That’d be me.

What seems more likely is that a hard right Knesset majority will bring out into the open the latent racism that’s always been there.

If they do, they may be playing into Obama’s hands. Obama wants Israel to make consessions that would make peace more likely. The USA supports Israel a lot, and without that support, Israel’s security would be threatened. But it would be politically risky for Obama to withdraw that support, unless the American people approve of his decision to. The more Israel becomes extreme and openly racist, the more supprt Obama would have for using withdrawal of support as a threat against Israel. Maybe Obama is giving Lieberman and Netanyahu enough rope to hang themselves; he’s certainly clever enough that this train of thought will have occurred to him.

Don’t you realise how insulting this is to those who suffered apartheid?

Don’t you realise how insulting it is to those who suffered apartheid that more than almost two decades after it ended, another country is still implementing apartheid policies?

There is no danger of this happening, since Israel is already a racist state, and always has been.

Haven’t got loads of time right now, but just to give a bit of a better idea…The Jewish National Fund (JNF) directly owns 13 percent of the land in Israel, a Zionist body whose self-professed loyalty is “to the Jewish people”. The JNF also has an important stake in the Israel Lands Administration (ILA), which manages 93 percent of Israel’s land.

Then there are the ‘selection committees’:

“According to official figures, around 89% of all towns and villages in Israel are classified as Jewish. Palestinian Arab citizens of the state are excluded from purchasing leasing rights in approximately 78% of these towns and villages, which are known as community or agricultural towns. The reason for their exclusion is that “selection committees” monitor applications for housing units in these areas, in order to filter out the Arab population, often finding Arab applicants to be ‘socially unsuitable’ and prevent them from residing in large areas of state-controlled land. Among the criteria that these committees employ is that the applicant be “suited to social life in a small community or agricultural settlement”. In addition, “a senior official from the settlement agency” (the Jewish Agency or the World Zionist Organization) must sit on the selection committee…”
Adalah, http://www.adalah.org/eng/hrw.php

“Selection committees are made up of government and community representatives as well as a senior official in the Jewish Agency or the Zionist Organization, and have notoriously been used to exclude Arabs from living in rural Jewish communities. The state owns the land and the ILA allocates the land to the communities and leases plots to individual residents, on the basis of the committees’ recommendations…”
Human Rights Watch, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2008/iopt0308/4.htm

All of that doesn’t include the fact that post-1948, many Palestinian villages inside Israel (the ones that weren’t destroyed/repopulated) had their land taken for new Jewish villages/towns. By the 1970s, a typical Palestinian community had lost 65-75 percent of its land (from then on off-limits to the Palestinians).

Where is this happening? In the settlements or more widely?

Does that shield Israel from criticism? It could be called the mini-me apartheid state. Or it could dismantle it’s own racist policies.