Israel Accused Of 'Apartheid' Crimes By Human Rights Watch

May 12, 2021 4:02 AM

Human Rights Watch issues a report accusing Israel of Apartheid crimes.

Meanwhile, Israel is again bombing Gaza. This follows Israeli mobs marching through Jerusalem chanting "Death to Arabs" and a crackdown in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah due to Palestinian protests against evictions. Fighting spread to the al-Aqsa mosque, which produced disturbing images of "ultranationalist Israelis in ecstatic celebration" at a fire inside the al-Aqsa mosque compound. Some of the mosque's stained glass was damaged by the fighting.

In response, representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar criticized the State Department's spokesman for refusing to condemn the killing of Palestinian children. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Yang's support for Israel's violence "utterly shameful." Demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine took place in NYC and elsewhere.

posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles (6 comments total)

Hard to argue, since Israel's actions have been obvious and open for decades now.
posted by Gelatin at 4:42 AM on May 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Communal Jewish organizations both in Israel and the diaspora absolutely lost their minds at the idea that Israel was anything but a model of democracy and tolerance when the HRW report came out, then spent the last week in shameful silence as the Israeli government and the violent far-right made HRW's case for them. Of course those organizations choose now to speak up, but only to either engage in both-sidesing and whataboutism or (like Yang did) pretend that only Palestinians are to blame.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 4:55 AM on May 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

You may have missed the bit where Hamas is bombing Israel, and Israeli Arab mobs are attacking Israeli Jews. This is a horrible situation, but you know what's worse? Someone cherry-picking bits of it to get their rage on the people they don't like.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:25 AM on May 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yeah, and that's after a week of Israeli Jewish settlers committing violent, murderous attacks on Palestinians in East Jerusalem and elsewhere, with the police cracking down on any Palestinians who complained.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 5:32 AM on May 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

Sheikh Jarrah highlights the violent brazenness of Israel’s colonialist project

Israeli settlers, supported as they are by the United States and a nearly silent global community, are incredibly brazen in their ethnic-cleansing campaign. One settler matter-of-factly told Muna El-Kurd while she protested the theft of her home: “If I don’t steal it, someone else will.” Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Arieh King was caught on camera lamenting that a Palestinian men shot in the leg during protests wasn’t shot in the head. On Monday, Israeli police raided the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites, wounding hundreds of Palestinians who had sought shelter inside with rubber-tipped bullets and stun grenades.

Now a new generation has taken to social media, using the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah, to once again show Zionist settler violence to the rest of the world. But when the hashtag began to trend in recent days on social media platforms, many activists reported that their posts were being removed; accounts have also been suspended en masse. The apparent censorship of Palestinian protest on social media is another chapter in the months-long campaign urging Facebook not to flag anti-Zionism critique as anti-Semitic hate speech. Many pro-Israel groups are trying to use the empty charges of anti-Semitism to shut down debate about Palestine.

As May 15 marks the 73rd commemoration of the mass expulsion of Palestinians from cities such as Haifa, Tarshiha and Safad in 1948, let the world bear witness to Jerusalem today. This is how refugees are made, this is our ongoing Nakba. Our freedom struggle is not for a state but for belonging to the land, to remain on it, to keep our homes, to resist erasure. But somehow calling it by its name on social media, revealing to the world what has been happening for decades, seems more offensive than our ongoing displacement at gun point.

Worth noting that, after this article was published, one of the co-authors found her tweets were being suppressed by Twitter, who then went on to suspend her account until people complained.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 5:33 AM on May 12, 2021 [5 favorites]

I need to read the HRW report to see how they frame it, but my discomfort with ‘apartheid’ has always been that it is so specifically linked to South Africa, and racism and violence by White Europeans against Black African people, and more generally the global racism against Black people.

To me, as a Jew who is not Israeli but with family there, it’s more compelling to say Israel has ghettoized its religious and ethnic minority and carries out campaigns of collective punishment, and other direct and stark parallels to the experience of Jews in Europe that led to the Zionist project in the first place.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:38 AM on May 12, 2021 [1 favorite]