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.

The shots that killed Yitzhak Rabin were not the opening shots of a civil war – they merely exposed the hidden war that had existed within Zionism since the beginning.

Who is allowed to discuss the Jewish narrative of Zionism in Berlin? Apparently, not Israelis as Germany tests its first case of a new anti-BDS law, surprisingly targeting a group of Israeli artists.

In Yishai Sarid’s novel, Israelis act out rituals of grief and mourning for the Holocaust and come away repulsed by their ancestors, the victims of a horrific genocide, and admiring of the Nazis in their “Hugo Boss” uniforms. “That’s what we should do to the Arabs,” one whispers. Yet US media have failed to grasp the novel’s moral about Palestinian dehumanization.

Park Avenue Synagogue inserts the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikva, into its Yom Kippur liturgy, as Rabbi Neil Zuckerman praises his son for overcoming exile in New York and going “home” to Israel and joining Israel’s army. “There is no mistaking it: Zionism is the synagogue’s core value that takes over at a key moment in the Yom Kippur service,” says one observer.

Liz Rose reflects on Rosh Hashanah: “We made the desert bloom,” my mother said when I was ten years old. “How did we do this,” I asked, “from the other side of the world?” My mother pointed to the blue JNF box full of loose change. “That’s how.” And then I felt a selflessness in me, learning to give to others who required help, like Israel, who I believed–because my mother believed–needed money to help make the empty forest grow.

Once the hope of liberal Zionists, Benny Gantz is now siding with settlers against Netanyahu for political advantage. Angered by the move, dedicated Zionist Michael Koplow urges U.S. Jewish community to open discourse to include a one-state outcome.

Israel has gone from attacking former US President Jimmy Carter for using the “A” word in the title of his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, to having to deal with an Israeli organization making the legal case that the entire state may be an Apartheid state.

What will it take to shift the balance towards liberation for Palestinians? Ali Abunimah, Nada Elia and Phil Weiss discussed this topic in an online event sponsored by Haymarket Books, Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss.

The only variety of Zionism still on offer is the ethno-nationalist creed of Benjamin Netanyahu and the many politicians in Israel who sit to his right in the Knesset. And with annexation, we are about to begin the final phase of the Palestinian people’s long and tortured dispossession.