NGOs Working On Strategy To Call Israeli Gaza Attack Tunnel Barrier ‘Apartheid Wall’ Also

“‘Apartheid’ is the hot term right now.”

Gaza City, August 25 – Reports of Israel’s military neutralizing yet another underground passage from this coastal territory into the Jewish State has challenged human rights groups to find ways that they can spin such a development to portray Israel as evil, with the approach that shows the most promise the characterization of such Israeli efforts as further evidence that Israel practices race-based disenfranchisement of Palestinians.

Activists from Btselem, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and several other organizations conducted meetings this week to settle on a rhetorical strategy to address Israel’s measures to protect its citizens from infiltration by terrorists from Gaza, an important element of which involves an underground wall running the length of the territory’s border with Israel and extending at least as deep as the available technology will allow the militant groups in Gaza to excavate. Several participants in the meetings floated the idea of deeming that wall an instrument of Apartheid, terminology that saw some propaganda success when applied to Israel’s security barrier that runs roughly along the 1967 armistice line with Jordan and that has all abut eliminated suicide bombings originating from beyond that line.

“‘Apartheid’ is the hot term right now,” argued a representative from Btselem. “It will lose its valence soon, with the way all of us have been deploying it against Israel, but while it’s still useful, we should maximize what we get out of it.”

“It’s a challenge,” acknowledged a Btselem activist. “Other tunnels, like the ones separating Egypt from Gaza, some of those are mostly military and some of them are used only for smuggling. But none of the tunnels into Israel are for smuggling. We can pretend otherwise, and that’s a defensible approach, playing up the ‘illegal siege’ angle that’s been a staple of our Gaza activism for some time now. But it’ll be a harder sell.”

Other suggested rhetorical avenues during the meetings, some of which have seen mention before, included decrying Israel for shooting down defenseless rockets desperate to leave the squalid Gaza Strip; demanding that Israel supply Gaza with Iron Dome batteries to protect civilians there from Islamists’ rockets that fall short; denouncing the Iron Dome as an unfair advantage, since Palestinians should be able to kill more Israeli civilian with indiscriminate rocket barrages, and Hamas does not provide the civilians it governs with bomb shelters; and continuing to call the Gaza Strip “the most densely-populated place on Earth” when in fact it ranks nowhere near the top 30, and below even Tel Aviv.

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