JEWISH QUESTIONS

It’s hard to effectively express dissent when your very presence at an organization would be portrayed as an endorsement of their positions. The fact is, we’re at a critical moment in the history of the US-Israel relationship. As Israel contemplates full annexation of the West Bank without extending voting rights to the Palestinian people living there, making the apartheid comparisons impossible to ignore, AIPAC continues to blend anodyne calls for “bipartisanship” with support for far-right plans for the region.

During the debate, Bloomberg’s Twitter account attacked Sanders over his AIPAC comments. “To characterize AIPAC as a racist platform is offensive, divisive, and dangerous to Israel – America’s most important ally in the Middle East – and to Jews,” the tweet read, “How can Bernie profess he’s the path to unity when he’s already managed to polarize a people and a party?”

JONATHON COOK—By not echoing the rest of the western media in entirely airbrushing the Palestinians out of Europe’s post-Holocaust history, Guerin stood isolated and exposed. None of her colleagues – supposedly fearless, muckraking journalists – appear willing to come to her aid. She has been made a scapegoat, a sacrificial victim – one that will serve as a future reminder to her colleagues of what they are permitted to mention, which parts of Europe’s history they may examine and which parts must remain forever in the shadows.

Guerin’s comment was denounced as “offensive” by her former boss, Danny Cohen, who was previously the director of BBC television. No one, of course, cares that the Palestinians’ experience of being wiped out of recent European history and its legacy in the Middle East is deeply offensive. The Palestinians are what historian Mark Curtis refers to as “Unpeople”.

Israel’s support for the “American” plan is not surprising, B’Tselem would argue, since “the plan eternalises the fragmentation of Palestinian space into disconnected slivers of territory in a sea of Israeli control, not unlike the Bantustans of South Africa’s Apartheid regime”. Human rights abuses against Palestinians – including daily indignities which have been criticised across the world – will continue, the group has argued.

BILL VAN AUKEN—The Trump plan was issued in the form of a 181-page document, replete with maps drawing the “conceptual” borders of an expanded Israel and a supposed Palestinian mini-state. The maps make clear the travesty of the supposed Palestinian entity to be carved out of Israeli occupied territories, while masking the full extent of the absurdity of the proposal.

They show a patchwork of Palestinian cantons surrounded by Israeli territory, linked one to another by a series of Israeli-controlled bridges, tunnels and roads. The cantons themselves are peppered with what the plan describes as “Israeli enclave communities,” i.e., Zionist settlements that will be walled off, linked by apartheid-style Israeli-only security roads, and protected by Israeli security forces.