American media and politicians underplay how rightwing Israel is in order to salute it as a robust democracy. The reality is that Israeli politicians are under “brutal” pressure from the right– and legislator Idit Silman stepped down from the coalition government this month because she was getting physically attacked and threatened on the street for her participation in a government that wasn’t vocal enough in its support for “Judea and Samaria,” biblical terms for the West Bank.
The Illinois state investment board voted to divest from Unilever because its subsidiary Ben & Jerry’s has decided to stop selling in occupied Palestinian territories. “We find the IIPB’s punitive actions against companies exercising their free speech rights to engage in boycott to be patently unjust,” write a group of Illinois rabbis and cantors.
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.
If the U.N. appears to single Israel out, it is because the country owes its existence to that body and has repeatedly defied principles it agreed to when it gained membership at the U.N. “The failure to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace remains for the UN a deep internal wound as old as the organization itself, (…) a painful and festering sore consequently felt in almost every intergovernmental organ and Secretariat body,” Kofi Annan said.
The Biden administration will continue to issue “strong” condemnations of Israeli settlements but do nothing to confront Israel because it does not want to make Palestine a political issue in the U.S. and it does not want to bring down Naftali Bennett’s fragile government, says Tal Shalev of Walla News speaking to an Israel lobby organization.
If the mainstream media reported on Israel’s Jewish-only colonies more accurately, Americans would have a better understanding of the Israeli system of apartheid.
The new Israeli government this week moved forward on plans to build 3000 more settlement units in the West Bank; and yesterday the State Department issued its strongest opposition to the plans since Joe Biden took office, calling the plans “unacceptable.” The State Department spokesperson said yesterday the U.S. “strongly” opposes the expansion of settlements.
On Sunday Israel approved plans for 1,300 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank, in the first move of its kind since US President Joe Biden took office. Later this week, the Israel Higher Planning Committee is expected to meet to push forward plans for an additional 2,862 units.
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.