Update (Sept. 8, 2023): The Archbishop of Canterbury says Israel is not an apartheid state and calls Israel "precious".
Of course, what d'ya expect from the very people who colonized the world, exploited and enslaved the innocent and the poor, and left behind them torn countries and nations including Palestine-Israel. Israel was created as a British colony to get the infamous "Empire" closer to the oil fields in Arabia, just like South Africa was created to secure the "Empire"'s maritime routes to its Indian "possessions". So it makes sense that this dinosaur of the Church of England (which is the political creation of a fornicating adulterer king Henry VIII) which contributed its massive racism to building the "Empire" is reluctant now to backtrack on all the harm and torment it caused to nations around the world. Israel was created as a British colony over the ashes of historic Palestine by the British Empire. Just as the British resisted ostracizing South Africa (its other former colony) for its abhorrent treatment of the native indigenous black Africans, it is (in the mouth of this Church of England idiot) resisting ostracizing Israel's racism against the native indigenous Arab Palestinians. To do otherwise and speak the truth would be an admission of failure. The Archbishop, like the Pope, is infallible. And so the abuse and torment of Palestine can continue under God's benevolent will.
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[Excerpted with modifications from an Associated Press report]
A former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency said on Wednesday that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse and international diplomacy.
Tamir Pardo is the latest former senior official to conclude that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank is apartheid, a reference to the system of racial separation in South Africa that ended in 1994.
Leading rights groups 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 Israeli leaders, diplomats and security men have been warning Israel that it risks becoming an apartheid state: “There is an apartheid state here”, Tamir Pardo said. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state”.
Pardo was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and served as head of Israel's clandestine spy agency from 2011-2016. He asserted that the Palestinians represent the country’s most pressing issue, more so than Iran’s nuclear program which Netanyahu keeps saying is 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 a state for the Jews. Israel has no constitution in which Israel would be compelled to define its borders. The international community believes Israel, without a constitution, harbors expansionist ambitions to steal more land from historic Palestine.
Pardo's candid evaluation Wednesday of Israel's military occupation is rare among leaders of the grassroots protest movement against the judicial overhaul, which has largely been mute about the occupation out of concern that it might scare away more nationalist supporters. But this position by the protest movement is also seen as an implicit endorsement of the occupation by the secular Israeli Left.
Pardo's remarks come as Israel's far-right government, which is made up of ultrareligious extremist and violence-advocating parties who support annexing the West Bank, is working to entrench Israel's hold on the territory.
Netanyahu's extreme far right 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 the conventional international political discourse of our time, Pardo stands to be accused of anti-Semitism or be denounced as a self-hating Jew.
In apartheid South Africa, a system based on white colonial supremacy and racial segregation against native indigenous Black Africans was in place from 1948 until 1994. In apartheid Israel, the system is based on white Jewish European colonial supremacy and racial segregation against native indigenous Palestinian Arabs in place since the founding of Israel in 1948 and which was expanded after the 1967 invasion and brutal occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Human rights groups have based their conclusions regarding 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 Israelis 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."
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 when denied entry they are left stranded as stateless people unable to return to their country. Palestinians are regularly denied building permits, which is a deliberate policy of de-arabization of Palestine, while incoming foreign Jewish settlers (from the United States and Europe) are allowed to build illegal settlements on Palestinian land just stolen from Palestinian villagers. Palestinians must pass through military checkpoints to move within their own land in the West Bank.
Rights groups point to all these discriminatory policies within Israel and in annexed east Jerusalem, Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, 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 the international community considers illegal.
Pardo warned that if Israel doesn't set borders between it and the Palestinians, Israel's existence as a Jewish state will be in danger.
Given current demographic trends, Arabs will outnumber Jews - the infamous demographic time bomb - in both Israel and the 1967 occupied territories. Continued occupation will force Israel into making difficult choices:
1- Formalize Jewish minority rule over disenfranchised majority Palestinians, or
2- Give the Palestinians the right to vote, in which case Israel will become a bi-national state , thus ending the racist Zionist dream of a pure exclusively Jewish homeland in historic Palestine, or
3- Carry out a second massive ethnic cleansing capmpaign, just like the 1948 one that created the state of Israel, by evicting the Palestinians of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank to ensure a doimnant Jewish majority.
“Israel needs to decide what it wants. A country that has no border[s] has no boundaries,” Pardo said.
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