Hebrew University professor: Calling Israel apartheid is 'describing reality'

Calling Israel an apartheid regime has nothing to do with anti-Semitism but is the description of what is happening in reality, according to an Israeli university professor.

Amos Goldberg, a leading professor of the Holocaust at Hebrew University in the occupied al-Quds, made the comment in response to an earlier statement by Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner Felix Klein, who said applying the framework of apartheid to discuss Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is “an anti-Semitic narrative.”

In an interview with the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Goldberg rejected Klein’s remarks and said, “Accusing Israel of apartheid is not anti-Semitic—it’s describing reality.”

In a veiled reference to Klein, Goldberg added, “All decent people must decide which side of history they want to be on.”

The Israeli university professor also warned against the conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, describing the issue as a “disturbing” phenomenon as he argued that some of the harshest opponents of Zionism were Jews.

In an open letter earlier in the month, hundreds of academics and public figures from across Occupied Palestine and other nations equated the Israeli regime’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories with apartheid.

The signatories complained that the Palestinian people “lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have martyred over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity.”

The Israeli oppression of Palestinians has witnessed a sharp rise under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist coalition cabinet, which is composed of far-right Zionist parties that oppose Palestinian statehood and support the expansion of illegal settlements in the Occupied Lands.

ME