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September 20th, 2022 
Awake Goy 
Last week the House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously passed a bill to restrict curriculums so that Palestinian children won’t be taught to “demonize” Israel.
The committee also unanimously OK’d an amendment from Republican August Pfluger of Texas to bar “claims that Israel practices apartheid” from curriculums in U.N. or Palestinian Authority schools funded by the U.S.
So Palestinian curriculums must not include the view of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that Israel practices apartheid.
The “Peace and Tolerance in Palestine Education Act” was sponsored by Brad Sherman of Los Angeles. The discussion and vote took place last Wednesday and featured an argument from Brad Sherman in support of the apartheid ban that struck me as extremely stupid.
Here’s Sherman:
“I believe this amendment is accurate… There might be some who would say– or at least I have met a few people who would claim– that Israel is an apartheid state, and I want to rebut that extreme conclusion. We want a two state solution. That means that there will be one state for one people apart from another state for another people. That is not apartheid. Apartheid was a vicious system in Southern Africa that the entire world worked to destroy. So to call Israel an apartheid state is to call for a worldwide effort to destroy Israel. The fact is that there is a border between Israel and Egypt. So the Egyptian people are separated from Israel by a border. They live apart from Israel in Egypt. That is no different from what we see in Europe. Nobody has called the Netherlands an apartheid state because it has a border with Germany. And the Dutch live predominantly on one side of the border and Germans tend to live on the other side of the border, and they both have different states for different people. And of course there are some Germans living in the Netherlands and some Dutch living in Germany and their rights are protected. So to say those who want a Jewish state living side by side with a Palestinian state are embracing the evils of apartheid is to say that virtually every international border constitutes a separateness, an apartheid, because it divides people into different countries. And I think that’s an extreme and ridiculous conclusion. We do want a two state solution. That is a majority sentiment in Israel and is the official position of the Israeli government. It’s almost the position of the Palestinian Authority. So to condemn Israel because it wants to be a Jewish state should be done right after we condemn the Netherlands because for wanting to be a predominantly Dutch state.”
There are many reasons I think this argument is nonsense. There is today only one state in the land, Israel, and the U.S. does all in its power to prevent Palestine’s efforts to be recognized as a state. The “borders” established by the international community in 1947 and again in 1949 are mere wishes; they have not been respected; Israel has occupied the land assigned to Palestine and moved 750,000 Jewish Israelis into that territory. Jews there are under a separate set of laws than the Palestinians, with separate roads and walls that cut through Palestinian villages, and the Palestinians are under military law.
Vicious? This whole system constitutes apartheid in the eyes– not of extremists– but Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Al-Haq, B’Tselem, and other human rights groups, as well as leading voices including Jimmy Carter, Stephen Robert (“apartheid on steroids”), Zaha Hassan, and Aida Touma-Sliman. Moreover, the Human Rights Watch “apartheid” report of 2021 was set in motion in 2018 when Israel passed a Nation-State bill that gave Jews higher rights to land and language over Palestinians inside Israel. B’Tselem has said there is an “apartheid regime” in the entire land. And P.S. the
“two-state solution” is off the table in Israeli politics.
No wonder people are trying to dismantle that persecution. Much as apartheid laws were dismantled in South Africa.
Almost as staggering as Sherman’s speech was Rep. Kathy Manning of North Carolina saying that Palestinian youth have given up on “acceptance and tolerance” because of text books. She said that on a recent trip, “We met with Palestinian youth who were deeply disillusioned about the possibility of peace with their Israeli neighbors,” because their curriculums contain content that “perpetuates antisemitism and Palestinian victimhood and martyrdom” — texts that “demonize or mischaracterize Israel.”
“No child is born to hate, they have to be carefully taught,” Manning said.
The Congress is seeking to deny “the very idea that Palestinians have any legitimate grievances against Israel,” Lara Friedman commented.
“This bill & the grandstanding in committee reflect comfortable Congressional framing that the underlying cause of the ‘conflict’ is irrational Palestinian hatred of Israel/Jews, as opposed to anything Israel actually does to Palestinians…[The bill] insists that Palestinians ‘learn’ their views about Israel in schools, as opposed to from their LIVED EXPERIENCE under Israeli apartheid. It is impossible to capture how disconnected the discussion/framing on the Hill is from the lived reality of Palestinians living under Israeli rule.”
Friedman said the Pfluger amendment on apartheid offered members an opportunity “to grandstand at the expense of progressive Democrats in general and HFAC member Rep. Omar (D-MN) in particular.”
Omar has described Israeli rule as apartheid. So has Rep. Rashida Tlaib. The Democratic establishment is terrified of the truth catching hold.
h/t Scott Roth, Adam Horowitz, Dave Reed.
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