Israel is the Equivalent of the Jim Crow South: MEARSHEIMER

The Biden administration consistently describes the U.S. and Israel as one in the same

John Mearsheimer, the professor and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” told “The Katie Halper Show” podcast on Tuesday that the claim that Americans “share values” with Israelis is nonsense and the only values that the countries once shared are “old values that are, thankfully, now gone.”

The Biden administration consistently describes the U.S. and Israel as one in the same. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has been described by Hamas as Israel’s foreign minister, told reporters recently that Israel, the U.S. and other democracies stand apart from the rest of the world because of their adherence to international law.

But Mearsheimer, who has called Israel an apartheid state, said, “Israel, today, is basically the equivalent of the Jim Crow South. That’s certainly true in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Few Americans know that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is the most extreme ever assembled in Israel. 

Itamar Ben Gvir, the extremist national security minister who can dissolve the government at any time, held a rally on Tuesday calling again for the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza, as Israeli forces work to make the enclave uninhabitable.

“To end the problem, in order that the problem won’t come back, we need to do two things: one, return to Gaza now! Return home! Return to our holy land!” Ben Gvir told the crowd. “And second, encourage emigration. Encourage the voluntary departure of Gaza’s residents…It is ethical! It is rational! It is right! It is the truth! It is the Torah and it is the only way! And yes, it is humane.”

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B'Tselem have all identified Israel as an apartheid state long before the Hamas attack in October.

Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth told The New York Times in May 2021 that the “oppression of Palestinians there has reached a threshold and a performance that meets the definitions of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.”

The paper reported at the time that Palestinians have been making the claim about the conditions there since the 1960s. President Jimmy Carter agreed with this back in 2006, and there is a growing number of Jewish human-rights groups that also make the claim. Jerusalem-based B’Tselem also made the claim.

“This trifecta of Israeli, American, and British documentation will prove an extremely important breakthrough for Palestinian human rights in terms of its timing, precedence, scope, legality, globality, boldness and ramifications,” Marwan Bishara, a senior political analyst, wrote in Al Jazeera after the Amnesty’s 211-page report came out.

Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector, told Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom” podcast that one of the smart moves that Hamas made was to allow “Israel to be Israel” after the 7 October attack.

Ritter said Israel sold itself as the U.S. equivalent in the Middle East when he lived there in the 90s. He said one would think that when a country is the target of an attack like the one carried out by Hamas, the world would be “sympathetic,” but “Israel didn't know how to respond properly and – this is one of the genius moves of Hamas – by letting Israel be Israel.”

“This [Israel] was a murderous nation and it's only gotten more murderous and what's happened now, because of their genocidal policies towards the Palestinian people, is that the shroud that made Israel look like a nice, fuzzy little rabbit to be hugged has been removed and Israel's been exposed as the demonic nation that it is, and it's lost the support of the world it's losing the support of Europe and it's losing the support of the American people.”