Dan Shapiro, the US ambassador to Israel – an American Jew who speaks Hebrew and who does not hide his deep bond with the country – made a simple observation last week: Israel, he said, seems to have “two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians”.
This is a simple fact. While he probably did not mean to call Israel out for its two separate systems of law – but rather for not enforcing the law as effectively when it comes to Israeli culprits as it does for Palestinian ones – everyone interpreted it this way. It is, after all no secret that Israel invented an intricate military-legal system for regulating its control over the Palestinian population living in the lands occupied in 1967 precisely in order to entrench separate systems for Israelis and Palestinians. Not only were Shapiro’s comments condemned by Binyamin Netanyahu as “unacceptable and wrong”, but a former spokesman for the prime minister called Shapiro a “Jew boy” on an Israeli talk show – a derogatory term that essentially accuses him of being a self-hating Jew, a sellout, a traitor. Shapiro was personally and publicly attacked for uttering not his opinion, but a basic description of the reality on the ground.
This incident is emblematic of the crackdown on Jewish dissent that has become commonplace in Israel. Human rights organisations and activists who document aspects of Israel’s demonstrable system of occupation, discrimination and human rights violations have become the targets of a concerted campaign of delegitimisation – including parliamentary legislation to inhibit their operations, public denunciations by political leaders, incendiary videos, and the accusation that they are foreign moles and liars.
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