Norman Finkelstein: Palestinians Tried EVERYTHING before October 7th - A Slave's Case for Resistance

 

In this Exclusive presentation, Dr. Norman Finkelstein examines the framework through which we assess violence, resistance, and state power. His central argument: what unfolded in Gaza cannot be understood within the conventional language of "war" or "self-defense"—but requires a more precise legal and moral category.

In war, the objective is military defeat. In genocide, the civilian population is the target. Finkelstein's challenge: name a single battle in Gaza. The absence of conventional military engagement, he contends, reveals the operation's true nature.

Using the Nat Turner rebellion as historical parallel, Finkelstein forces us to confront how context is erased when power controls the narrative. Who gets to define "violence" when the conditions that produce it are systematically ignored?

The 17-year blockade, the 2006 election sanctions, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the Great March of Return sniper fire—all documented, all dismissed. Finkelstein traces how every diplomatic, legal, and nonviolent avenue was met with escalation, not engagement.

Citing Frederick Douglass: "The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion."

Israel forfeited its moral claim to self-defense long before October 7.

Abby Martin Went To Israel. IT'S WORSE Than You Think

 

EXPOSED: Israeli Settlers Attacking Palestinian Families

 

I Went to Palestine's Most Surveilled City to Expose Israel's Wolfpack AI: What I Found Broke Me

 

Join MintPress director Mnar Adley as she embarks on walking through the city of Hebron, where her family originates from. Known to Palestinians as the city of al-Khalil, Hebron is the largest and most populated Palestinian city in the West Bank. Dubbed by Israel as 'Hebron Smart City' -- this is where Israel tests its Draconian surveillance technology on the Palestinian population as part of what is called the Wolfpack surveillance system. 

Mnar Adley takes us along her journey as she crosses through the most heavily armed and surveilled checkpoints in the world where Israel has set up an automated apartheid system to track Palestinian movement.  Adley is joined by Palestinian activist Izzat Karake from Youth Against Settlements who chronicles the struggle against settler colonialism where armed Jewish settlers supported by Israeli soldiers are trying to take over the city to Judaize the quarter. 

Gaza Fights For Freedom (2019) | Full Documentary | Directed by Abby Martin

 

This debut feature film by journalist Abby Martin began while reporting in Palestine, where she was denied entry into Gaza by the Israeli government on the accusation she was a “propagandist.” So Abby connected with a team of journalists in Gaza to produce the film through the blockaded border.

It is a documentary about the historic Great March Of Return protests, which occurred every week from March 2018 until December 2019, but covers so much more.

It tells the story of Gaza past and present, showing rare archival footage that explains the history never acknowledged by mass media. You hear from victims of the ongoing massacre, including journalists, medics and the family of internationally-acclaimed paramedic, Razan al-Najjar.

At its core, ‘Gaza Fights For Freedom’ is a thorough indictment of the Israeli military for war crimes with exclusive documentary evidence and a stunning cinematic portrayal of Palestinians' heroic resistance.

#MeToo unless it's Palestine: Why Western feminists ignore proven Israeli rape of Palestinians

 

In the immediate aftermath of October 7, before the dust had settled and the wholesale destruction of Gaza had commenced, claims of sexual assault and rape were quickly plastered across newspapers by Western feminists.

High-profile figures penned pieces about not believing Jewish women and the undermining of the #MeToo movement, with the claim of "systematic rape" lapped up by governments, Israeli military officials, and swathes of undiscerning media alike.

Establishing the facts of sexual violence during wartime is challenging, especially as the Israeli government deliberately muddies the waters by shifting narratives, presenting witnesses with undisclosed ties to the government, and suspending normative investigative practices.

But while we should always believe women and remain outraged by rape, it's clear the claim of "systematic rape" was weaponised by the Israeli government to justify the massacre of Palestinians.

The main question is therefore why the sexual assaults of Palestinian women have not provoked a similar outrage.

Over the past ten months, the selective empathy of high-profile feminists and feminist organisations in the UK has become increasingly apparent.

While swift statements on social media and articles supporting Israeli women are plentiful, there is a notable silence regarding the dire conditions of Palestinian women.

The deliberate overlooking of the extensive sexual and reproductive harm inflicted on Palestinian women by the Israeli onslaught is troubling, especially since one would assume this is a primary concern of feminism.

Since October 7, hundreds of Palestinian women have been detained in Israeli custody and subjected to inhumane treatment, including sexualised torture, naked beatings, threats of rape, and, in two verified instances, rape.

Even if the two verified rapes documented in the UN report from February 19, 2024, were somehow overlooked, how can the decades-long history of gender-based violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the Israeli army over the past 76 years be ignored?

Numerous reports detailing this violence against Palestinian women and children, long before October 7, are readily accessible online.

These reports come from major Israeli rights groups, such as the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Jerusalem-based Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, and B’Tselem (one report from 2009 among many others), in addition to several reports from the UN.

All these reports, based on protocols used in legal hearings, legal complaints, lawyer documentation, and detainee testimonies, depict sexual violence, torture, and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of Palestinians in Israeli detention.

Suppose feminist discourse genuinely seeks to address gender-based violence in war. In that case, the ongoing atrocities against Palestinian women should have been included in all those articles to uphold the integrity of the movement.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the past 10 months — 40,000 Palestinians killed, around half of them women and children, and more than 21,000 children reported missing — the feminist movement has not learned from its initial one-sided stance when emotions ran high and perspectives were narrow.


The ongoing violence endured by Palestinian women and children continues to be glaringly neglected. Similarly, the recent UN report from June 12, 2024, appears to have gone unnoticed, failing to stir any conscience or prompt a substantial response.

This report detailed how the Israeli Security Forces systematically targeted and subjected Palestinians to sexual and gender-based violence, including forced public nudity, forced public stripping, sexualised torture and abuse, and sexual humiliation and harassment.

The report also documented that Israeli soldiers filmed themselves ransacking homes, rummaging through drawers filled with lingerie to mock and humiliate Palestinian women, referring to them as 'sluts,' concluding that this gender-based violence was intended to humiliate and degrade the Palestinian population as a whole

A culture of sexual violence
This sexual and gender-based violence extended to men as well, with the report highlighting that males were repeatedly filmed and photographed by soldiers while subjected to forced public stripping and nudity, sexual torture, and inhumane treatment.

Just last week, disturbing footage surfaced from the Sde Teiman detention facility, reportedly showing the gang rape of a Palestinian by Israeli soldiers. Israeli ministers, including Bezalel Smotrich, were swift to condemn the leaking of the video rather than its contents. Some, like Likud's Hanoch Milwidsky, went so far as to justify the rape. As expected, Western feminists remain silent.

It’s unsettling but not unexpected that there appears to be little sympathy for Arab men, who are often portrayed in deeply rooted racist stereotypes as inherently misogynistic and barbaric. The stark contrast in empathy, whether conscious or unconscious, exposes a blatant bias among high-profile feminists in the UK and contributes to normalising Israel’s actions against Palestinians.

The deafening silence from the rest of the feminist community is equally damning; ignoring the horrifying images from Gaza over the past ten months signals a dehumanisation so profound that the suffering has lost its impact.

Remaining silent on one of the worst atrocities against women and children in our lifetime is indefensible. When 70% of those killed are women and children; when Palestinian women are digging through rubble to find their missing children; when mothers are holding their lifeless babies; when families are burning to death in refugee camps while they sleep; when mothers watch their children die from hunger as a result of Israel’s starvation campaign; and when children cry for food amidst famine conditions, silence is not a matter of being ‘politically correct’ — it is a betrayal of feminist principles.

Recent events during the Gaza genocide have highlighted the feminist movement’s failings, casting a shadow of shame over it.

During one of the deadliest weeks in Gaza since October 7, some feminists were instead fixated and preoccupied with commenting on UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's ‘sexy’ look. Do we live in a parallel universe?


This deliberate focus on superficial issues, while ignoring pressing concerns, signals a loss of direction in the movement and shows that those leading it — many of whom were once trusted — are harbouring anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia.

This couldn’t be more obvious than when some so-called feminists aligned with figures like Tommy Robinson, a convicted criminal known for his far-right ideology and promotion of false narratives about Muslims, asylum seekers, and migrants, mirroring the disturbing resurgence of far-right rhetoric in the UK.

While these views have led some astray, making it difficult to envision their return, the feminist movement still holds hope if it can steer back towards its foundational values.

One glaring lesson from recent events is the pervasive racism among some UK feminists, as even the bare minimum expectation —to acknowledge the struggles of Palestinian women enduring systemic marginalisation — has not been met.

For the feminist movement to rise above this mess, it must be unequivocally clear that there is no room for racism. Overcoming this tribal feminism that serves only selective interests demands recognising and addressing prejudices as they emerge, holding everyone accountable.

The collective power of the feminist community should never be underestimated. Just as some figures have been elevated to high-profile status, those who betray the core principles of feminism must face the risk of becoming irrelevant.

By thoughtfully choosing whom to support and elevate, both as individuals and as feminist organisations, the movement can uphold its integrity and ensure its values remain truly inclusive and anti-racist. There is no room for racism in feminism, and as Angela Davis wisely stated, "In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist”.

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Israeli woman explains why she went to prison instead of joining the IDF

 

 

Sofia Orr is the first Israeli woman since October 7th to be jailed for refusing military service. She's just been released, and tells James O'Brien that she believes it is ‘wrong to take children and make them into soldiers’. Six months on from the start of the war in Gaza, are young Israelis becoming more anti-war?

Palestine Talks | An Anti-Zionist Roundtable with Miko Peled and Sami Al-Arian

 

In this exclusive TRT World roundtable discussion featuring Israeli American activist and writer, Miko Peled, and Palestinian activist and professor Sami Al-Arian, who is the director of Center for Islam and Global Affairs based in Istanbul, Zionism is explored as a means of developing anti-Palestinian fear in its followers, a persecutory force against those who – in accordance with key moral principles and international law – stand up for the rights of Palestinians, and, finally, is embedded within American institutions of power.

The Free Palestine Podcast - A Conversation with Habib Al Ostaz

In this poignant and compelling podcast, host Tadhg Hickey welcomes Habib Al Ostaz, a Palestinian now residing in Cork, Ireland, for an in-depth conversation that spans the breadth of Habib's life experiences, from his early years in Gaza to his journey to Ireland. With raw honesty and profound emotion, Habib shares his perspective on the heart-wrenching realities of living under occupation, the genocide being perpetrated in Palestine, and the complex fabric of hope, despair, and resilience that defines daily life in the shadow of ongoing conflict.

I was an IDF soldier stationed in Gaza in at the end of 1992

 

From @alon_mizrahi

Let me share with one of the most surreal and sobering moments of my life, that happened to me while I was an IDF soldier stationed in Gaza in at the end of 1992.

That kind of moment could only happen to a Mizrahi, or Arab-jewish soldier. You'll see why I say it. And I could swear to you that every word of it is true. No embellishments, no filling in missing pieces of memory. All truth.
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In the summer of 1992 I finished basic and some advanced infantry training, and my platoon was ready to partake in combat function, which really was just (same as for generation of young Israeli men and women before and after that) enforcement of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
 
The unit I was joining at this stage had under its responsibility (for purposes of overt occupation activities) the Al-Shati refugee camp and some of the adjacent Rimal neighborhood, on the northwestern part of the Strip.

At the end of 1992, Israel's leadership decided that the (Zionist and brilliant) solution for the growing discontent, or resistence, in the Strip, was removing 400 Hamas 'leaders' from Gaza and sending them into exile in Lebanon.

As many of those Hamas figures lived in and around the area designated for my unit to handle, we were appointed with making dozens of arrests, or maybe hundreds (Israel would always arrest additional people for more information, as a form of pressure and to prevent an eruption of a violent reaction).

For weeks in November of 1992 I would spend whole nights of my very young life walking from house to house in the dead of night in Gaza, knocking on doors, threatening family members of missing wanted people and handing over those who were home to the representatives of the security services, who were always with us, and always in plain cloths.

As part of my service there, I was in hundreds of Palestinians homes in Gaza, many of them during that month of endless nocturnal search and arrest hours.
Some nights we would take in 10 different people from same numbers of homes.
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I was too young and shocked to understand anything, though it was clear to me that this was not the hero's service fighting evil I spent the months and years before joining the IDF hoping for and fantasizing about.

Those people in Gaza were normal in a way that no part of me could align with evil. And I could never bring myself to become that natural lord and master that colonial and racist regimes always expect their soldiers and cops to be. I was too soft.
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The people we took in never cried, begged for forgiveness or claimed it was a mistake. They would climb up and sit in the military vehicle with their hands tied behind their backs and their eyes covered in a kind of quiet that was more thunderous, more painful for me to remember all those years later, than any other act would be.
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One man in particular I remember. A big, sombre man in his 30', who looked untouchable in a big, thick black coat. But as he sat in the military vehicle with his hands tied behind his back his coat slipped over his shoulders, revealing a tank top and a body and skin that did not look invincible, or untouchable. He was human.

And he sat there, staring into space, in total quiet. Back then I had no idea where these men were taken, and what was going to be unleashed upon them. Only many years later did I discover how extensive Israel's use of torture was, and how horrible.

But the big, somber, fragile man sat there, quiet, and, like any other Palestinian I saw in this situation, with  what I can best describe as dignity in brokenness, that was astonishing. I have never seen anyone with more dignity in my life than a hand-tied, eyes-covered Palestinian detainee.
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Towards the end of those weeks of knocking on doors and arresting people, one morning, around 7AMm after a long long bight, that moment happened to me. It was something that I never forgot and never will forget.

It was the last arrest for that night, which already becade day. We stood there, a small band of soldiers, and knocked on the door of what looked like a well built, well kept house. It was not fancy, but it surely not the house of poor people.

We waited for someone to come and open the door. After a minute or so, someone did.

If you ever felt like reality around you had its fundamentals twisting and changing, or like the layer of meaning that enveloped reality was torn, revealing another layer of deeper meaning, but in a way that makes you dizzy and dumbfounded - if you know that feeling you'll know what I went through that moment.

Because the person that opened that door at that house that morning in Gaza was my very own and only sister.

The door opened and the actual, precise, living and breathing image of my sister, identical as any identical twin ever was, stood in the doorway. It was her face. her expression, her hair, her highet, her age, her build, her movement, her skin tone accurate to the 1000th degree.

I didn't know what was going on, or what kind of insane trick was being played on me. I gasped, lost for words. I stood a meter away from her, and my very wanted to call her by my sister's name.   
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Not long after this, after that whole period, I started cracking. I could not take it anymore, though I never could tell myself what it was that I couldn't take. I went to see a psychologist and got restationed to a non-combat unit.

It took me many years to start to appreciate the damage done to me by what I was sent to do and see in Gaza. I don't think that even today I have completely processed it.
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She stood at the door and was a little puzzled, bot not panicked. She was wiping the floor, and it was still wet. A bucket with a rug in it stood by. It was a clean house, with a shining clean floor. The officer told her to get out and speak to us from street level, as the house was one stair up from that.

But the street was dirty and sandy, and she couldn't bring herself to step outside barefoot. Her foot (my sister's foot) ventured out for a second, not actually stepping, just hovering, but then was drawn in.

The officer pretended to not notice. He didn't insist, and she remained inside. By not insisting and not becoming violent, I think, he saved my actual sanity, and never knew it.

Israeli women soldiers give shocking testimonies

 

A personal account of female soldiers about their life in the Israeli Army, the only one to draw women for mandatory military service.
A female point of view on the drama of an unending war, on the moral challenges they faced at the encounter with the Palestinian population. Questions that were not dealt with during the service are raised today with great pain - and courage. A female point of view on the drama of an unending war, on the moral challenges the soldiers faced at the encounter with the Palestinian population. The young women look back critically at the way they handled the power that was placed in their hands at the young age of eighteen. Did they really smile in the pictures?

In 1988 the filmmaker served herself in the Israeli Defence Force in the Occupied Territories. 'How could I ever think I'd forget...' is what one of the young women asks herself at then end of this film.

Hebron: The Reality of Israeli Settlement in Palestine // Behind The Wall

 

It’s widely known that there are Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory, but very few people know what the lives of people are actually like in these isolated districts.This vlogger traveled to Hebron, a Palestinian city that has Israeli settlements right in the middle of the city itself, and managed to enter a Jewish neighborhood surrounded by barbed wire fences and checkpoints.
he shares what he saw and experienced in this controversial section of Hebron.

My Life in Gaza with Amr Abdul Latif

 

The death toll in Gaza has reached above 10,000, yet the so-called international community, in reality, the Western nations, are deaf to the cries under the rubble. The Israeli war machine no longer worries about redlines as they act in complete impunity. If the hypocrisy of the West was not evident before this crisis, it is clear now that the Liberal World Order was never meant to safeguard the lives and honour of those it deems lesser people.

Amr Abdul Latif was, until recently, a resident and citizen of Gaza. He came to the UK to study for his postgraduate degree at St Andrews University and now works as a software developer. The Western press, even those that show little empathy, present the people of Gaza as lesser human beings who do not have dreams and aspirations. Who are either to be pitied or presented as subhuman. I want to understand what life has been like since 2007, when Israel announced its siege and what the average Gaza actually believes.

“They Could Kill Me At Any Time”: Life Under Israeli Occupation

 

Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi captured international attention after she served eight months in an Israeli prison for slapping an Israeli soldier. Sine then, she and Dena Takruri have teamed up to write a book about this experience and growing up under military occupation. On the eve of the book’s publication, Dena catches up with the young activist, now 21, seen by many as an icon of Palestinian resistance.

Life in Occupied PALESTINE by Anna Baltzer

 

A must watch documentary:

OUR MOST DIFFICULT DAY IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE | LIFE IN HEBRON & BETHLEHAM | PAKISTANI IN ISRAEL VLOG

 

We are IMMY AND TANI- A full time travel family. Today was difficult day for us to share in our Pakistan To Saudi Arabia series. We explore the cities of Hebron and Bethlehem with you all and what we witnessed was extremely sad and unbearable.

A Threshold Crossed Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution

 

 About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

Several widely held assumptions, including that the occupation is temporary, that the “peace process” will soon bring an end to Israeli abuses, that Palestinians have meaningful control over their lives in the West Bank and Gaza, and that Israel is an egalitarian democracy inside its borders, have obscured the reality of Israel’s entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians. Israel has maintained military rule over some portion of the Palestinian population for all but six months of its 73-year history. It did so over the vast majority of Palestinians inside Israel from 1948 and until 1966. From 1967 until the present, it has militarily ruled over Palestinians in the OPT, excluding East Jerusalem. By contrast, it has since its founding governed all Jewish Israelis, including settlers in the OPT since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, under its more rights-respecting civil law.

For the past 54 years, Israeli authorities have facilitated the transfer of Jewish Israelis to the OPT and granted them a superior status under the law as compared to Palestinians living in the same territory when it comes to civil rights, access to land, and freedom to move, build, and confer residency rights to close relatives. While Palestinians have a limited degree of self-rule in parts of the OPT, Israel retains primary control over borders, airspace, the movement of people and goods, security, and the registry of the entire population, which in turn dictates such matters as legal status and eligibility to receive identity cards.

A number of Israeli officials have stated clearly their intent to maintain this control in perpetuity and backed it up through their actions, including continued settlement expansion over the course of the decades-long “peace process.” Unilateral annexation of additional parts of the West Bank, which the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to carry out, would formalize the reality of systematic Israeli domination and oppression that has long prevailed without changing the reality that the entire West Bank is occupied territory under the international law of occupation, including East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed in 1967.

International criminal law has developed two crimes against humanity for situations of systematic discrimination and repression: apartheid and persecution. Crimes against humanity stand among the most odious crimes in international law.

The international community has over the years detached the term apartheid from its original South African context, developed a universal legal prohibition against its practice, and recognized it as a crime against humanity with definitions provided in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (“Apartheid Convention”) and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The crime against humanity of persecution, also set out in the Rome Statute, the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights on racial, ethnic, and other grounds, grew out of the post-World War II trials and constitutes one of the most serious international crimes, of the same gravity as apartheid.

The State of Palestine is a state party to both the Rome Statute and the Apartheid Convention. In February 2021, the ICC ruled that it has jurisdiction over serious international crimes committed in the entirety of the OPT, including East Jerusalem, which would include the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution committed in that territory. In March 2021, the ICC Office of Prosecutor announced the opening of a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine.

The term apartheid has increasingly been used in relation to Israel and the OPT, but usually in a descriptive or comparative, non-legal sense, and often to warn that the situation is heading in the wrong direction. In particular, Israeli, Palestinian, US, and European officials, prominent media commentators, and others have asserted that, if Israel’s policies and practices towards Palestinians continued along the same trajectory, the situation, at least in the West Bank, would become tantamount to apartheid.[1] Some have claimed that the current reality amounts to apartheid.[2] Few, however, have conducted a detailed legal analysis based on the international crimes of apartheid or persecution.[3]

In this report, Human Rights Watch examines the extent to which that threshold has already been crossed in certain of the areas where Israeli authorities exercise control.

Definitions of Apartheid and Persecution
The prohibition of institutionalized discrimination, especially on grounds of race or ethnicity, constitutes one of the fundamental elements of international law. Most states have agreed to treat the worst forms of such discrimination, that is, persecution and apartheid, as crimes against humanity, and have given the ICC the power to prosecute these crimes when national authorities are unable or unwilling to pursue them. Crimes against humanity consist of specific criminal acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack, or acts committed pursuant to a state or organizational policy, directed against a civilian population.

The Apartheid Convention defines the crime against humanity of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” The Rome Statute of the ICC adopts a similar definition: “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” The Rome Statute does not further define what constitutes an “institutionalized regime.”

The crime of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute consists of three primary elements: an intent to maintain a system of domination by one racial group over another; systematic oppression by one racial group over another; and one or more inhumane acts, as defined, carried out on a widespread or systematic basis pursuant to those policies.

Among the inhumane acts identified in either the Convention or the Rome Statute are “forcible transfer,” “expropriation of landed property,” “creation of separate reserves and ghettos,” and denial of the “the right to leave and to return to their country, [and] the right to a nationality.”

The Rome Statute identifies the crime against humanity of persecution as “the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity,” including on racial, national, or ethnic grounds. Customary international law identifies the crime of persecution as consisting of two primary elements: (1) severe abuses of fundamental rights committed on a widespread or systematic basis, and (2) with discriminatory intent.

Few courts have heard cases involving the crime of persecution and none the crime of apartheid, resulting in a lack of case law around the meanings of key terms in their definitions. As described in the report, international criminal courts have over the last two decades evaluated group identity based on the context and construction by local actors, as opposed to earlier approaches focused on hereditary physical traits. In international human rights law, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), race and racial discrimination have been broadly interpreted to include distinctions based on descent, and national or ethnic origin, among other categories.

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Occupation Is The Problem | Jeremy Corbyn

ISRAEL EXPOSED: Colonialism, War Crimes & The Global Far Right | Lowkey

‘A Ghastly Future’? Israeli Apartheid, Biden, Starmer, Assange And Mass Extinction

 

From the excellent Media Lens:

One of the most egregious recent omissions by BBC News was last week’s groundbreaking report by leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem naming Israel as ‘an apartheid state’ and ‘a regime of Jewish supremacy’:

‘In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.’

Apartheid in the Palestinian Territories has long been recognised. For example, in 2004, a prominent South African professor of international law, John Dugard, then UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, wrote that there is ‘an apartheid regime’ in the territories ‘worse than the one that existed in South Africa.’

Noam Chomsky concurred:

‘In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by “apartheid” you mean South African-style apartheid.

‘What is happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse. There is a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce…

‘The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just do not want them. They want them out, or at least in prison.’

All this was damning enough. But the publication of the new B’Tselem report was the first time that Israeli human rights and legal experts had publicly stated that apartheid exists not just in the Occupied Territories, but throughout the whole region that Israel claims for itself.

As the Israel-based British journalist Jonathan Cook observed:

‘By calling Israel an apartheid state and a “regime of Jewish supremacy”, B’Tselem has given the lie to the Israel lobby’s claim – bolstered by a new definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – that it is antisemitic to suggest Israel is a “racist endeavour”.

‘B’Tselem, a veteran Israeli Jewish organisation with deep expertise in human rights and international law, has now explicitly declared that Israel is a racist state. Israel’s apologists will now face the much harder task of showing that B’Tselem is antisemitic, along with the Palestinian solidarity activists who cite its work.’

As far as we are aware, there was no mention of the report on any of the flagship BBC News at 6 or 10 television programmes. Nor was there anything to be found on the BBC News website. Presumably, the BBC deemed it unworthy of the public’s attention. We challenged BBC foreign editor Andrew Roy, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and BBC digital news editor Stuart Millar for a response. Not one of them replied. It is perhaps significant that Millar moved to the BBC from the Guardian where, as deputy editor of Guardian US, he had scoffed at Julian Assange:

‘I like to think that #Assange chose the Ecuadorean embassy because it’s so convenient for Harrods’

This is the archetypal sneering ‘mainstream’ journalist’s view of anyone who seriously exposes the truth and challenges power.

As for B’Tselem’s landmark report detailing the reality of the Israeli state as an apartheid regime, it is possible that there were sporadic brief mentions in some outlying parts of the BBC. Longtime readers will recall that the BBC infamously buried revelations by Scott Ritter, a former chief UN weapons inspector, that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed of any weapons of mass destruction, at 3am on the BBC World Service.

In response to the B’Tselem report, John Pilger pointed out via Twitter:

‘Israel is top of the league for vaccinating its own people [against coronavirus]. The accolades say Israel is the “example”. False. Israel is denying the vaccine to Palestinians whose land and lives it controls. WHO has pleaded with Israel: to no avail. Apartheid in action.’

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