Dr. Liel is the former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, both under apartheid and during the presidency of Nelson Mandela. In this snippet from RT, he tells Afshin Rattansi, the host of ‘Going Underground’, that unless Israel returns to peace talks with the Palestinians and a two-state solution, they risk creating an apartheid state containing 6 1/2 million Israelis and 6 million Palestinians. He states that he was Israel’s ambassador to South Africa during apartheid and Mandela’s government, and makes the point that he’s seen it, and it’s horrible.
Rattansi takes him up on the implications of his comment, and asks him if he rejects what some Jews were saying in Jerusalem last week, that Israel alread is an apartheid state.
He denies that Israel was an apartheid state when it was confined to its 1967 borders, and contained 1 1/2 million Arabs. But he agrees that in the case of the West Bank, and its 2 1/2 million of Arab inhabitants, it is apartheid or something close to it. He describes it as ‘a win back’ by the Israeli government and a minority of Jewish settlers, with the government controlling the lives of the Palestinians. If the Palestinians there become part of Israel without being citizens, it will be an apartheid state, or something close to it. Which is what he and others are worried about, and which they do not want.
This is important, because Dr. Liel states very clearly what the Israel lobby has been doing its best to hide: that Israel is an apartheid state. The Israel lobby vigorously denies this, and accuses anyone who describes Israel as such of anti-Semitism. I don’t know how realistic the two state solution really is. A number of Palestinians rights activists, like Tony Greenstein, have rejected the two-state solution as unworkable. For them the only solution is to have a single state, where the Palestinians enjoy citizenship and equal rights with the Israelis. Which is absolutely unacceptable to Zionists, because Israel was set up to be the Jewish state.
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