The Apartheid Road

It is getting very hard for some who considered themselves friends of Israel to stomach what it seems to be becoming. Unfortunately not an isolated incident.

Seven Israeli teenagers were in custody on Monday, accused of what a police official and several witnesses described as an attempted lynching of several Palestinian youths, laying bare the undercurrent of tension in this ethnically mixed but politically divided city. A 15-year-old suspect standing outside court said, “For my part he can die, he’s an Arab.”

Two suspects were escorted to a courthouse in Jerusalem on Monday. The police said that scores of Jewish youths were involved in the attack late Thursday in West Jerusalem’s Zion Square, leaving one 17-year-old unconscious and hospitalized. Hundreds of bystanders watched the mob beating, the police said — and no one intervened.

This sort of thing is the all but inevitable side effect of the settler movement and the fanatics who now control Israeli politics. This is the country that Sheldon Adelson and Mitt Romney want us to go to war against Iran for. How much longer are Americans going to sign up for more of that?

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