Majadle near Temple Mount
Majadle near Temple MountIsrael news photo: Flash 90

Members of Brandeis Students for Justice in Palestine (BSJP), together with Waltham and Boston area Palestine solidarity activists, disrupted a Town Hall Meeting with five Knesset Members at Temple Emanuel in Newton, Massachusetts on Monday. They chanted slogans against supposed Israeli "apartheid."

The activists wore blue T-shirts featuring the word “apartheid” in Hebrew. They stood up before MK Ofir Akunis (Likud) began speaking at the event and shouted, "Israel is an apartheid state and the Knesset is an apartheid parliament!"

The protest may be one of the stupidest "apartheid" protests ever, though, because one of the five visiting MKs is Raleb Majadle of the Labor party – an Arab, who served as Minister of Science, Culture and Sport in the previous government.

While Majadle is a member of a Zionist party, he has been known to make incendiary Arab nationalist statements, including a justification of Muslim destruction of Temple Mount artifacts and the statement "I respect Israeli law...  but if there is a contradiction between the law and my deep faith as a Muslim, I announce that I will know what to choose."

The event, whose sponsors included Brandeis University, the Ruderman Foundation, and a number of Boston-area Zionist organizations, was aimed at strengthening relations between Israeli political leaders and the American Jewish community.

The activists were pushed outside the hall by police officers and private security guards. One student was arrested and another was reportedly hurt while being thrown to the floor by a police officer.

Besides Akunis and Majadle, the panel included MKs Lia Shemtov (Yisrael Beitenu), Faina Kirshenbaum (Yisrael Beitenu) and Ilan Gilon (Meretz).

The BSJP website says that the parliamentary delegation included five MKs, but lists only the names of Akunis, Shemtov and Kirshenbaum – seemingly an act of discrimination in itself.