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Israel Obstinately Rejects Legitimate Criticism

As published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs: Nov. / Dec. 2022 Vol. XLI, No. 7

A recent article by Abraham Global Peace Initiative (AGPI) CEO Avi Benolo is titled: “Israel Strong in the Face of Growing Progressive Obstinacy”. Unfortunately, the piece offers shaky assumptions and lacks historical context to balance its strident appeal to emotion. For example, Benolo’s AGPI wrongly assumes that Israel represents the interests of all Jews.

Benolo’s organization supports the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism” which casts even accurate criticism of Israel state policy as antisemitism.

His critique of the Berkeley Law School’s proposed “Jewish-free zones” is offered without contextual reference to their role in protesting Jewish-only zones in the occupied West Bank, Golan and East Jerusalem enforced by the arbitrary violence of Israeli martial law.

Benolo’s assumption that Israeli Jews are Palestine’s sole Indigenous people ignores the fact that European Zionists gradually marginalized Palestine’s Indigenous Arabs in the early 20th century and later accelerated the process though open warfare. With generous U.S. support, this program continues to defy countless UN Resolutions while it squeezes Palestinians into isolated pockets surrounded by illegal Israeli settlers.

A recent Amnesty International report states that the Israel operates an apartheid system assigning inferior status to Israeli Arabs and open hostility to Palestinians in Gaza, the Occupied Territories and East Jerusalem.

Benolo dismisses this observation and assigns to Israel exceptional status and privileges due to the Nazi Holocaust. According to this view, Palestinians must pay for Europe’s crimes even though Zionism’s founders intended to eject Palestine’s Arabs even before the birth of Adolf Hitler.

Unfortunately, Zionism has evolved into a supremacist ideology actively oppressing and excluding even its most reasonable critics. History indicates that such movements always collapse after inflicting misery on all sides.

Peace will only be possible when the U.S. government ceases its military, economic and diplomatic support for Israel’s total domination of Palestinian society. Only that will allow the beginning of fair-dealing and the cynical two-state fantasy must eventually be replaced by a binational state with equal rights for all.