In a JNS column, Mendi Glik takes aim at Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, who in a Nov. 5 interview on MS NOW again called Israel an "apartheid state" and accused it of deliberately killing Palestinian children, then repeated the claims on CNN.
Glik answers with the record. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh's infant niece was treated in an Israeli hospital in February 2024, in the middle of the war, and other relatives of his were treated before that. Yahya Sinwar, the architect of Oct. 7, owed his life to Israeli surgeons who removed a brain tumor while he was in prison. Thousands of Gaza children have been treated in Israeli medical centers over the years.
On "apartheid," Glik notes that Arab citizens vote, sit in the Knesset and help decide who forms a government, with Arab parties such as the Joint List and Ra'am making recommendations in the latest coalition talks. Arab citizens serve as judges, prosecutors and senior police officers, and Justice George Karra sat on Israel's Supreme Court from 2017 to 2022. The real identity-based ban in the region, he writes, is the red signs barring Israeli Jews from Palestinian-controlled cities in Judea and Samaria.
Glik rejects El-Sayed's line that he opposes only Israel, not Jews. Denying the Jewish state's right to exist and to defend itself, he argues, is an attack on the Jewish people, and he concludes that El-Sayed is no champion of human rights.
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