Feb. 4 2010 - 7:32 pm | 114 views | 0 recommendations | 0 comments

Ehud Barak Again Warns Israel Headed Toward ‘Apartheid’

By EILEEN WHITE READ

For the second time in as many weeks, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has warned his countrymen that unless they make peace with the Palestinians, they are headed toward an apartheid state.

Here are his latest comments from the Herzliya security conference in Israel:

“My feeling about the Middle East is that the weak will not be spared. Peace will not prevail as long as our neighbors seek to destroy us. However, as leaders it is our responsibility to do all in our powers to pursue peace. A Jewish democratic Zionist state will be secure only when we have peace with our neighbors. There are 12 million people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea–7.5 million Israelis and 4.5 million Palestinians. If there is only one political entity in this area it will eventually be either non-Jewish or non-democratic. If that bloc of millions of Palestinians vote, then there will be a bi-national state, and if they don’t vote, then there will be an apartheid state. Neither is the Zionist dream…..

The circumstances dictate our paths. We don’t do the Palestinians any favor but rather this is our interest.”

Great stuff, huh? As reported here, Barak said something similar on January 27. The former Prime Minister from the moderate Labor Party, who held his nose and became a political bedfellow of far-rightists like Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman (a nutter who’s famous for staging an insult to the Turkish ambassador and just this morning was silenced by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for trying to goad the Syrians into another battle) returns to sanity. Sanity being the recognition that the occupation of the Palestinian territories is not a good thing for Israel’s future. Call it enlightened self-interest.

Who else was at the security conference: the Palestinians’ Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, and he stood for a peaceful photo with Barak:

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