Rob W.

These two in an interview to @DeStandaard describe Israel as an apartheid state, not a democracy My reaction: We are not on trial. They are dragging Israel into a made-up courtroom with a verdict they have already written. Every time we take the stand to plead our innocence, we hand them the thing they need most: our agreement that the trial is real. It’s not! Think about the usual response we give to their allegations: “Arabs serve as judges on Israel’s Supreme Court.” or, “Look, Arab parties just won a record number of seats in the Knesset,” or, “Arab citizens just turned out in record numbers in the Israeli election,” All true, and none of it works, because the people pushing this lie and the people so eager to believe it don’t actually care about Arab or Palestinian rights. If they did, they’d be furious that those in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, where they’re ruled by their own dictatorships, haven’t voted in an election in twenty years. They’d be outraged that across the Arab-colonized world, nobody gets a real vote at all. Their outrage is at the one country in the entire region where a Jew and a Muslim or Arab stand as an equal, a model of coexistence: Israel. This is what they cannot accept. Not inequality for the Arab. Equality for the Jew.