For the @JewishCurrents newsletter today, I wrote about the @hrw report on Israeli apartheid, which comes as the politics of Israel/Palestine hang in an interregnum between the discredited Oslo paradigm and whatever will come after it. https://us19.campaign-archive.com/?u=3cc76f17c6ed59cadc2612fde&id=80b60e9793

While the @hrw report and other recent similar reports take into account Israeli policy on both sides of the Green Line, the primary impetus for the shift in analytical frame to apartheid is the recognition that Israel intends to rule over the occupied territories in perpetuity.

The Israelis are explicit about this. But no significant political actor, in the US or, even more importantly, in Palestine, is willing to break with two-state idea. And so the discourse persists despite bearing no resemblance to the reality on the ground.

If the history of social movements is any indication, it can take a long time for this kind of disjuncture to be addressed. The current political conditions, in the US and abroad, are also not favorable to the kind of reckoning needed on this issue.

This should go without saying, but part of why the disjuncture persists in US politics is because the American Jewish establishment has become hermetically sealed to criticism of Israel, while still wielding significant political power.

Indeed, there is no way to describe the responses by American Jewish groups, not to mention the Israeli government with terms other than embarrassing and intellectually inadequate.