it appears that slowly the force field surrounding israhell is finally cracking;

More than 700 academics and public figures from Israel, Palestine and other countries have signed an open letter equating Israel’s occupation of the West Bank with apartheid, signalling what supporters say is a “watershed moment” for how Israel’s occupation is viewed.

The letter, which began circulating on Friday, has received around 200 signatures per day with “more coming in, quite literally, by the minute”, Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and organiser of the letter, told Middle East Eye.

The letter featured 752 signatories at the time of publication.

The authors said there was a direct link between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to overhaul Israel’s judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian Territories.

“The ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population,” the letter said.

Notably, the letter made a clear reference to “the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation that, we repeat, has yielded a regime of apartheid.”

“There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid,” it added.

Bartov told MEE that there were a number of Israeli academics who signed the letter who previously would have likely refused to equate the occupation with apartheid. One of the most prominent he identified was Benny Morris, professor emeritus at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

“The main change is that Israeli behavior, in the West Bank, but also apparently unfolding vis-a-vis Israel’s Arabs now, has become increasingly brutal over the past few years, and especially more in the past half year. It has made more and more people realise that continued occupation is morally and politically impossible,” he said.

‘Watershed Moment’

Leading academics such as Peter Beinart from the City University of New York, and Avrum Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel also signed the letter.

Academics whose backgrounds span from evolutionary biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to choreography and rabbinical studies at Hebrew College also endorsed the letter. Besides leading academics in Israel, it received support from professors at Yale, Brown, Columbia, and Harvard University in the United States.

On social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, one user anticipated potential accusations of anti-semitism.........more........