B’Tselem, apartheid, and correcting the ethical grammar on Israel/Palestine
January 25, 2021
Robert A. H. Cohen
B’Tselem’s new report describing all of Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories as a single ‘apartheid’ regime will have widespread and long-term implications. Not only does it change the acceptable vocabulary on Israel/Palestine, it also alters the ethical grammar which has created and sustained an injustice now in its eighth decade. How we speak and what we can say will shape the future politics of this conflict and change the ethical framework through which solutions are found and implemented. In short, language matters.
Antifa’s ‘street thugs’
Your editorial “We need a big-tent antifascist movement” (Dec. 9) properly warned of the potential danger of the Proud Boys, one of whose factions openly calls for the organization to formally become white supremacist and “anti-Zionist.” However, your treatment of antifa, while laudably covering their recent “random acts of vandalism like smashing the cars of Trump supporters” in Sacramento, seriously understated the danger posed by this anarchist group. The editorial said, “Many members … are peaceful.” A better description would have been a collection of street thugs for whom violence is the norm.
Last spring and summer, antifa and BLM rioters took a terrible toll in American cities. In Seattle, their violence led to at least 12 injured police on July 19 and 55 on July 25. One day later, the Department of Homeland Security reported that in Portland there had been at least 14 injured federal officers over the previous 24-hour perio