Peter Beinart’s call for equality seeks to reform Israel as a Jewish project instead of repudiating its system of racial supremacy, placing Jewish identity above Palestinian rights.
The immediate and urgent task is to move international solidarity for Palestine beyond the grassroots and implement the S section of the BDS call — sanctions against apartheid Israel until it complies with international law.
Israel and its supporters use the charge of antisemitism to deter anyone who dares to hold Israel accountable — from commenters on social media all the way to the International Criminal Court.
Human rights activists launched a campaign this week to stop social media giant Facebook from adjusting its hate speech policy to classify the word ‘Zionist’ as a protected category, a move that would make any criticism of Zionism a violation of Facebook’s Community Standards and hate speech policy.
Historian Jerome Slater reinterprets the Cold War in the Middle East: “It’s an easy case to make that it was the United States, specifically Nixon and Kissinger… who sabotaged Soviet inititatives that I think were very fair for a two state settlement guaranteed by the super powers.” The Soviets wouldn’t have been in the Middle East if the U.S. hadn’t supported Israel so vigorously, which left Arab states no choice but to align with the Soviet pole. But the Soviets pushed peace in an effort to thwart a global conflict.
By the Israeli standard on which I was brought up, Sheldon Adelson was a good Jew, dedicating his life and fortune to supporting Israel, Avigail Abarbanel writes. But I am much worse than a bad Jew. I am in fact an outright enemy of Israel because I insist that we should uphold justice, equality and human rights indiscriminately, and that all humans deserve an equal opportunity not just to survive, but to develop, grow and fulfill their potential.
The two state solution has been killed by Israeli expansion, and Jonathan Kuttab argues for the development of a program for one hybrid state that would be a truly unified democracy by allowing both Jews and Palestinians to “validate the essential elements of both Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism,” while rejecting those elements in each “which degrade or deny the Other.”
Lillian Rosengarten writes, “What is there to understand about the German Holocaust that demands blanket support of Israel? How dare we continue to support white Democracy which so similarly could sound like white Aryan supremacy? Have we become as insane as the lies and destruction of Zionism?”
Michael Arria interviews Sumaya Awad and brian bean, editors of the new book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction: “The Palestine movement doesn’t exist in isolation, so we need to stand up for it and integrate it into into our organizing for any system change to be possible in the U.S.”
Racism plays a huge role in how Israel is able to get away with apartheid and ethnic cleansing without facing major backlash from the international community. Political philosopher Charles Mills’s notion of the racial contract is useful in both understanding Israel’s existence, and how its continued apartheid practices are sustained.