Breaking the Apartheid barrier

Bottom Line: When a former Israeli Prime Minister and current Defense Minister says flatly that the choices ahead are either a Palestinian state or Israeli Apartheid, there can be no doubt that the word is a valid one in the debate and any accusations of anti-semitism purely for using it have forever lost their validity.

If, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic... If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don't, it is an apartheid state.

Mr Levy writes that Mr Barak's views reflect the basic realist center-left diagnosis of Israel's situation, but that there is a terrible "disconnect" between this diagnosis—a Palestinian state, or apartheid—and the weak, hopeless half-measures most on the Israeli (and American Jewish) left advocate in response. Continuing negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, which the Israeli right can continue to sabotage at every launch of a Hamas missile, will go nowhere; they have gone nowhere for nine years. This road leads to apartheid. Mr Levy says the real contest for Israel's future is between the "hard retractionists", those who support drastic measures to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank, and the "hard retentionists", who want to keep the West Bank.

Will Stephen Harper and Jason Kenny now be accusing Barak of anti-semitism and cutting government funding to Israel as a result?