In the past year, Pardo has become an outspoken critic against Netanyahu and his government's push to reshape the judicial system, slamming his old boss for steps he said would lead Israel to become a dictatorship. 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 a state for the Jews. ![]() But he said that he believed among the country’s most pressing issues was the Palestinians - above Iran’s nuclear program, seen by Netanyahu as an existential threat. 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. Given Pardo's background, the comments carry special weight in security-obsessed Israel. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.” “There is an apartheid state here,” Tamir Pardo said in an interview. 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.Ī handful of former Israeli leaders, diplomats and security men have warned that Israel risks becoming an apartheid state, but Pardo's language was even more blunt. 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. HERZLIYA – 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.
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