Margaret Wente for the Settler Movement

In yesterday's column in the Globe Margaret Wente pours scorn on those opposed to the mistreatment of Palestinians in the Occupied territories.

On the one hand she reluctantly acknowledges Israeli excesses in the last paragraph of her screed while still minimizing them:

Israel can be condemned for many things, including bad judgment, botched military campaigns, unnecessary harshness and occasional brutality. So can lots of other countries.

But she is dismissive of the comparison with Apartheid South Africa while still admitting that Black South Africans who lived under it like Bishop Tutu find it an accurate comparison.

But the analogy with South Africa is badly flawed. Under apartheid, non-white South Africans were denied the right to vote, to organize, to live where they wanted or to marry across racial lines. A small white minority ruled a large black underclass.

Denied the right to live where they wanted? Is she suggesting that Palestinians in the occupied territories have this right? In fact she repeatedly and deliberately tries to confuse the issue by referring to Israeli Arabs living within Israel rather than Palestinians living in the occupied territories - she knows better what the debate is about but obfuscation has always been her favorite tactic.

Palestinians in the occupied territories have no vote in the state that controls them and in South Africa at its worst they didn't have whites only highways which nonwhites could be shot for setting foot on and had more freedom of movement than Palestinians in the open area prison of Gaza do now. At the height of resistance to Apartheid - which Apartheid apologists in the west sounding a lot like Wente described as 'communist terrorism' - black townships weren't being shelled with heavy artillery and white phosphorus.

In fact within Israel the debate about the occupied territories is much more robust than Israel's apologists would prefer was allowed here and Apartheid is a term that is regularly used. Arguments that get fierce accusations of antisemitism thrown at them here are routinely made by Jewish Israelis within Israel.

Just another Wente column with her usual mix of snide sarcasm and selective application of the facts.