Tamir Pardo said in a radio interview with Kan public broadcaster that many of the laws that the government is legislating are tantamount to ‘antisemitic laws,’ and would be labelled such were they passed in any other country
The former head of the Mossad, Tamir Pardo, said that “horrible, racist parties” in Netanyahu’s coalition are similar to the notorious American white supremacist Ku Klux Klan.
In a scathing interview with Kan public broadcaster radio on Thursday, Pardo slammed Netanyahu for “taking the Ku Klux Klan and putting them into government.”
When asked if he was referring to the far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Yitzhak Wasserlauf, he responded: “Of course.”
“Worse than this, I don’t want to go into examples from the 1930s,” he said, pointing to Smotrich’s comments that the Palestinian town of Huwara should be “wiped out.”
The northern West Bank town has been subjected to settler violence for several years, but this culminated in a settler riot in February this year that saw one Palestinian killed, dozens injured, and widespread damage to property.
Pardo went on to say that many of the laws that the government is legislating are tantamount to “antisemitic laws,” and would be labelled such were they passed in any other country.
“Tomorrow morning, they can’t enter a club, or a locality, or can’t buy a house in a certain area, or have less rights, that is antisemitism for its own sake,” he said.
On Tuesday, the Knesset expanded the so-called Admissions Committees Law, which enables small communities to reject applicants they deem “unsuitable," and was described by leading rights organization Adalah as “racist."
The ex-Mossad chief said that he held Netanyahu responsible for the unfolding crisis in the country, and said that his worldview on several key issues “is not so far away” from those of his extremist coalition partners.
Pardo, who served as the head of Israel’s intelligence service from 2011 to 2016 while Netanyahu was in office, cited the prime minister’s lack of vision when it comes to the Palestinian question.
When Pardo confronted Netanyahu with the fact that Israel “rules from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [river] Jordan, and in practice, holds Gaza as the largest open air prison in the world,” he said he was never met with any substantive response.
“His vision [on this issue] is the vision of Smotrich,” Pardo charged.
Pardo said that the mass refusal from IDF reservists does not amount in an “existential threat,” given Israel’s relative strength in the region. However, he warned that “if we lose hi-tech, the doctors, the academia, we won’t have a country anymore,” or at least, he later clarified, Israel will become a third-world country.
When pressed on how far civil disobedience should go, Pardo said he would do “everything possible” to stop Israel from becoming “like North Korea.” He ended on a more optimistic note, stating that he believes that “more than 90 percent of Israelis…want to live in a democracy,” and that there is a “critical mass of Israeli citizens that won’t allow us to reach this dismal point.”
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