enough for it to delay and use other methods towards the same end.

The Dutch Government lately deferred to the Israeli government in deciding to defund the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, a leading Palestinian civil society group, because its failure to screen its staff and board on the grounds of their political opinion and affiliation is considered “undesirable” and displays a “lack of candour” by the organisation. That is the sole basis put forward by the Dutch government to terminate funding which started in 2007.

Rabbi Michael Davis sought to further his Arabic studies by visiting his teacher in Hebron. She took him to the armed Jewish-Israeli settler encampment in the heart of the Palestinian city. “Despite the show of military force, the hospitality of my hosts reminded me: an outstretched hand provides greater security than all the guns in the world.”

Let’s hope 2022 is the year that the grassroots break down the firewall in Washington on the death of the two-state solution. Liberal Zionists are the gatekeepers, and are preventing the discourse of apartheid and a struggle for human rights of replacing the political mantra of a secure homeland for the Jewish people.