r/JewsOfConscience • u/DorkasaurusRexx Mizrahi Anti-Zionist • 1d ago
Resources The most succinct and clear argument that Israel is an apartheid, from Tamir Pardo, former head of the Mossad, appointed by Bibi Netanyahu.
September 6, 2023. Exactly 3 years ago to the day.
“There is an apartheid state here,” Pardo said in an interview with the Associated Press news agency, published on Wednesday.
“In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state,” Pardo said, joining a small but growing list of retired officials to endorse an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse and international diplomacy but has gained growing acceptance within human rights circles.
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 institutionalized 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 Strip, 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.
He also warned that what has been described as Israel’s “forever occupation” threatens its existence as a Jewish state. “Israel needs to decide what it wants,” he said. “A country that has no border has no boundaries.”
Pardo is among the highest ranking former officials to draw the once taboo parallel with the old South Africa. Israel’s former attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, said last year “that my country has sunk to such political and moral depths that it is now an apartheid regime”.
The former speaker of the Israeli parliament, Avraham Burg, and the renowned Israeli historian, Benny Morris, are among more than 2,000 Israeli and American public figures who have signed a recent public statement declaring that “Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid”.
The open letter calls on US Jewish groups to speak out against the occupation of the Palestinian territories as “the elephant in the room” in the mass Israeli protests against Netanyahu’s deeply divisive judicial reforms which, it said, are intended to “annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population”.
Prominent foreign officials have also invoked apartheid to described the situation in the occupied territories.
Earlier this year, the former Irish president Mary Robinson and the former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon – representatives of The Elders group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007 – spoke about the “ever-growing evidence that the situation meets the international legal definition of apartheid” after visiting the West Bank.
Israelis are barred from entering Palestinian areas of the West Bank, but can drive across Israel and throughout the 60% of the West Bank that Israel controls. 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 annexed east Jerusalem, Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has been ruled by the Hamas militant group 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 considers illegal.
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u/Fit_Dog_123 Non-Jewish Ally 1d ago edited 1d ago
Benny Morris is a genocide denier. He acknowledges the Nakba but twists it to say it did not go far enough to "transfer" Palestinians from their land.
There is a danger here. They may acknowledge apartheid, but i have to ask because that link broke, does that acceptance contribute more to normalize and create indifference to apartheid than work to resist apartheid on moral grounds? Israel could accept its moral degeneracy but tell the world "so what" and fall deeper so moral considerations are replaced by brute force and terror. In other words, nihilism. Zionists will commit apartheid because they can with impunity.
Its like after 10.7 some israelis chanted lets Nakba 2023.
What is the source of their morality?
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u/DorkasaurusRexx Mizrahi Anti-Zionist 22h ago
They get offended by the term every day. Apartheid is the truth and even their own leaders say it. They have no morality. All that they are is hatred of Arabs anymore.
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u/halfercode Anti-Zionist 1d ago
I don't disagree with the sentiment, but note that one has to grit one's teeth to nod in agreement with an ex-Mossad leader. It reminds me of the 2012 documentary The Gatekeepers, which featured the surprisingly anti-occupation views of prior leaders of Shin Bet. The anti-colonialist who watches the movie is still confronted with the image of amiable, chuckling, comfortable old men who have done macabre, unspeakable things.
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u/DorkasaurusRexx Mizrahi Anti-Zionist 1d ago
This is unfortunately, something somewhat common. They serve in the government and military and security apparatus. And toward the end of their careers, they develop a sudden moral conscience and call these things plainly as they are: apartheid.
https://palestinenexus.com/articles/15-former-israeli-leaders-call-it-apartheid
However, these are our best resources. A blue haired college kid calling it an apartheid doesn't mean anything. The head of the Mossad, appointed by Netanyahu himself? What are they gonna say, that he's a liar? There's no response. They have to acknowledge the claims.
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