Time and again, Hamas’s American “useful idiots” describe Israel’s war against Palestinian terror groups in language borrowed from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, or the Black Lives Movement today. And, as Shany Mor notes in his November essay, in 2021 “every major human-rights group started issuing glossy reports accusing Israel of practicing apartheid.” Such comparisons are not only absurd, writes Coleman Hughes, they are dangerous:
Once framed this way, the correct view becomes obvious. Israelis: racist oppressors. Palestinians: noble victims. This view of the Arab-Israeli conflict has lodged itself deeply in the Western psyche. . . . It is why Black Lives Matter chapters across America came out in reflexive support of Hamas mere days after the terror group slaughtered 1,200 Israelis in the most gruesome ways imaginable. And it is why Ta-Nehisi Coates, considered by many to be America’s leading public intellectual on race, recently called Israel a “Jim Crow regime” and compared cities in the West Bank to Baltimore and Chicago. . . .
When ideologues co-opt the African American freedom struggle and compare it to the Palestinian national movement, they do black Americans a grave disservice. Black Americans (aside from a fringe) did not seek to dominate and destroy white society, as Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasized frequently in his speeches. African Americans pursued equality before the law and better economic circumstances.
Palestinian leaders, by contrast, seek dominion over all the land existing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Read more on Free Press: https://www.thefp.com/p/israel-is-nothing-like-apartheid-jim-crow