This was the header of a brief notice in today’s paper. The state of Israel has given Human Rights Watch’s Omar Shakir two weeks to leave, claiming that he is an activist for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, a group that is trying to bring about Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territories.

It is no surprise that Israel is expelling the local director of Human Rights Watch, given its record in human rights. Israel may have started as one of those “tolerably repressive” regimes that Jeane Kirkpatrick used to talk about, but it has long ago ceased to be tolerable. Israel has become a garrison state, with a vast nuclear-equipped military complex that has been funded by the U.S.A. as its principal military base in the Mediterranean. Israel has been allowed to treat the Palestinians much as the U.S. treated the native American populations, driving them out, expropriating the good land, and crowding those who remain of the former inhabitants into reservations, denying them all political and civil rights.

American is to Israel as the U.S.S.R. was to communist regimes in Eastern Europe that could not have crushed their people and built up their military without Soviet aid and protection. The U.S. pretends to be even handed in its dealings with the Middle East. But who is so gullible as to believe that, given America’s funding of Israel, its blind tolerance of Israeli repression and colonizing? Who also is so gullible as to believe America’s assertion of the inviolability of human rights, when we turn a blind eye to Israel’s outrages, and support the State of Israel however heinous its behavior.