A Brief History of Israeli Leaders on Apartheid

For decades, Israeli political and military leaders have wondered, will Israel become an apartheid state?

Then, once their tenure in office ends, and their title is former Mossad chief, or former Shin Bet chief, or former minister in government, they find the courage to say, alas, Israel has become an apartheid state!

In 1967, the former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said shortly after the conquest of Gaza and the West Bank that Israel “better rid itself of the territories and their Arab population as soon as possible…if it did not Israel would soon become an apartheid state.” Did soon mean a year? A decade? A half century?

In 1976, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called the settlements a cancer when a mere 3,000 Israeli civilians lived illegally in occupied Palestine. Still, something had to be done “if we don’t want to get to apartheid,” he said. He prefaced this point by telling his interviewer to keep this part quiet. “I have said, and this I ask really not to be used, I’m not going to [say it publicly]....” Rabin understood settlements and apartheid were two sides to the same coin. Israel could not have the former without the latter. 

In 2000, Israeli leader Ariel Sharon admitted in private that “the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.” Sharon’s vision for Palestine was an archipelago of 11 demilitarized and disconnected cantons subject to Israeli military domination. Sharon, along with other Israeli leaders like Rafael Eitan and Eliahu Lankin, believed Israel and South Africa found themselves in similar situations. They were apparently both states facing “terrorists” hell-bent on their destruction. That’s why he frequently interrogated an Israeli official with deep knowledge of South Africa’s regime to learn apartheid best practices.

By the mid-2000s, the Oslo “Peace Process” was dead, making Israel’s apartheid rule harder to deny. Thus began a flurry of statements from current and former Israeli officials sounding the apartheid alarm bell:

In 2006, former Education Minister Shulamit Aloni published a piece in the popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot titled “Indeed, Apartheid in Israel.” 

In 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Israeli media just after his Annapolis “Peace Conference” failed to bring peace to anyone: "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.”

In 2008, former Environment minister Yossi Sarid published a similar piece titled, ”Yes, It Is Apartheid” in which he tried to appeal to Israel’s mainstream: “The white Afrikaners, too, had reasons for their segregation policy; they, too, felt threatened - a great evil was at their door, and they were frightened, out to defend themselves,” he wrote. 

In 2010 former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared at a security conference in Herzliya: "as long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic…if this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state." 

For Israel’s Prime Ministers, even former ones, the apartheid admission has always been too much to stomach. Barak, much like Olmert, Rabin and Ben-Gurion, preferred the future tense. Israel couldn’t possibly be an apartheid state now. The apartheid label was reserved for an unspecified future date, the impending doom forever lurking on the horizon.

In 2013, the former Foreign Ministry director-general and former ambassador to South Africa Alon Liel, stated rather bluntly, “In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian state is created, we are actually one state. This joint state — in the hope that the status quo is temporary — is an apartheid state.” Although Liel also tried to hegde his position, describing the situation as an “apartheid cliff” or as “a sort of Israeli apartheid.”

Much like other Israeli officials, Liel had to point out that it was precisely because of his Zionism that he insisted on using the word apartheid. It was his desire to save the Jewish state that led him to call it an apartheid state. The label was now becoming a symbol of the Zionist center-left as a rhetorical weapon against the Zionist right.

In recent years, the chorus of liberal Zionists calling Israel an apartheid state has only grown louder.

In his 2020 memoir, former head of the Shin Bet Ami Ayalon wrote Israel “can only be described as an apartheid state.” He continued: “two sets of laws, rules, and standards, and two infrastructures...we’ve already created an apartheid situation in Judea and Samaria where we control Palestinians by force, denying them self-determination.” 

In 2022, former Attorney General of Israel Michael Ben-Yair:  “It is with great sadness that I must also conclude that my country has sunk to such political and moral depths that it is now an apartheid regime. It is time for the international community to recognise this reality as well.”

In just the past year or two the flurry has turned into an avalanche. The elite mainstream journalist Ron Ben-Yishai published a Feb. 2023 op-ed (in Hebrew) titled “The judicial revolution has another goal – the Apartheid”; the former IDF Northern Command commander Amiram Levin declared in Aug. 2023 “there is absolute apartheid” in the West Bank; former head of the Mossad (from 2011-2016) Tamir Pardo said in Sep. 2023 that “there is an apartheid state here…In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”; former Director General of Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed in June 2024 "Israel is turning into South Africa.” 

The pattern is remarkable. Israeli officials spend their careers defending, strengthening and enforcing an apartheid regime, and then, once they settle into retirement, they lament their life’s work. It’s almost as if the apartheid accusation acts as a kind of release valve for their collective guilt. The question remains, when will Israel’s current political and military leaders have the courage to state the obvious when they are still able to do something about it?