Israeli settlers have taken over dozens of springs in the West Bank, all of them on private Palestinian land, and are keeping the Palestinian owners away. Rina Shnerb, a Jewish teen, was murdered last week at one of them.
The New York Times – most notably columnist Thomas Friedman – acknowledges that current policies and practices in Israel/Palestine are now and have been for decades a form of apartheid, yet for some unspecified reason, the paper has stated for twenty years merely that the region is “at risk of” becoming an apartheid state. In spite of profuse evidence from experts around the world and from Israel’s own legislation, NYT refuses to state the obvious.
Jewish-only communities, mostly in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. No Palestinians allowed.
The Nation magazine reports that a quarter-century after the Oslo agreement, Israel is consolidating its domination by cruel and illegal means—but the global resistance movement is growing.
While my country has long been free from racist minority rule, the world is not yet free of the crime of apartheid. I see the eerie similarities between Israel’s racial laws and policies towards Palestinians, and the architecture of apartheid in South Africa. We South Africans know apartheid when we see it. In fact, many recognise that, in some respects, Israel’s regime of oppression is even worse.
Burt Cohen interviews Alison Weir about Israel’s new law… Cohen: “At least it’s now out in the open. All Israelis who are not Jewish have had their rights diminished. Given the longstanding discrimination against non-white non-European Jews, Palestinians and Druze are now just third class citizens…” Listen to the interview.
Palestinian reaction to Israel’s new Nation-State Law is hostile: words like “racism,” “ethnic cleansing,” “declaration of war,” “legitimization of hate,” and more.
The Settlement Law is under scrutiny in the Supreme Court, accused of “breach[ing] an international convention on Apartheid”. If it stands, it may put Israel on track to annex the West Bank.
South Africans – who should know apartheid when they see it – called out Israel as “the world’s last functioning apartheid state” during a UN hearing this week. They no doubt recalled the words of South African hero, the late Nelson Mandela, who famously said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Three former Israeli prime ministers, a winner of the Israel prize, two former heads of the Israeli internal security service Shin Bet, and one of Israel’s principal newspapers have warned that the Jewish state is becoming, or already is, an apartheid state…