Wednesday Edition | Israeli Apartheid: The power of the frame, the shame of the name

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2022/07/israeli-apartheid-the-power-of-the-frame-the-shame-of-the-name/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1656944432

By ROBERT HERBST
Published July 4, 2022

In the last two years, in a carefully researched and documented confluence of reports, UN, Israeli, regional and international human rights organizations have concluded that the facts on the ground – both in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in the entire land of Israel- Palestine – amount to the crime of apartheid. B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Yesh Din, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic have all adopted the apartheid name and framing, concluding that Israel is an apartheid regime, committing an international crime and a crime against humanity in its systematic oppression of Palestinians.

This is no surprise to Palestinians, 65% of whom agree that they are victims of apartheid. Palestinian human rights groups have for years led the way on this understanding, including Al-Mezan, Al-Haq, and Addameer.

This was not a coordinated effort.  These organizations independently decided that this was the time to call apartheid apartheid and to lay out why.  A substantial majority of Middle East scholars now agree, and the apartheid name and frame is slowly making its way into mainstream media –even the New York Times. Last year the United Church of Christ “reject[ed] Israel’s apartheid system of laws and legal procedures and declared that system a “sin.” Other Protestant churches are heading in the same direction.  

There is clearly a broadening and quickening acceptance in civil society of the apartheid name and narrative frame...

Read more: Israeli Apartheid: The power of the frame, the shame of the name

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A Palestinian Response to Global and Regional Trends

Source: Al-Shabaka
https://al-shabaka.org/commentaries/a-palestinian-response-to-global-and-regional-trends/

By Tareq Baconi
Published June 29, 2022

This commentary is based on a lecture delivered by Al-Shabaka policy analyst, Tareq Baconi, during Birzeit University’s Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies’ annual conference. Held in May 2022, the three-day conference, titled “The Palestinian Cause in a Troubled Region,” brought scholars and experts from Palestine and beyond to examine recent global and regional trends and their implications for the Palestinian cause. Baconi’s intervention analyzes some of these developments, situating the Palestinian struggle for justice and liberation within the contexts of changing US foreign policy toward the Middle East, the popular revolutions of the region, and normalization deals between the Israeli regime and authoritarian Arab states. 

Introduction

Over the course of the past decade, a new regional architecture has come into focus in the Middle East and North Africa. The US has shown greater signs of withdrawal and retrenchment from the region. Tensions have arisen and subsided between regional powers, proxy wars continue to proliferate, and alliances shift consistently between players. The revolutions that erupted throughout the region starting in 2011 sputter along in the shadow of a new order, which is still being created, but the contours of which have been elucidated with the normalization agreements signed between Gulf states, Morocco, Sudan, and Israel. These accords build on more than a decade of clandestine relations between these countries, perhaps with the exception of Sudan, and surface at a time when popular uprisings have been dealt near-fatal blows throughout much of the region. The growing relations between Israel, a settler-colonial apartheid regime, and Arab autocrats herald an important pillar of the future regional landscape in which Palestinians must wage their struggle for liberation...

Read more: A Palestinian Response to Global and Regional Trends

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Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for Palestinians?

Source: Jews for Justice for Palestinians
https://jfjfp.com/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return/

Peter Beinart writes in Jewish Currents
Published May 11, 2022

In April, when Joe Biden announced that he would restore US funding for The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides education, health care, and other services to Palestinian refugees, establishment American Jewish groups reacted with dismay. A letter signed by Hadassah, B’nai B’rith, and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) blamed UNRWA’s schools for teaching Palestinian refugees “lessons steeped in anti-Semitism and supportive of violence.” AIPAC accused the organization of “inciting hatred of Jews and the Jewish state.”

But AIPAC and the ZOA did not merely accuse UNRWA of miseducating Palestinian refugees. Along with Israeli government officials, they have questioned whether most of the Palestinians that UNRWA serves are refugees at all. AIPAC has slammed UNRWA’s “misguided definition of refugees.” ZOA called UNRWA’s clientele “the descendants of Arab refugees.” Israel’s Ambassador to the US and the UN, Gilad Erdan, declared that, “this UN agency for so-called ‘refugees’ should not exist in its current format.”

The fundamental problem with UNRWA, according to this line of argument, is that it treats the children and grandchildren of Palestinians expelled at Israel’s founding as refugees themselves. Establishment Jewish critics don’t blame UNRWA merely for helping Palestinians pass down their legal status as refugees, but their identity as refugees as well. In The War of Return, a central text of the anti-UNRWA campaign, the Israeli writers Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf allege that without UNRWA, refugee children “would likely have lost their identity and assimilated into surrounding society.” Instead, with UNRWA’s help, Palestinians are “constantly looking back to their mythologized previous lives” while younger generations act as if they have “undergone these experiences themselves.” To Schwartz and Wilf’s horror, many Palestinians seem to believe that in every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Palestine...

Read more: Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for Palestinians?