Student Union members at a large college outside Tel Aviv make a grotesquely racist film, and they don't understand what they did wrong.    I wish I could say that the young Israelis who made this film and the "thousands" who immediately gave "positive reactions" to it were marginal in this society - that they were "hilltop youth" in the West Bank, or slum-dwellers growing up amid severe poverty, ignorance, violence and crime. But they're not. They're college students in their early twenties from the heart of the country, from the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon Lezion, outside…

It is not considered racist in Israel to discriminate against 20 percent of the population and the millions more living in the occupied West Bank. It is considered the self-determination of the Jewish people. The few words Yair Lapid said to the press the day after the election that made his Yesh Atid party the second largest in Israel, are still troubling me. Ami Kaufman mentioned it in his post, but I think it merits a bit more attention, since while we in Israel may be desensitized and no longer shocked, it really is quite disturbing. Those following news here…

Racist attitudes against Arabs are widespread in Israel. Numerous official policies segregate and separate Jews from Palestinians, with a vastly discriminatory effect and intent. Justifications alluding to security needs, or alleging that separation is based on citizenship rather than ethnic origin, do not withstand close scrutiny. One of the most acrimonious controversies surrounding Israeli policy concerns the accusation that it has created a system of apartheid between Jews and Palestinian in territories under its control. The issue is so sensitive, that some activists have come to refer to the term as "the A-word". While bickering over nomenclature is, in my…