by Helen Tansey
The T-Room

These dual American-Zionist windbags pouncing like rabid cats on Kerry’s apartheid statement owe him a public apology.

Yesterday, the mainstream media gleefully handed over their bullhorns to these zealots to once again slam Sec. Kerry for daring to speak the truth about what could become of the state of Israel if a peace accord isn’t hammered out and agreed to posthaste –

“In a fit of candor, Kerry told the commissioners (if that’s what you call them) that a one-state solution (so-called) for the Israel-Palestine conundrum either leads to “an apartheid state with second-class citizens — or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.” (A full report on Kerry’s remarks can be found at the Daily Beast, whose reporter apparently taped the remarks.)” Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg, “Is Israel an Apartheid State?”

Goldberg goes onto say –

“In a 2004 New Yorker article I described how the settlement movement was slowly destroying the idea of a Jewish democratic state of Israel:

[Ariel] Sharon seems to have recognized — belatedly — Israel’s stark demographic future: the number of Jews and Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be roughly equal by the end of the decade. By 2020, the Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola has predicted, Jews will make up less than forty-seven per cent of the population. If a self-sustaining Palestinian state — one that is territorially contiguous within the West Bank — does not emerge, the Jews of Israel will be faced with two choices: a binational state with an Arab majority, which would be the end of the idea of Zionism, or an apartheid state, in which the Arab majority would be ruled by a Jewish minority.

A de-facto apartheid already exists in the West Bank. Inside the borders of Israel proper, Arabs and Jews are judged by the same set of laws in the same courtrooms; across the Green Line, Jews live under Israeli civil law as well, but their Arab neighbors — people who live, in some cases, just yards away — fall under a different, and substantially undemocratic, set of laws, administered by the Israeli Army. The system is neither as elaborate nor as pervasive as South African apartheid, and it is, officially, temporary. It is nevertheless a form of apartheid, because two different ethnic groups living in the same territory are judged by two separate sets of laws.

Goldberg then asks –

“I suppose this passage makes me an enemy of Israel, in the same way Kerry is an enemy of Israel, and in the same way that the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (who is also Israel’s most decorated soldier) is an enemy of Israel, because Barak has also warned about the dangers of the status quo: “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel,” he said in 2010, “it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Mondoweiss is reporting that the infamous Naftali Bennett, leader of Israel’s religious and far right-winged party, used the same exact language in a 2012 ad promoting his “Stability Initiative” –

“In a 2012 ad, featured in his YouTube page and titled “Naftali Bennett’s stability initiative”, the narrator calls for the partial annexation of the West Bank to Israel and for allowing the Palestinians “self-rule” (though not a state) over what is left. This plan also entails granting Israeli citizenship to those Palestinians living in the would-be annexed territory and building overpasses between the islets of Palestinian self-rule which the plan would create.”

“The video (above below) claims that this plan, although not utopian, will “greatly improve the situation.” What is wrong with the situation today? According to the video (1:27), if Israel does nothing then the arena is left open for Palestinian initiatives such as Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. (Notice that even Bennett believes BDS is not a form of anti-Semitism but rather a logical political strategy derived from Israel’s politics.) Then the video goes on to tell us (2:47) that this plan will “take the wind out of the sails of those who accuse us (Israelis) of being an Apartheid state.”

“One logical conclusion from this last statement is that if the current legal status of the West Bank and its residents does not change, then the claims of Israel being an Apartheid state will have merit. Even right-wing politicians such as Bennett understand that as many differences one can find between post-1967 Israel and Apartheid South-Africa, the analogy between the two regimes will be reasonable so long as Israel holds within its sovereign territories a population which has no access to equal citizenship due to it being of non-Jewish faith and/or ethnicity.”

Is Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Naftali Bennett, Jeffrey Goldberg and now Sec. Kerry all enemies of the Zionist State of Israel? I think not and neither do you.

You tired, old, shrill windbags – ADL, AIPAC, Eric Cantor, Barbara Boxer and et al – owe Sec Kerry a public apology for demonizing him and bastardizing the facts – the current trajectory of the Zionist State of Israel is creeping ever so closer, although many argue it’s already there, toward an APARTHEID state.

Now issue a public apology and take those loud mouths of yours and do something meaningful with them, like start to work toward a fair and peaceful resolution to the appalling Palestinian – Israel plight once and for all.

Oh, and any who hold the belief that Israel is a democracy has spent way too much time in Colorado.

Naftali Bennett’s Stability Initiative –