Trump campaign backs Netanyahu on Palestinian ‘ethnic cleansing’ charge

It merits the US Jewish community’s rejection and repudiation.

“Prime Minister Bettel has invited me to Luxembourg, and he said the Palestinians might also come there”.

Netanyahu also turned the tables on the “ethnic cleansing” charge, noting that the only side trying to ethnically cleanse anything is the Palestinian leadership, which demands a state free of Jews. The irony is, of course, that these settlers initially colonized this land after it was captured in the 1967 war at the behest of the state.

“Settlements are a final status issue that must be resolved in negotiations between the parties”. We’ll see, one of them or anywhere else. These demands can not coexist with the idea of a two-state solution, which requires Palestinian sovereignty over the territory agreed upon for their state. He went on to intimate that insofar as the USA and other western countries support the uprooting of Israeli settlements as part of an agreement with the Palestinians, they were, in effect, supporting the cleansing of Jews.

Senior officials in Ramallah believe that Netanyahu’s words were directed at Washington, given that he mentioned the two largest minority groups in the United States: “Would you accept ethnic cleansing in your own country?”

Nor was it appropriate to compare the settlers to Israeli-Arabs, who are full-fledged Israeli citizens and as such are entitled to the full array of civic equality under Israeli law.

Two lawyers hired by the City University of NY to investigate alleged instances of anti-Semitism found that expressions of political opposition to the state of Israel are not inherently anti-Semitic, and that such expressions are protected under the First Amendment.

The prime minister concluded: “Ethnic cleansing for peace is absurd”.

“No one would seriously claim that the almost 2 million Arabs living inside Israel – that they’re an obstacle to peace”, he said. If this situation becomes a reality, questions of respect, tolerance, and security become extremely relevant.

Tensions have been especially high since an uptick in Israeli-Palestinian violence began last October.

“There is a deeper apartheid system being created in the occupied Palestinian territories than that which existed in South Africa”.

AMCHA’s 2016 mid-year study, which revealed a 45% increase in campus anti-Semitism, found that calls for Israel’s elimination on campus tripled, and that expression highly correlated with actions that harm Jewish students.

Like the term “genocide”, the term “ethnic cleansing” should be restricted to actually describing the atrocity it suggests – rather than distorted to suit political ends.