Israel enforcing apartheid in occupied West Bank — former Mossad chief

Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the occupied West Bank, a former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency has said, joining a growing list of retired officials to endorse an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse and international diplomacy.

Tamir Pardo becomes the latest former senior official to have concluded that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank amounts to apartheid, a reference to the system of racial separation in South Africa that ended in 1994.

Leading rights groups in Israel and abroad and Palestinians have accused Israel and its 56-year occupation of the West Bank of morphing into an apartheid system that they say gives Palestinians second-class status and is designed to maintain Jewish hegemony from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

“There is an apartheid state here,” Tamir Pardo said in an interview with the Associated Press news agency. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”

Pardo, who was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and served as head of Israel’s spy agency from 2011-2016, said that he believed among the country’s most pressing issues was the Palestinians — above Iran’s nuclear programme, seen by Netanyahu as an existential threat.

Pardo said that as Mossad chief, he repeatedly warned Netanyahu that he needed to decide what Israel’s borders were, or risk the destruction of the Israeli state.

In the past year, Pardo has become an outspoken critic of Netanyahu and his government’s push to reshape the judicial system.

Pardo’s remarks, and the judicial overhaul, come as Israel’s far-right government, which is made up of ultranationalist parties who support annexing the West Bank, is working to entrench Israel’s hold on the territory.

Some ministers have pledged to double the number of settlers currently living in the West Bank, which stands at a half-million.

Netanyahu’s Likud party issued a statement condemning Pardo’s comments. “Instead of defending Israel and the Israeli military, Pardo slanders Israel,” it said. “Pardo. You should be ashamed.”

In apartheid South Africa, a system based on white supremacy and racial segregation was in place from 1948 until 1994. Human rights groups have based their conclusions on Israel on international conventions like the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It defines apartheid as “an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.”

Pardo said Israeli citizens can get into a car and drive wherever they want, excluding the blockaded Gaza, but that Palestinians can’t drive everywhere. He said that his views on the system in the West Bank were “not extreme. It’s a fact.”

Israelis are barred from entering Palestinian areas of the West Bank, but can drive across Israel and throughout the 60 percent of the West Bank that Israel occupies.

Palestinians need permission from Israel to enter the country and often must pass through military checkpoints to move within the West Bank.

Rights groups point to discriminatory policies within Israel and in occupied East Jerusalem, Israel’s blockade of the Gaza, which has been administered by the Hamas since 2007, and its occupation of the West Bank.

Israel exerts overall control of the territory, maintains a two-tier legal system and is building and expanding Jewish settlements that most of the international community says is illegal.

Israel rejects any allegation of apartheid and says its own Arab citizens enjoy equal rights. Israel granted limited autonomy to the internationally recognised Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, at the height of the peace process in the 1990s and withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005.

Pardo warned that if Israel doesn’t set borders between it and the Palestinians, Israel’s existence will be in danger.

“Israel needs to decide what it wants. A country that has no border has no boundaries,” Pardo said.