Dredging up the Israel/apartheid question

In addition to everything else they are, the scribblings on The Washington Post Op-Ed Page are often wildly out of touch. They often have the feel of having been written a decade ago, stuffed under a mattress somewhere, and then arbitrarily hauled out and dusted off for publication. With seemingly no trigger, Richard Cohen woke up today and decided to write about a long-standing though not particularly relevant (and largely semantic) controversy: whether the word "apartheid" is properly applied to Israel due to its control of the West Bank and Gaza, whose non-Jewish residents have no democratic rights in the country that rules over their land. Cohen, for whatever reasons, focuses on Jimmy Carter's use of the word in his book from four years ago, and takes the standard, predictable position: the term is false, deliberately inflammatory, and often the by-product of anti-semitism, etc. etc. But in dredging up this debate, Cohen completely omits a very recent, highly significant event: the use of the term by Israel's own hawkish Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, just four weeks ago: