The necons, from Bill Kristol to Jennifer Rubin, from The Weekly Standard to Commentary, continue to try to dig out "dirt" on Chuck Hagel. The latest is a statement he supposedly made during a speech at Rutgers asserting that Israel "was risking becoming an apartheid state if it didn’t allow the Palestinians to form a state." This has caused an uproar in the neocon fever swamp and led Lindsay Graham to send another letter to Hagel asking whether Hagel made the statement and whether it reflects his current view.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
I guess this is considered a blatant violation of I/P political correctness sufficient to blow Hagel out of the water. But it just so happens that a former director general in the Israeli foreign minister, and a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Alon Liel, just made a statement far stronger than what Hagel supposedly said:
As long as there is no Palestinian state and Israel rules over the West Bank, Israel is a de facto apartheid state, a former top Foreign Ministry official said Wednesday . . . .
Alon Liel, a former Foreign Ministry director-general and ex-ambassador to South Africa, also called on President Barack Obama to stay home if he didn’t intend to warn Israelis about the dangers of an approaching “apartheid cliff.”
“In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian state is created, we are actually one state. This joint state — in the hope that the status quo is temporary — is an apartheid state,” Liel said at a Jerusalem conference about whether Israel is or could become an apartheid state.
“As someone who knows the original apartheid well, and also knows the State of Israel quite well – I was born here, grew up here, served and fought for it for 30 years — someone like me knows that Zionism isn’t apartheid and the State of Israel that I grew up in wasn’t an apartheid state,” Liel emphasized.
“I’m here today because I came to the conclusion that the occupation of the West Bank as it exists today is a sort of Israeli apartheid,” said Liel. “The occupation became a hump on the back of Zionism; it has now become the hump of the State of Israel.”
There is a real danger of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank becoming an integral part of the state, he said. “When that happens, when the West Bank and [Israel in the pre-1967 lines] become one, and the Palestinian residents of the West Bank will not have citizenship — we’re apartheid,” he said.
Similarities between the “original apartheid” as it was practiced in South Africa and the situation in Israel and the West Bank today “scream to the heavens,” added Liel, who was Israel’s ambassador in Pretoria from 1992 to 1994. There can be little doubt that the suffering of Palestinians is not less intense than that of blacks during apartheid-era South Africa, he asserted.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/...
Liel is not unique in Israel. About half the members of the current Knesset represent parties that have expressed the view that Israel will become an apartheid state if it does not end its occupation and colonization of the west bank. Yet what's good enough to be expressed by members of the Israeli Knesset is apparently not good enough for the Defense Secretary of the United States. At least according to the neocons in and out of government.
Simply mindblowing.