Quick, Find A New Alarmist Buzzword To Call Israel – ‘Apartheid’ Isn’t Working

by Linda Sarsour

New York, September 19 – I just returned from a solidarity visit to our Palestinian brethren under occupation, and I have both good news and bad news. The good news: our brothers and sisters facing the brutal colonialist policies of Zionism expressed as much resolve as ever when it comes to demanding historical justice. The bad news: few important-enough people and entities seem to care, and the ever-evolving list of charged epithets we throw at the Zionists seems to be losing whatever power it once had, including what many of us considered a carefully-crafted ace-in-the-hole, using a single word to paint the Jewish State as just another incarnation of white-minority-ruled South Africa. But even that rhetorical trick has produced disappointing results, and we desperately need new epithets to play on gullible Western emotions, ignorance, and knee-jerk antisemitism if we are to keep Palestine on the front page and in the trending topics.

Simpleminded activists might feel tempted to attribute the fizzling of the “Apartheid!” label to sinister (((Zionist))) manipulation or media, or suppression of the accusations. But an honest look at media reveals no shortage of mainstream outlets willing to legitimize the term as referring to Israel, especially since Amnesty International worked so hard to develop a redefinition of the term to apply only to Israel. All that hard work amounting to… not much, in terms of policy outcomes, will prompt some to imagine dark forces at play, but we mustn’t rush into that mentality when more mundane factors explain the failure.

Chief among them: rhetorical fatigue. The fact that we’ve been yelling ourselves hoarse over so many spurious “massacres” by Israel might, just might, have eroded our credibility. Our tendency to call everything associated with Jewish sovereignty and security “Nazism” has diluted the impact of our work.

It also doesn’t help that we call for boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning Israel, while registering no notable successes and quite a few embarrassing instances of hypocrisy on our part. For example, I was just there, enjoying places where Jews and Arabs live under Israeli rule more or less peacefully. Certainly more peaceful than the streets of Brooklyn. Who knows how many of us use Wix as the backbone of our websites? And don’t even get me started on the technology that runs our smartphones and computers. If we don’t take our demands and rhetoric seriously, how can we expect anyone else to?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hijack a progressive movement and make it about Palestine, thus running it into the ground.

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