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May 3rd, 2021 
Awake Goy 
For many years anyone going into the occupied territories came out saying they’d seen apartheid– separate roads for Jews and Palestinians, crippling checkpoints for Palestinians, township areas to which Palestinians were confined and moved. “Apartheid on steroids,” the former chancellor of Brown University said in 2011. “Worse” than apartheid South Africa, a South African told me in 2006.
Now Human Rights Watch has joined the chorus with a bombshell 213-page deeply-documented report alleging the crimes of “apartheid and persecution” that has excited the rage of the rightwing Israel lobby and of course no substantive rebuttal.
But it’s been known on the left so long, why now? The answer is essentially political. For years, Human Rights Watch bent over backwards to give Israel the benefit of the doubt: that it intended to get out of the persecution business. But stark political events in the last few years, the disavowal of a Palestinian state by Israeli leaders, and the passage of the racist Nation State law in 2018, cast the die. HRW began compiling this report in the months after that law was passed, granting Jews the exclusive right of self-determination in the “land of Israel” and derogating Palestinian land and language rights.
The report’s author Omar Shakir told Arno Rosenfeld of the Forward that the key element of the finding was not showing the many inhumane acts against Palestinians, or the systematic oppression of Palestinians — but the Israeli government’s “intent to dominate” Palestinians.
While many of the abuses go back many years, there was long a debate about whether Israeli leaders had the intent to dominate Palestinians… In the 1990s and in the 2000s there was hope and a sense among many that maybe there would be a political resolution to this situation that would lead to and end to the systematic repression that takes place… Israeli government officials would publicly say… this is temporary. That’s how they justified settlements in the [Israeli] Supreme Court.
What’s changed in the last four or five years…. Israeli officials now openly proclaim their intent to rule over the West Bank in perpetuity and treat Palestinians there as subjects.
Secondly we have seen the massive expansion of settlements and the connection of settlements with Israel proper.
Third, we saw the passage of the Nation State Law, which… codified as a constitutional value the idea that one group of people on the ground had rights denied to the other.
When we put all those things together, it became impossible to say that there was not a clear intent to dominate.
HRW’s repeated reference to Israeli politicians’ statements reveals the larger politics of the report: rage on the part of the establishment toward Israel over the two-state solution. World leaders arrived in the ’90s through a tortuous process at a solution for the Israel-Palestine problem, two states, and insisted even as Israel moved hundreds of thousands of its citizens into occupied lands that the two-state solution was the consensus position of the global community. We on the left laughed at the folly of the notion. Still the world stuck to the program. Now Israel has made an open mockery of the two-state solution in its politics. The report often cites Israeli political decisions– including the fact that Israel’s two leading parties in the 2020 election– Likud and Blue/White– said that they would annex the West Bank.
So Israeli actions have consequences. Policymakers have had enough of Israeli bullshit– even if the Democratic Party is still singing the two-state hymn — and this report is one result.
HRW appears to have coordinated its report with other recent developments to try to gain maximum political impact and change the paradigm from A Palestinian State Alongside a Jewish State to Equal Rights for Everyone Under Israel’s Governance.
Several organizations have in recent weeks set forth the same message, we are tired of Israeli intransigence.
–In January, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said that Israel is an apartheid regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea, and it too cited the naked record of Israel’s rightwing governments in recent years.
–In February the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into war crimes by Israel including in its settlement project. Now the HRW report says that the ICC case must be pursued.
–Two weeks ago the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace issued a report urging the United States and other countries to abandon the two-state peace process, which has been an utter failure, in favor of using its levers of power to call for equal rights for Palestinians. One co-author of the report, Zaha Hassan, repeatedly described Palestinian conditions as “apartheid” in the Israel lobby conference last weekend. While another author Marwan Muasher called at Foreign Affairs for an international gut check on the death of the two state solution.
“It’s time for the international community to face a stark truth that, polls show, a majority of Palestinians have already come to understand: a two-state solution is no longer feasible.”
Finally there were the two blockbuster articles by Nathan Thrall, a contributor to the HRW report, in The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, arguing that subjugation of Palestinians is at the heart of Zionism, and liberal Zionists are denying the apartheid reality by claiming that the occupation is not Israel. Talk about softening up the resistance!
The HRW report is not a leftwing argument. While it buoys the leftwing critique of the Jewish state as a illegitimate concept, it is not rooted in that analysis. This is not a report about Zionism or settler colonialism or ethnic cleansing or the Nakba or the foundation of the state. None of those terms appear in the report, except Zionism incidentally. HRW sidestepped all such historical analysis in favor of a description of inhumane conditions on the ground now.
The soul of the report is its several case studies of Palestinians whose lives have been ripped apart by racist Israeli policies that have no security rationale, only the aim of limiting the number of Palestinians in the West Bank. I suggest you search the report for “Hadil” to find the story of a 37-year-old Palestinian woman who works on social media and in 2011 fell in love with a man from Nablus at a conference in Amman only to have Israeli authorities routinely prevent the two from getting together. They broke up after four years. In 2019, Hadil became engaged to another West Bank man and is now living illegally in the West Bank but is terrified of discovery. She and her fiance are exploring emigration.
I wish that the American Jewish Committee and Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations — which have slammed the report as antisemitic — would respond to Hadil’s story of thwarted love for even one minute. But all they’ve got is invective. This is the horror of Zionism.
The most interesting politics of the report involve liberal Zionism. Americans for Peace Now is holding a respectful webinar on the report Tuesday. It is clearly peeved by the report– “ruffling feathers in Israel and beyond” — but can justly boast that its Israeli partner helped document the abuses therein.
The report leaves J Street in a more difficult position. It just concluded a conference that said the problem over there is “deepening occupation and creeping annexation.” Now it is insisting that the HRW report is also about “occupation.”
The report goes far beyond occupation to the will of the Israeli government to dominate Palestinians inside Israel proper and the occupied territories — including by allowing any Jew to emigrate to Israel “while a Palestinian expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country, cannot.”
J Street is committed to a two-state solution. So is the Democratic Party, even progressives like Raphael Warnock and Elizabeth Warren.
The HRW report regretfully informs liberal westerners that there will not be a Palestinian state, and the state that does exist in the land is not a “Jewish democracy.” That news is the report’s largest political lesson.
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