Rep. Khanna: We Need Accountability, not Photo ops that Whitewash Israeli Apartheid

By Osama Ahmad and Rami Sultan

Earlier this month, Amnesty International joined a growing consensus among Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations that Israel practices apartheid toward the Palestinian people. “Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights,” the largest grassroots human rights organization in the world stated.

Israel’s “massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law,” Amnesty added.

Amnesty specifically called out the United States for propping up Israeli apartheid. The United States “must not support the system of apartheid or render aid or assistance to maintaining such a regime, and cooperate to bring an end to this unlawful situation.”

In light of Amnesty’s meticulously documented report and its recommendation to policymakers, it is especially disconcerting that eight Democratic Members of Congress, including four from the Bay Area–Reps. Nancy Pelosi, Ro Khanna, Barbara Lee, and Eric Swalwell–chose this moment to travel to Israel last week to meet with senior Israeli government officials who are complicit in maintaining apartheid.

This trip attempts to whitewash Israeli apartheid, undermines these Representatives’ stated commitments to human rights and the rule of law, and is a slap in the face to Palestinians currently facing Israeli ethnic cleansing in neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem.

It is especially obscene that Pelosi lionized the establishment of Israel while speaking with reporters in the Israeli parliament.

Pelosi failed to mention that Israel was born amidst a premeditated campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants. At least 750,000 Palestinians became refugees after they were forcibly expelled from their homes by Zionist militias and the Israeli army, or fled under war conditions. Under international law, refugees have an iron-clad right to return to their homes; however, Israel has refused to allow Palestinian refugees to return home for nearly 75 years. Instead, Israel demolished at least 400 Palestinian villages and towns in an effort to erase the Palestinian presence from their homeland, and to construct a state designed to privilege Jewish people and discriminate against Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants.

Equally disturbing is Khanna’s adulation of Israel’s technology sector, as he recently told an Israeli media outlet. Especially as the representative for Silicon Valley, Khanna should know better than to reify Israeli technology, which is closely embedded in Israel’s military-industrial complex and whose products fuel repression both for Palestinians living under brutal Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and globally.

Last year, the Washington Post revealed a secret Israeli military program to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank through intrusive and all-pervading facial recognition software, which greatly enhances Israel’s capability to monitor Palestinians, further restrict their movement, and crackdown on Palestinian efforts to organize for their freedom.

In addition, last fall, the United States also sanctioned the NSO Group, an Israeli cyber-spying outfit whose Pegasus software has been sold to authoritarian regimes around the world to jail, torture, and kill human rights defenders, including Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A human rights organization, Frontline Defenders, also found that the phones of employees of prominent Palestinian human rights organizations were similarly hacked by Pegasus software. Now, Israel’s cyber-spying chickens have come home to roost as Israel has been roiled by revelations that Israeli police deployed Pegasus spyware against Israeli politicians.

From ethnic cleansing to repressive technology, Israel is an apartheid state that should be shunned and sanctioned, not whitewashed by Members of Congress–especially those who profess to be progressive.

Osama Ahmad and Rami Sultan are Palestinian-American constituents of Rep. Khanna.