A former Mossad chief doubled down Saturday on a previous assertion he made about Israel enforcing an apartheid system in the occupied West Bank.
"[The] fact that there are two populations on the same territory – one [that lives] according to military law and one according to Israeli law – is apartheid by definition," Tamir Pardo, who served as the head of Israel’s infamous national intelligence agency from 2011-2016, said during an interview with Channel 12.
Pardo made headlines earlier this week when he said in an interview with The Associated Press that "there is an apartheid state here [in Israel] ... in a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state."
In his most recent interview, the former spy chief rounded on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners, mentioning National Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir but also alluding to the Finance Minister and self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich. Pardo said of the two cabinet ministers that "their approach is that of apartheid".
Pardo referenced Smotrich’s call earlier this year to "wipe out" the Palestinian village of Huwara, while also mentioning Ben-Gvir’s claim last month that his family’s right to travel in the occupied West Bank is "more important than the right to movement for Arabs".
Far-right government poses 'existential danger'
The self-described Israeli patriot further said that the presence of far-right politicians in the current government poses an "existential danger" to the Jewish state.
"The fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu — who did not agree to even be photographed with Ben-Gvir until the eve of the elections — put him in such a central position, he changed the strategic status of the State of Israel and he is putting it in existential danger," he said.
Pardo is one of a number of former senior Israeli officials to compare the situation Israel has created in the West Bank to apartheid. Last month, the decorated former Israeli general and former deputy chief of Mossad Amiram Levin not only compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid, but went further and likened it to Nazi Germany.
Leading human rights groups in Israel and abroad, as well as Palestinians and the UN, have accused Israel’s 56-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank of morphing into an apartheid system that subjugates and discriminates against Palestinians.