With Israeli plans to apply sovereignty in parts of the West Bank in deep freeze since September, National Public Radio’s Dec. 8 broadcast relies on a flimsy pretext to level the baseless apartheid smear at the Jewish state, falsely claiming that the plan prompted an Israeli “debate” about whether West Bank Palestinians live under apartheid (“Do Palestinians in Israel-Occupied West Bank Live Under Apartheid?”).
Host Ari Shapiro begins:
Do Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank live under apartheid? That word is taboo in Israel, but Israelis confronted that question when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to annex parts of the territory this summer. NPR’s Daniel Estrin reports on the debate.
Only half-way through the story does Estrin even acknowledge: “Israel has now shelved annexation plans,” and then immediately hastens to recapture relevancy: “but [Israel] has not ruled it out for the future.”
Estrin interviews Michael Sfard, the lawyer representing the extremist foreign-funded Israeli NGO Yesh Din, who argues that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is apartheid. Estrin reports:
Israel has occupied the West Bank for 53 years, and Palestinians there don’t have the privileges and rights that their Israeli neighbors have in settlements guarded by the military. Most Israelis says it’s wrong to compare this to apartheid, defined by international conventions as one racial group dominating another. But I drove through the West Bank with out Israeli who’s changed his mind.