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NLP: What did you make of Ehud Barak’s recent comparison of
Israel to South Africa?

JC: We should be extremely wary of ascribing a leftwing agenda to
senior Israeli politicians who make use of the word “apartheid” in the
Israeli-Palestinian context. Barak was not claiming that Israel is an
apartheid state when he addressed the high-powered delegates at the
Herzliya conference last month; he was warning the Netanyahu government
that its approach to the two-state solution was endangering Israel’s
legitimacy in the eyes of the world that would eventually lead to it
being called an apartheid state. He was politicking. His goal was to
intimidate Netanyahu into signing up to his, and the Israeli centre’s,
long-standing agenda of “unilateral separation”: statehood imposed on
the Palestinians as a series of bantustans (be sure, the irony is
entirely lost on Barak and others). Barak knows that Netanyahu currently
has no intention of creating any kind of Palestinian state, even a
bogus one, despite his commitments to the US.

The last senior Israeli politician to talk of “apartheid” was Ehud
Olmert, and it is worth remembering why he used the term. It was back in
November 2003, when he was deputy prime minister and desperately trying
to scare his boss, Ariel Sharon, into reversing his long-standing
support for the settlements and adopt i... >>>