Los milmillonarios del mundo poseen más riqueza que 4600 millones de personas

Publicado: 20 Enero 2020

https://www.oxfam.org/es/notas-prensa/los-milmillonarios-del-mundo-poseen-mas-riqueza-que-4600-millones-de-personas

Los 2153 milmillonarios que hay en el mundo poseen más riqueza que 4600 millones de personas (un 60% de la población mundial), según revela Oxfam en un informe publicado hoy, la víspera del Foro Económico Mundial de Davos (Suiza).

La desigualdad en el mundo está profundamente arraigada y ha alcanzado un nivel escandaloso. El número de milmillonarios en el mundo se ha duplicado en la última década. Amitabh Behar, director ejecutivo de Oxfam India, que está en Davos representando a la confederación Oxfam, ha señalado: “La brecha entre ricos y pobres no puede eliminarse sin la adopción de políticas contra la desigualdad. Pero muy pocos Gobiernos se han comprometido a adoptarlas”. 

En América Latina y el Caribe el 20% de la población concentra el 83% de la riqueza. El número de milmillonarios en la región ha pasado de 27 a 104 desde el año 2000. En grave contraste, la pobreza extrema está aumentando. En 2019, 66 millones de personas, es decir, un 10,7% de la población vivía en extrema pobreza, de acuerdo a datos de la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL).
 
En su informe Tiempo para el cuidado, Oxfam muestra además cómo el modelo económico sexista profundiza la crisis de desigualdad, permitiendo a una élite millonaria acumular vastas fortunas a expensas del resto de la ciudadanía, especialmente de las mujeres y niñas en mayor situación de pobreza:  

• Las mujeres y niñas dedican al trabajo de cuidados no remunerado 12 500 millones de horas diariamente, lo que supone una contribución a la economía global de al menos 10,8 billones de dólares anuales, una cifra que triplica el tamaño de la industria mundial de la tecnología. 
• Un incremento de tan solo el 0,5% adicional al impuesto a la riqueza del 1% más rico de la población durante los próximos 10 años, permitiría recaudar los fondos necesarios para invertir en la creación de 117 millones de puestos de trabajo de cuidados en sectores como la educación, la salud, el cuidado infantil y la asistencia a las personas mayores.   

   
"Las mujeres y niñas son uno de los grupos que menos se benefician del sistema económico actual. Dedican miles de millones de horas a cocinar, limpiar y cuidar de los niños y niñas y las personas mayores. El trabajo de cuidados es el "motor oculto" que mantiene en funcionamiento nuestras economías, empresas y sociedades. Este trabajo recae principalmente sobre las mujeres, por lo que, a menudo, apenas tienen tiempo para recibir una educación, ganar un salario digno o participar en la toma de decisiones en la sociedad. Esto las atrapa en la parte más baja de la pirámide económica", añade Behar.  
  
Todos requerimos de cuidados, pero no todos cuidamos. Las mujeres son quienes realizan más de las tres cuartas partes del trabajo de cuidados no remunerado. A menudo se ven forzadas a reducir su jornada laboral o renunciar a su empleo para poder hacerse cargo del trabajo de cuidados. En todo el mundo, el 42% de las mujeres no puede acceder a un empleo porque son las responsables del trabajo de cuidados, en comparación con tan solo el 6% de los hombres. Dadas estas cifras, es urgente asegurar una redistribución justa de las tareas de cuidado entre hombres y mujeres. Los estados y las empresas también están obligados a aportar a estas tareas de cuidado, bien sea a través de la provisión de servicios como guarderías e incentivos, u otorgando tiempo y facilidades para que toda la ciudadanía asuma su responsabilidad de cuidado.  

De acuerdo un informe desarrollado por Oxfam en Bolivia, el cuidado de los niños y niñas, en especial si son menores de 12 años, repercute en la inserción laboral de las mujeres de manera significativa. Se estima que cada niño o niña adicional menor de 13 años reduce en 6% la probabilidad de que una mujer acceda a un trabajo remunerado.

En América Latina y el Caribe, aun cuando las mujeres logran conseguir y mantener un empleo, es en condiciones precarias: el 49% de las mujeres empleadas en la región, ganan menos del salario mínimo mensual correspondiente a su país.

Las mujeres también constituyen dos terceras partes de la mano de obra que se ocupa del trabajo de cuidados remunerado. Empleos como el de enfermera, trabajadora del hogar o cuidadora a menudo están mal remunerados, proporcionan escasos beneficios, conllevan un horario irregular y pueden suponer un importante desgaste físico y emocional.  
  
El informe de Oxfam pone de manifiesto que los Gobiernos aplican unos impuestos extremadamente bajos a las personas y empresas más ricas, y por lo tanto no obtienen ingresos suficientes para ayudar a aliviar la responsabilidad del trabajo de cuidados que recae sobre las mujeres y a combatir la pobreza y la desigualdad.  
    
"Los Gobiernos han generado esta crisis desigualdad y ahora deben tomar medidas para resolverla. Deben asegurarse de que las empresas y personas ricas paguen su justa parte de impuestos e incrementar las inversiones en infraestructuras y servicios públicos. Deben también aprobar leyes para abordar el enorme trabajo de cuidados que recae sobre las mujeres y niñas y garantizar que las personas que desempeñan algunos de los trabajos más importantes para nuestra sociedad (cuidar de nuestros mayores, nuestras hijas e hijos, y las personas más vulnerables) reciban un salario digno. Los Gobiernos deben dar la misma importancia al trabajo de cuidados que al resto de sectores para construir una economía más humana que funcione para todas las personas y no únicamente para unos pocos afortunados" subraya Behar. 

 

Fearing the Palestinian Narrative: Why Israel Banned ‘Jenin Jenin’

BY RAMZY BAROUD

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/22/fearing-the-palestinian-narrative-why-israel-banned-jenin-jenin/
JANUARY 22, 2021

On January 11, the Israeli Lod District Court ruled against a Palestinian film-maker, Mahmoud Bakri, ordering him to pay hefty compensation to an Israeli soldier who was accused, along with the Israeli military, of carrying out war crimes in April 2002, in the Palestinian Jenin refugee camp located in the northern occupied West Bank.

The case, as presented by Israeli and other media seemed to deal with typical legal matters such as defamation of character and so on. To those familiar with the massive clash of narratives which emanated from that singular event, known to Palestinians as the ‘Jenin Massacre’, the Israeli court verdict is not only political but historical and intellectual, as well.

Bakri, a native Palestinian born in the village of Bi’ina, near the Palestinian city of Akka, now located in Israel, has been paraded repeatedly in Israeli courts and censured heavily in Israeli mainstream media simply because he dared challenge the official discourse on the violent events which transpired in the Jenin refugee camp nearly two decades ago.

Bakri’s documentary, “Jenin Jenin”, is now officially banned in Israel. The film, which was produced only months after the conclusion of this particular episode of Israeli violence did not make many claims of its own. It largely opened up a rare space for Palestinians to convey, in their own words, what had befallen their refugee camp when large units of the Israeli army, under the protection of fighter jets and attack helicopters, pulverized much of the camp, killing scores and wounding hundreds.

To ban a film, regardless of how unacceptable it may seem from the viewpoint of the official authorities, is wholly inconsistent with any true definition of freedom of speech. But to ban “Jenin Jenin”, to indict the Palestinian filmmaker and to financially compensate those accused of carrying out war crimes, is outrageous.

The background of the Israeli decision can be understood within two contexts: one, Israel’s regime of censorship aimed at silencing any criticism of the Israeli occupation and apartheid and, two, Israel’s fear of a truly independent Palestinian narrative.

Israeli censorship dates back to the very inception of the State of Israel atop the ruins of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The country’s founding fathers had painstakingly constructed a convenient story regarding the birth of Israel, almost entirely erasing Palestine and the Palestinians from their historical narrative. On this, late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, wrote in his essay, Permission to Narrate, “the Palestinian narrative has never been officially admitted to Israeli history, except as that of ‘non-Jews,’ whose inert presence in Palestine was a nuisance to be ignored or expelled.”

To ensure the erasure of the Palestinians from the official Israeli discourse, Israeli censorship has evolved to become one of the most elaborate and well-guarded schemes of its kind in the world. Its degree of sophistication and brutality has reached the extent that poets and artists can be tried in court and sentenced to prison for merely confronting Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, or penning poems that may seem offensive to Israeli sensibilities. While Palestinians have borne the greatest brunt of the ever-vigilant Israeli censorship machine, some Israeli Jews, including human rights organizations, have also suffered the consequences.

But the case of “Jenin Jenin” is not that of routine censorship. It is a statement, a message, against those who dare give voice to oppressed Palestinians, allowing them the opportunity to speak directly to the world. These Palestinians, in the eyes of Israel, are certainly the most dangerous, as they demolish the layered, elaborate, yet fallacious official Israeli discourse, regardless of the nature, place, or timing of any contested event, starting with the  ‘Catastrophe’ or Nakba of 1948.

Almost simultaneously with the release of “Jenin Jenin”, my first book, “Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion”, was published. The book, like the documentary, aimed to counterbalance official Israeli propaganda through honest, heart-rending accounts of the survivors of the refugee camp. While Israel had no jurisdiction to ban the book, pro-Israeli media and mainstream academics either ignored it completely or ferociously attacked it.

Admittedly, the Palestinian counter-narrative to the Israeli dominant narrative, whether on the ‘Jenin Massacre’ or the Second Palestinian Intifada, was humble, largely championed through individual efforts. Still, even such modest attempts at narrating a Palestinian version was considered dangerous, vehemently rejected as irresponsible, sacrilegious, or anti-Semitic.

Israel’s true power – but also Achilles heel – is its ability to design, construct and shield its own version of history, despite the fact that such history is hardly consistent with any reasonable definition of the truth. Within this modus operandi, even meager and unassuming counter-narratives are threatening, for they poke holes in an already baseless intellectual construct.

Bakri’s story of Jenin was not relentlessly attacked and eventually banned as a mere outcome of Israel’s prevailing censorship tactics, but because it dared blemish Israel’s diligently fabricated historical sequence, starting with a persecuted “people with no land” arriving at a supposed “land with no people”, where they “made the desert bloom”.

“Jenin Jenin” is a microcosm of a people’s narrative that successfully shattered Israel’s well-funded propaganda, sending a message to Palestinians everywhere that even Israel’s falsification of history can be roundly defeated.

In her seminal book, “Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples”, Linda Tuhiwai Smith brilliantly examined the relationship between history and power, where she asserted that  “history is mostly about power”.

“It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others,” she wrote. It is precisely because Israel needs to maintain the current power structure that “Jenin Jenin” and other Palestinian attempts at reclaiming history have to be censored, banned, and punished.

Israel’s targeting of the Palestinian narrative is not a mere official contestation of the accuracy of facts or of some kind of Israeli fear that the ‘truth’ could lead to legal accountability. Israel hardly cares about facts and, thanks to Western support, it remains immune from international prosecution. Rather, it is about erasure; erasure of history, of a homeland, of a people.

A Palestinian people with a coherent, collective narrative will always exist no matter the geography, the physical hardship, and the political circumstances. This is what Israel fears most.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

 

At Israel’s request, Trump pardons Israeli handler of spy Jonathan Pollard

Aviem Sella one of 73 people granted clemency; 70 have sentences commuted; the list doesn’t include Trump or family; several Jewish convicts pardoned, incl. Lakewood Ponzi schemer

By TOI STAFF 20 January 202

https://www.timesofisrael.com/at-israels-request-trump-pardons-israeli-handler-of-spy-jonathan-pollard/

US President Donald Trump pardoned 73 people and commuted the sentences of 70 additional individuals in the final hours of his term on Wednesday. The list included several Jewish convicts as well as Aviem Sella, a top Israeli Air Force pilot who was the recruiter and operator of spy Jonathan Pollard.

The list does not include Trump himself or members of his immediate family. It does, however, include his former chief strategist Steve Bannon and several family allies.

Sella fled to Israel days before Pollard was arrested outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC was indicted for espionage in 1987, but was never extradited.

A former fighter pilot who took part in the 1981 strike on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor, Sella started working for the Mossad intelligence agency in the early 1980s and received some of the classified top-secret documents provided by Pollard.

He remained deeply involved in the affair despite not running Pollard for most of the espionage stint.

The White House said Sella’s clemency request was supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and Miriam Adelson, the wife of top conservative donor Sheldon Adelson died last week.

“The State of Israel has issued a full and unequivocal apology and has requested the pardon in order to close this unfortunate chapter in US-Israel relations,” the White House said.

Pollard, who was released from prison in 2015, was recently allowed to move to Israel after his parole restrictions were not renewed by the US Justice Department.

In a statement Wednesday, Pollard and his wife Esther said they were “very happy” about the decision, adding that it “puts an end to the affair’s bleeding wounds after 35 years.”

“We wish Aviem good luck,” they added. “After so many years of suffering, Esther and I want to only focus on the future rather than past wounds.”

Also pardoned was Elliott Broidy, a Trump family ally and Jewish Republican fundraiser who pleaded guilty last fall in a scheme to lobby the White House to drop an investigation into the looting of a Malaysian wealth fund, and Ken Kurson, a friend and former colleague of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was charged last October with cyberstalking during a heated divorce.

Trump also pardoned or commuted the sentences of several Jewish businessmen jailed for white-collar crimes, including Shalom Weiss and Ponzi schemer Eliyahu Weinstein, who defrauded Lakewood Jews and others out of $200 million.

Also on the list were New York art dealer and collector Hillel Nahmad, convicted on gambling charges, and Noah Kleinman, jailed for marijuana offenses.

A commutation was granted to rapper Bill Kapri, known as Kodak Black, who identifies as Jewish even though he hasn’t converted.

Other high-profile defendants included fellow rapper, Lil Wayne. Both he and Kodak Black were convicted in Florida on weapons charges. Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter, has frequently expressed support for Trump and recently met with the president on criminal justice issues. Also on the list was Death Row Records co-founder Michael Harris.

Other pardon recipients include former Rep. Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican who served three years for corruption, money laundering, and other charges, and former Rep. Duke Cunningham of California, who was convicted of accepting $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. Cunningham, who was released from prison in 2013, received a conditional pardon.

Trump also commuted the prison sentence of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who has served about seven years behind bars for a racketeering and bribery scheme.

The list also includes a conditional pardon for philanthropist Stephen Odzer, convicted of bank fraud, saying that he has “dedicated resources to support and build synagogues in memory of his late cousin who was kidnapped and killed by Muslim terrorists while in Israel.”

The last-minute clemency follows separate waves of pardons over the last month for Trump associates convicted in the FBI’s Russia investigation. Taken together, the actions underscore the president’s willingness, all the way through his four years in the White House, to flex his constitutional powers in ways that defy convention and explicitly aid his friends and supporters.

Bannon has been charged with duping thousands of investors who believed their money would be used to fulfill Trump’s chief campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border. Instead, he allegedly diverted over a million dollars, paying a salary to one campaign official and personal expenses for himself.

Whereas pardon recipients are conventionally thought of as defendants who have faced justice, often by having served at least some prison time, the pardon for Bannon nullifies a prosecution that was still in its early stages and likely months away from trial in Manhattan, effectively eliminating any prospect for punishment.

Though other presidents have issued controversial pardons at the ends of their administration, perhaps no commander in chief has so enjoyed using the clemency authority to benefit not only friends and acquaintances but also celebrity defendants and those championed by allies.

Trump has already pardoned a slew of longtime associates and supporters, including his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law; his longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone; and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

 

Recipients testing positive in Israel sparks concern over Pfizer vaccine efficacy.

By Leng Shumei Published: Jan 21, 2021

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1213566.shtml

More than 12,400 in Israel were reportedly infected after accepting Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, which led to doubts over the vaccine's efficacy, despite the reported 95 percent efficacy in Phase III clinical trials.  

This can be a sign that the vaccine's efficacy is not necessarily the same as data from experiments, which is affected by many elements such as the experiment environment and the population tested on, some experts said.   

More importantly, experts warned that a vaccine is not a panacea. The public should learn that the most effective way is wearing masks and protective suits, they said.

Israel's health ministry tested 189,000 people after they received Pfizer's vaccine and 6.6 percent of the people, including 69 who had received two shots, still tested positive for COVID-19, according to media reports.

A single dose of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine appeared "less effective than we had thought," and also lower than Pfizer had suggested, Israeli coronavirus commissioner Nachman Ash previously told media on Tuesday. 

Pfizer said that a single dose of its vaccine is about 52 percent effective, media reported. 

The Israeli government earlier announced a plan to vaccinate 5.2 out of its nine million residents by March. As of Tuesday, more than two million have been vaccinated, local media reported. 

Feng Duojia, president of the China Vaccine Industry Association told the Global Times on Thursday that it is possible that vaccine recipients got infected before they developed an immunity. 

Instead of preventing recipients completely from infections, the key functions of vaccination are to reduce the incidence rate or prevent recipients from getting serious symptoms, Feng explained.

Normally it takes 14 days for vaccines to build effective immunity in recipients' bodies. 

According to media reports, within two weeks after the first dose, recipients in Israel show similar infection rates as those who have not received shots. But those vaccinated started to show 33 percent fewer new infections than the others after the second dose.

The difference between a real-world and experimental environment, such as the scale of the participants and whether the recipients continue wearing masks after injections, could also lead to in conformity in results, according to experts reached by the Global Times.   

Any vaccine, after being approved for use, will go through a further evaluation which is dubbed as "Phase IV clinical trials" on masses of people who receive it to further study the safety and efficacy, according to Feng.  

The most effective way to prevent coronavirus infections are still physical protective measures, like wearing masks and protective suits, experts noted.

Some countries rely on vaccines as a lifesaver as they had tried all other measures but failed. But a vaccine is not a panacea, experts said.

 

Israel Is Losing the Fight To Obscure Its Apartheid Character

A new report by rights group B'Tselem will make it harder to smear Israel's critics as antisemites for arguing that Israel is a racist state.

by Jonathan Cook Posted on January 21, 2021

https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2021/01/20/israel-is-losing-the-fight-to-obscure-its-apartheid-character/

For more than a decade, a handful of former Israeli politicians and US diplomats identified with what might be termed the “peace process industry” have intermittently warned that, without a two-state solution, Israel is in danger of becoming an “apartheid state”.

The most notable among them include Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, two former Israeli prime ministers, and John Kerry, who served as the former US President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. Time is rapidly running out, they have all declared in the past.

Their chief concern, it seems, was that without the alibi of some kind of Palestinian state – however circumscribed and feeble – the legitimacy of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” will increasingly come under scrutiny. Apartheid will arrive, the argument goes, when a minority of Israeli Jews rule over a majority of Palestinians in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan controlled by Israel.

Demographic threshold

The apartheid threat has been wielded by the so-called “peace camp” in hopes of mobilizing international pressure on the Israeli right, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The goal has been to force it into making sufficient concessions that the Palestinian leadership agrees to a demilitarized statelet, or statelets, on fragments on the original Palestinian homeland.

Meanwhile, demographic trends have continued apace, and the Israeli right has ignored all warnings, preferring to pursue their Greater Israel ambitions instead. But strangely, the apartheid moment never arrived for the Israeli peace camp. Instead, its expressions of concern about apartheid fizzled into silence, as did its once-vocal worries about a Palestinian demographic majority.

This entirely cynical approach to Palestinian statehood was very belatedly blown apart this week with the publication of a report by B’Tselem, Israel’s most prominent and respected human rights group. It broke ranks to declare what has been obvious for many, many years. Israel has created a permanent reality in which there are two peoples, Jews, and Palestinians, sharing the same territorial space, but “a regime of Jewish supremacy” has been imposed by the stronger side. This unequivocally qualifies as apartheid, B’Tselem said.

It dismisses the sophistry that apartheid relates to some self-serving demographic deadline – one that never materializes – rather than the explicit segregationist practices and policies Israel has enforced throughout the territories it rules. It also dismisses arguments made by Israel’s partisans abroad that Israel cannot be an apartheid state because there are no South African-style “whites only” signs on park benches.

Hagai El-Ad, B’Tselem’s executive director, notes that Israel’s version – “apartheid 2.0, if you will – avoids certain kinds of ugliness … That Israel’s definitions do not depend on skin color make no material difference: it is the supremacist reality which is the heart of the matter.” The report concludes that the bar for apartheid was met after considering “the accumulation of policies and laws that Israel devised to entrench its control over Palestinians”.

Daring analysis

What is perhaps most daring about B’Tselem’s analysis is its admission that apartheid exists not just in the occupied territories, as has been observed before, including by former US President Jimmy Carter. It describes the entire region between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River – which encompasses both Israel and the Palestinian territories – as an apartheid regime. It thereby denies Israel’s claims to be a democratic state even inside its internationally recognized borders.

B’Tselem has abandoned the pretense that apartheid can be limited to the occupied territories, as though Israel – the state that rules Palestinians – is somehow exempt from being classified as integral to the apartheid enterprise it institutes and oversees.

That was always obvious. How much sense would it have made in former South Africa to claim that apartheid existed only in the Bantustans or black townships while exempting white areas? None at all. And yet, Israel has been getting away with precisely this clear-cut casuistry for decades – largely aided by the peace camp, including B’Tselem.

Now, B’Tselem observes: “Jews go about their lives in a single, contiguous space where they enjoy full rights and self-determination. In contrast, Palestinians live in a space that is fragmented into several units, each with a different set of rights – given or denied by Israel, but always inferior to the rights accorded to Jews.”

Israel’s “Jewish supremacist ideology” is revealed in its obsession with “Judaizing” land, in it's bifurcated citizenship laws and policies that privilege Jews alone, in its regulations that restrict movement for Palestinians only, and in its denial of political participation to Palestinians. These discriminatory policies, B’Tselem notes, apply also to the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian and have nominal Israeli citizenship.

El-Ad concludes: “There is not a single square inch in the territory Israel controls where a Palestinian and a Jew are equal. The only first-class people here are Jewish citizens such as myself.”

Permanent occupation

What B’Tselem has done is echo the arguments long made by academics and Palestinian civil society, including the international boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, that Israel is a settler-colonial society.

In an emailed response to the report, Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the BDS movement, said it helped to put an end to “the vicious and deeply racist lies about the not-so-perfect Israeli democracy that has a problem called ‘the occupation’”.

The B’Tselem report observes that, while “occupation” must be a temporary situation, Israel has no intention of ending its military rule over Palestinians, even after more than five decades. A Palestinian state is not conceivably on the agenda of any Israeli party insight of power, and no one in the international community with any influence is demanding one. The two-state solution has been smothered into oblivion.

For that reason, it argues, all of Israel and the Palestinian territories under occupation are organized“under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians”.

There are good reasons why B’Tselem is biting the bullet now, after decades of equivocation from it and the rest of the Israeli peace camp. Firstly, no one really believes that Israel will be pressured from outside into conceding a Palestinian state. Trump’s so-called “peace plan”, unveiled a year ago, gave Netanyahu everything he wanted, including support for annexing swaths of the West Bank on which illegal settlements have been built.

Four years of Trump, and the recruitment of much of the Gulf to Netanyahu’s side, has shifted the conversation a long way from efforts to secure Palestinian statehood. Now, the focus is on how best to delay Israel’s move towards formal annexation. US president-elect Joe Biden will at best try to push things back to the dismal state they were in before Donald Trump took office. At worst, he will quietly assent to all or most of the damage Trump has inflicted on the Palestinian national cause.

Deeply isolated

Secondly, B’Tselem and other human rights groups are more deeply isolated at home than ever before. There is simply no political constituency in Israel for their research into the systematic abuses of Palestinians by the Israeli army and settlers. That means B’Tselem no longer needs to worry about messaging that could antagonize the sensibilities of Israel’s so-called “Zionist left” – because there is no meaningful peace camp left to alienate.

The disappearance of this peace camp, unreliable as it was, has only been underscored by the Israeli general election due in late March. The battle for power this time is being waged between three or four far-right parties that all support annexation to varying degrees.

The Israeli left has ceased to exist at the political level. It comprises a handful of human and legal rights groups, mostly seen by the public as traitors supposedly meddling in Israel’s affairs on behalf of “European” interests. At this stage, B’Tselem has little to lose. It is almost entirely irrelevant inside Israel.

Thirdly, and as a result, the only audience for B’Tselem’s careful research exposing Israeli abuses is overseas. This new report seeks to liberate a conversation about Israel, partly among Palestinian solidarity activists abroad. Their campaigns have been stymied by the failure of the Palestinian leadership under Mahmoud Abbas to signal where they should direct their efforts, now that prospects for Palestinian statehood has vanished.

Activists have also been browbeaten into silence by smears from Israel’s partisans in the US and Europe, decrying any trenchant criticism of Israel as antisemitic. These slurs were relentlessly deployed against the UK’s Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn because of his support for the Palestinian cause.

Breaking a taboo

By calling Israel an apartheid state and a “regime of Jewish supremacy”, B’Tselem has given the lie to the Israel lobby’s claim – bolstered by a new definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – that it is antisemitic to suggest Israel is a “racist endeavor”.

B’Tselem, a veteran Israeli Jewish organization with deep expertise in human rights and international law, has now explicitly declared that Israel is a racist state. Israel’s apologists will now face the much harder task of showing that B’Tselem is antisemitic, along with the Palestinian solidarity activists who cite its work.

The report is also intended to reach out to young American Jews, who are more willing than their parents to foreground the mistreatment of Palestinians and forgo the Zionist idea that Israel is their bolthole in times of trouble.

Significantly, the B’Tselem report has been published in the wake of two groundbreaking essays this past summer by influential American Jewish journalist Peter Beinart. In them, he broke a taboo in the US Jewish mainstream by declaring the two-state solution dead and calling for a single democratic state for Israelis and Palestinians.

It doubtless served as a wake-up call to Israeli groups such as B’Tselem that the conversation about Israel is moving on in the US and becoming much more polarized. Israeli human rights groups need to engage with this debate, not shy away from it.

Battle for equality

There is one possible lacuna in B’Tselem’s position. The report suggests a reticence to focus on outcomes. Nowhere is the two-state solution ruled out. Rather, the report notes: “There are various political paths to a just future.” Statements by El-Ad to Middle East Eye indicate that his organization may still support a framework of international pressure for incremental, piecemeal change in Israeli policies that violate Palestinian human rights.

That is very much what western states, particularly Europe, have been paying lip-service to for decades, while Israeli apartheid has entrenched.

Does B’Tselem hope its apartheid criticisms will prove more effective than Barak and Olmert’s apartheid warnings, finally galvanizing the international community into action to push for a Palestinian state? If so, Biden’s performance in the office should soon dispel any such illusions. El-Ad observes that the goal now is “a rejection of supremacy, built on a commitment to justice and our shared humanity.”

That cannot happen within the two-state framework, even on the untenable assumption that the international community ever seriously rallies behind Palestinian statehood, against Israel’s wishes. So why not say so explicitly? The best-case two-state scenarios on the table are for a tiny, divided, demilitarized, pseudo-Palestinian state with no control over its borders, airspace or electromagnetic frequencies.

That would not offer “justice” to Palestinians or recognize their “shared humanity” with Israeli Jews.

As welcome as the new report is, it is time for B’Tselem – as well as Palestinian solidarity activists who look to the organization– to explicitly reject any reversion to a “peace process” premised on ending the occupation. The logic of an apartheid analysis needs to be followed to the very end. That requires unequivocally embracing a democratic single state guaranteeing equality and dignity for all.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared in the Middle East Eye.