Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.
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Tel Aviv, April 28 - The holder of a fellowship from a human-rights-monitoring NGO came to the Jewish State several days ago to conduct a comprehensive survey of the race-based discrimination and segregation policies that his organization insists the country maintains against the non-Jewish population within its borders, but has discovered that after recording every remotely credible manifestation of the phenomenon that he can identify, he still has twenty-nine days, twenty-three hours, and forty-eight minutes remaining in the thirty-day fact-gathering portion of the project, and has begun soliciting recommendations from locals and friends abroad regarding what sites, activities, or experiences to pursue with all that free time.
Grant Rider, 23, arrived in Israel last week on sponsored mission from Human Rights Watch and instructions from the latter to observe Israeli society, government, politics, law enforcement, and public policy, with a specific focus on each institution, law, or policy that features apartheid. Mr. Rider began his research as soon as his flight landed, attempting to discern whether passport control, customs, or other official functions at Ben-Gurion International Airport discriminated against incoming travelers by race - only to discover that the largely-automated processes involve none. His observational powers then turned to looking for apartheid in baggage claim, COVID testing, and transportation away from the airport, again with nothing to document. By the time Rider's formal research began two days later, following a brief recuperation from jetlag, he had conducted upwards of two dozen conversations with visitors, citizens, and residents of multiple races, none of whom could point him to apartheid.
"I know it's supposed to be rampant," the puzzled researcher acknowledged. "So I figured it should be easy to spot. But nope. I know a lot of activists like to go on about Israeli apartheid, but the only 'discrimination' I've been able to find is between citizens and non-citizens, which is what every country on Earth does. If it's race-based, I'm having a hard time seeing how two million Arabs with full citizenship and voting rights, welfare, healthcare, the whole package - how that represents apartheid. Palestinians are citizens of Palestine, or the Palestinian Authority, whatever you want to call it, so that's not race-based but citizenship-based, as I said. Is this one of those things where we change the long-established definition of a term so we can paint Israel as violating it, like we did with 'seller-colonialism,' 'ethnic cleansing,' and 'genocide'? Maybe I missed the e-mail, but my job here is done, and I have more than four weeks until I have to fly back and write up my findings. I hear the Dead Sea is good."
Rider explained that Human Rights Watch leadership reacted with dismay to the negligible tangible effect that the Amnesty International report labeling Israel and apartheid state earlier this year has had in the real world, other than undermining the credibility of human rights groups themselves. His assignment, therefore, aims to present what HRW hopes will produce an "objective" verdict that supports the Apartheid charge, and as such did not predicate his instructions on tendentious anti-Israel axioms, with results predictable to anyone outside the circle of mutually-parroting activists who populate the human rights industry.
"I'd like to go visit the Temple Mount, maybe," he suggested. "Only Muslims are allowed to pray there, which is the kind of apartheid I guess my bosses are OK with."
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