The truth does not serve to bolster their position, so they just lean hard on lies.
Check out Rep. Brad Sherman here, trying to justify a law censoring the word “apartheid” from curriculum in Palestinian schools funded by the U.S. or UN.:
“I believe this amendment is accurate… There might be some who would say– or at least I have met a few people who would claim– that Israel is an apartheid state, and I want to rebut that extreme conclusion. We want a two state solution. That means that there will be one state for one people apart from another state for another people. That is not apartheid. Apartheid was a vicious system in Southern Africa that the entire world worked to destroy. So to call Israel an apartheid state is to call for a worldwide effort to destroy Israel. The fact is that there is a border between Israel and Egypt. So the Egyptian people are separated from Israel by a border. They live apart from Israel in Egypt.
That is no different from what we see in Europe. Nobody has called the Netherlands an apartheid state because it has a border with Germany. And the Dutch live predominantly on one side of the border and Germans tend to live on the other side of the border, and they both have different states for different people. And of course there are some Germans living in the Netherlands and some Dutch living in Germany and their rights are protected. So to say those who want a Jewish state living side by side with a Palestinian state are embracing the evils of apartheid is to say that virtually every international border constitutes a separateness, an apartheid, because it divides people into different countries. And I think that’s an extreme and ridiculous conclusion. We do want a two state solution. That is a majority sentiment in Israel and is the official position of the Israeli government. It’s almost the position of the Palestinian Authority. So to condemn Israel because it wants to be a Jewish state should be done right after we condemn the Netherlands because for wanting to be a predominantly Dutch state.”
As Phil Weiss comments, “There are many reasons I think this argument is nonsense. There is today only one state in the land, Israel, and the U.S. does all in its power to prevent Palestine’s efforts to be recognized as a state. The “borders” established by the international community in 1947 and again in 1949 are mere wishes; they have not been respected; Israel has occupied the land assigned to Palestine and moved 750,000 Jewish Israelis into that territory. Jews there are under a separate set of laws than the Palestinians, with separate roads and walls that cut through Palestinian villages, and the Palestinians are under military law.”
As Benjamin Netanyahu has said, there will only ever be one state between the river and the see, but it will most assuredly not be free:
“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”
Right. Apartheid.
