Ron DeSantis visited Israel four times in recent years — the sum total of his official foreign visits. He’s trying to put Trump and the Democrats in a bind on blind support for the “Jewish state.”

Human Rights Watch’s Omar Shakir tells Mondoweiss, “Though there has been a shift in the narrative that is discernible, we actually have to translate that into action to dismantle apartheid.”

An NPR report on Israel’s killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist, makes clear that Israel is withholding information from the public 6 weeks later. “The army declined to answer NPR’s questions about what the suspected soldier told investigators, what orders soldiers were given, and what footage the army has of the incident.”

Liberal Zionists Aaron David Miller, Daniel Kurtzer, and Eric Alterman are surely afraid that Israel will be ostracized in the manner that South Africa was due to the Human Rights Watch report finding the crime of apartheid. And their response is, Israel is nothing like South Africa, and cannot be ostracized.

The very political Human Rights Watch report finding that Israel commits the crime of “apartheid” is a response to recent events in Israel: passage of the racist Nation State law in 2018 and rightwing leaders dismissal of the idea of a Palestinian state. The report regretfully informs liberal westerners that there will not be a Palestinian state, and the state that does exist in the land is not a “Jewish democracy.” That news is the report’s largest political lesson.

The State Department briefing is turning into a forum for reporters who are impatient with the charade of a two-state solution. Said Arikat asks what the US is doing about his cousin Ahmed Erekat’s killing at an Israeli military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank last June, and the “torment” of his family because Israel won’t release Ahmed’s body.