Ex-head of spy agency calls Israel apartheid regime

Tamir Pardo, who was the regime's spymaster from 2011 to 2016, made the remarks to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

"In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that's an apartheid state," he said.

"Let's say there's a car accident between the car of a Jewish settler and the car of a Palestinian who lives in Hebron or Nablus. Each one of them stands before a different legal system. One under the military legal system and the other, the civilian system," Pardo noted.

Apartheid refers to the system of racial separation in South Africa that ended in 1994.

Israel has been practicing the same regime against Palestinians, though far more brutally and several times more deadly, since 1948, when it claimed existence across Palestine after a Western-backed war, during which tens of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes, villages were depopulated, and thousands were killed.

Israel launched yet another such war in 1967, occupying the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, including East al-Quds that Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.

Ever since Israeli apartheid authorities have created a judicial system that allows them to steal Palestinians’ land and property and dispossess them in order to make way for illegal settlers.

Israeli military bulldozers roll into the occupied territory on a near-daily basis, forcing Palestinians from their homes, destroying their belongings in front of their eyes, and even making the uprooted people pay for the demolition of their own property.

Pardo, meanwhile, sounded a warning aimed at Israeli authorities about the consequences of their racist practices.

He said, "We will reach that place (similar to South Africa, where there are international community-imposed sanctions) and the greatest catastrophe will be that in the end, we will be forced to say sure, whoever lives here has the same rights..."