Arab party leader in Israel rejects ‘apartheid’ label

JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of an Arab party in Israel who made history last year by joining the governing coalition said Thursday he would not use the word “apartheid” to describe relations between Jews and Arabs within the country... “I would not call it apartheid,” Mansour Abbas said in response to a question at an online event organized by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a D.C-based think tank. He noted that he was in the coalition and could join the government itself if he wanted to. "I prefer to describe the reality in objective ways,” he added, according to the English translation of his remarks, which he delivered in Hebrew. “If there is discrimination in a certain field, then we will say that there is discrimination in that specific field.”

Dan Diker, "The Amnesty report on Israel affirms the PLO’s 60-year ‘apartheid’ strategy", JC, Feb 2, 2022.

Perhaps most significantly, the report reflects the decades-old strategy by Palestinian groups—whether Fatah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; whether Islamist, nationalist or Marxist-Leninist—which have devoted the past six decades to assaulting and subverting the existence of the only democratic nation-state in the Middle East. Their goal has been to replace the sole Jewish state with another Muslim-majority one, in line with Islamic law...

As early as 1961, Ahmad Shukairy, the PLO’s first chairman, a former Saudi ambassador to the United Nations, declared to the U.N. General Assembly that Israel was practicing the “apartheid of South Africa.” He also “Nazified” Israel..

Amnesty’s report parallels Shukairy’s denunciations of Israel, which preceded Israel’s so-called “occupation” of the West Bank by half a dozen years. In both cases, it’s Israel’s reestablishment in 1948, not its surprise victory in the 1967 Six-Day War over Arab marauders and unexpected winning of Jerusalem and historic Judea and Samaria from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria, that’s at the root of the delegitimization and defamation...

The Amnesty indictment of Israel has unmasked the organization once again as a racist agency that engages in anti-Jewish bigotry in the name of human rights. This time around, its “findings” reflect, both in letter and in spirit, the 60-year-old PLO eliminationist strategy of criminalizing and racializing Israel as a colonialist entity since its reestablishment in 1948. Amnesty, like the PLO, continue to work towards their shared final solution: the cancellation of the one and only democratic Jewish majority nation-state, and its replacement with a 23rd Muslim-majority Arab state of “Palestine.”

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.