By Jonathan Cook

[New Left Project  interview with journalist Jonathan Cook]

What  did you make of Ehud Barak’s recent comparison of Israel to South  Africa?

We should be  extremely wary of ascribing a leftwing agenda to senior Israeli  politicians who make use of the word “apartheid” in the  Israeli-Palestinian context. Barak was not claiming that Israel is an  apartheid state when he addressed the high-powered delegates at the  Herzliya conference last month; he was warning the Netanyahu government  that its approach to the two-state solution was endangering Israel’s  legitimacy in the eyes of the world that would eventually lead to it  being called an apartheid state. He was politicking. His goal was to  intimidate Netanyahu into signing up to his, and the Israeli centre’s,  long-standing agenda of “unilateral separation”: statehood imposed on  the Palestinians as a series of bantustans (be sure, the irony is  entirely lost on Barak and others). Barak knows that Netanyahu currently  has no intention of creating any kind of Palestinian state, even a  bogus one, despite his commitments to the U.S.

The last senior  Israeli politician to talk of....continue http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/The-decline-of-Israel-and-the-prospects-for-peace.html