JERUSALEM: The Palestinian Authority on Friday welcomed remarks by a former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency qualifying the legal situation in the occupied West Bank as “apartheid”, but Israelis denounced the comments.

Tamir Pardo, who led Mossad from 2011 to 2016, told the Associated Press that “there is an apartheid state here”, referring to the Palestinian territory Israel has occupied since 1967.

“In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state,” he said in the interview published on Wednesday.

Ahmed Al Deek, a top Palestinian Authority official, said Pardo was among an “increasing number of Israeli officials” expressing such a view.

“We hope that this marks the beginning of an awakening in Israeli society to support the rights of Palestinian people and to pressure the Israeli government to end its occupation of Palestinian land,” Deek said in a statement.

In 2021, US-based group Human Rights Watch (HRW) joined some Palestinian and Israeli NGOs in adopting the term “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policies towards Palestinians and the country’s Arab minority.

A year later, Amnesty International followed suit with a report on the subject which was promptly condemned as “lies” by Yair Lapid, then Israel’s foreign minister and now opposition leader.

EU slams Abbas’s remarks

The European Union has condemned as “grossly misleading” comments by Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas that Jews were killed in the Holocaust because of their “social role” and not religion.

Abbas made the remarks during a speech late last month before senior members of his Fatah party in Ramallah, and a video of the event surfaced this week.

Abbas, 87, who has previously made similar comments, said it was “not true” that “(Adolf) Hitler killed Jews because they were Jews”.

He said Europeans “fought (Jews) because of their social role, and not their religion. Because of usury and money”.

A spokesperson for the European Union said “the speech... contained false and grossly misleading remarks about Jews and anti-Semitism”.

“Such historical distortions are inflammatory, deeply offensive” and “trivialise (the) Holocaust and thereby fuel anti-Semitism”, the EU spokesperson added in a statement.

Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2023