Former Mossad chief says Israel is enforcing apartheid system in West Bank

Tamir Pardo, former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, says Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank. He joins a small list of former officials to endorse the idea. Pardo warned that if Israel doesn't set borders, its existence as a Jewish state will be in danger. He said Israel must decide what it wants, as a country without borders has no boundaries.

A former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, joining a tiny but 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 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.

A handful of former Israeli leaders, diplomats and security men have warned that Israel risks becoming an apartheid state, but Mr. Pardo's language was even more blunt.

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

Given Mr. Pardo's background, the comments carry special weight in security-obsessed Israel.

Mr. Pardo, who was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and served as head of Israel's clandestine spy agency from 2011-2016, wouldn't say if he held the same beliefs while heading the Mossad. But he said that he believed among the country’s most pressing issues was the Palestinians — above Iran’s nuclear program, seen by Mr. Netanyahu as an existential threat.