Have Former Israeli Officials or UN Leaders Called It Apartheid? Reading the 14 Named Statements, Their Dates and Their Tense

Yes, but fewer than the circulating count suggests, and in more than one sense of the word. The best-known list, a compilation titled “15 Former Israeli Leaders Call it Apartheid,” names 14 people, and only 6 of them apply the word to conditions at the time they spoke; the others warn of a future, use a different word, come from a journalist, or rest on a source that cannot be traced. On the UN side, the word reached the public through a former secretary-general’s interview, a private group of retired officials, an appointed rapporteur and a regional commission whose report was withdrawn within days.

Key Findings

• The compilation “15 Former Israeli Leaders Call it Apartheid,” published by Zachary Foster on Palestine Nexus on 18 August 2024, names 14 people under a title of fifteen.
• Of those 14 entries, 6 apply the word to the present, 2 warn that Israel would become an apartheid state under stated conditions, 3 quote words that do not include “apartheid,” 1 is by a journalist who held no office, and 2 rest on a provenance that could not be confirmed (Foster, 2024; each entry checked against its reporting).
• Tamir Pardo, director of Mossad from 2011 to 2016, told the Associated Press, in reporting carried by Haaretz on 6 September 2023, that “there is an apartheid state here,” seven years after his term ended.
• Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general from 2007 to 2016, told the Associated Press in June 2023 that the situation “may constitute apartheid,” while visiting for The Elders, whose 22 June 2023 statement reported hearing evidence that the situation meets the legal definition.

Where does the figure of 15 former Israeli leaders come from?

The figure traces to a compilation by the historian Zachary Foster, published on Palestine Nexus on 18 August 2024 under the title “15 Former Israeli Leaders Call it Apartheid.” Read entry by entry, it names 14 people, not fifteen, each with an office, a year and a quoted phrase linked to press reporting.

The 14, in the order the compilation gives them, are David Ben-Gurion (1967), Yitzhak Rabin (1976), Ariel Sharon (2000), Shulamit Aloni (2006), Ehud Olmert (2007), Yossi Sarid (2008), Ehud Barak (2010), Alon Liel (2013), Ami Ayalon (2020), Michael Ben-Yair (2022), Ron Ben-Yishai (February 2023), Amiram Levin (August 2023), Tamir Pardo (September 2023) and a former director general of Ehud Barak’s prime ministerial office, who is not named (June 2024).

The list is the most complete public attempt at the roster, and it does something the bare number does not: it gives a year and a source for nearly every name, so each entry can be checked. That is what the sections below do. The method is simple. For each entry, the quoted words are read against the reporting the compilation links, and each is sorted by one question: does the speaker apply the word “apartheid” to conditions at the time of speaking?

Two features of the list matter before any sorting. First, it spans 57 years, from 1967 to 2024, so it mixes statements made before and after major changes in the facts they describe. Second, it mixes offices. Seven of the named held cabinet rank at some point, several held senior appointed posts, one is described by the compilation itself as a “mainstream journalist,” and one is identified only by a former office. A count that treats all of these as the same kind of statement is counting the headline, not the record.

How many applied the word to conditions at the time?

Six of the 14 did, each after leaving the office named. Shulamit Aloni, a former education minister, published an article in Yediot Ahronot that the compilation dates to 2006 and titles “Indeed, Apartheid in Israel.”

The other five, in order:

Source: Haaretz, 2008 and 2023; the Times of Israel, 2013 and 2023; TheJournal.ie, 2022.

Liel told the Times of Israel that “the occupation of the West Bank as it exists today is a sort of Israeli apartheid.” Ben-Yair wrote in a signed op-ed in the Irish outlet TheJournal.ie that his country “has sunk to such political and moral depths that it is now an apartheid regime.” Levin spoke on the public broadcaster Kan’s radio, and Pardo in an interview with the Associated Press.

Three things hold across all six. Every statement came after the speaker had left the office the compilation names, so none was issued by a ministry, an agency or the Attorney General’s office. Three of the six fall in 2022 and 2023, with Levin and Pardo less than a month apart. And every statement reached the public through the press, as an article, a column title or a quotation in a news report, rather than as a document issued by a state body.

Which of them warned of a future rather than described a present?

Two entries use the word as a conditional warning. Yitzhak Rabin said in a 1976 interview, recorded by his press secretary and first published in 2015, that Israel could not absorb “a million and a half [more] Arabs inside a Jewish state” over the long term “if we don’t want to get to apartheid.”

The Times of Israel, reporting the recording on 25 September 2015, notes that Rabin prefaced the remark: “I have said, and this I ask really not be used, I’m not going to [say it publicly].” So the one prime minister on the list who used the word while in office did so in a remark he asked to be kept off the record, about a future he was describing as avoidable.

Ehud Barak, then defence minister, spoke at the Herzliya Conference in February 2010: “If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.” The sentence is conditional on its face, and it was spoken at a session on the peace process that the Palestinian Authority prime minister also attended.

Ami Ayalon, director of the Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000, belongs with these two on his own dated words, though not on the words the compilation gives him (see below). In a France 24 interview broadcast on 15 April 2026 he said: “If we shall not divide this piece of land (between Israelis and Palestinians), we are heading to apartheid.”

A warning and a description are different claims, and they point in opposite directions on the question a reader brings. A description says the threshold has been crossed. A warning says it has not been, and names what would cross it. Rabin in 1976, Barak in 2010 and Ayalon in 2026 all spoke in the second form, and each tied the outcome he named to Israel keeping the West Bank without granting its Palestinian population the vote or a state of its own.

Which entries do not contain the word apartheid?

Three of the 14 quote words that do not include it. The clearest is Ehud Olmert, who told Haaretz on 29 November 2007, as prime minister, that if the two-state solution collapsed and Israel faced “a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights,” then “the State of Israel is finished.”

Olmert’s sentence is conditional and it draws the comparison to South Africa, but the word itself is not in it. Headlines at the time supplied it: the Boston Globe’s report of 30 November 2007 ran under “Israeli leader refers to peril of South African-style apartheid.” The word in that headline belongs to the newspaper.

The other two, as the compilation itself presents them:

• Ariel Sharon, 2000: “the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict,” which the compilation says he “admitted in private.” The quoted words name a South African policy instrument; they do not use the word apartheid.
• A former director general of Ehud Barak’s office, June 2024: “Israel is turning into South Africa.” The speaker is not named, so the statement cannot be checked against the person.

A fourth entry uses the word but not from office. Ron Ben-Yishai, whom the compilation itself describes as an “elite mainstream journalist,” published an op-ed in Hebrew in February 2023 titled “The judicial revolution has another goal – the Apartheid,” as the compilation renders it. He held no office, so on the list’s own terms he is not a former leader.

None of this makes the comparisons empty. A reader may reasonably hear “Bantustan” or “turning into South Africa” as the same idea. But the circulating claim is that these leaders “call it apartheid,” and for three of them the word is supplied by the list, not by the speaker. That is a difference a reader can check in a few minutes, and the list itself provides the links to do it.

Does the Ayalon quote come from Ayalon?

It could not be confirmed. The list quotes Ami Ayalon’s 2020 memoir, Friendly Fire, as saying Israel “can only be described as an apartheid state.” That phrase matches a sentence in a review of the book by Raja Shehadeh in The Nation on 23 March 2021, where it sits in the reviewer’s own clause rather than in a sentence the review attributes to Ayalon.

Shehadeh’s sentence, describing Ayalon’s meetings with settler leaders, reads: “It was the first time, Ayalon writes, that he had ever heard anyone defend what can only be described as apartheid: two sets of laws, rules, and standards and two separate infrastructures.” The review attributes to Ayalon the account of the meeting. The characterisation, “what can only be described as apartheid,” describes what a settler leader was defending, not the state of Israel.

The compilation adds a second passage it attributes to the memoir: “we’ve already created an apartheid situation in Judea and Samaria where we control Palestinians by force, denying them self-determination.” That passage could not be traced to any source other than the compilation itself, and the memoir was not available to be read for this report. So the finding is narrow in both directions: the most-quoted phrase matches a reviewer’s sentence, and the stronger passage is neither confirmed nor ruled out.

Ayalon’s own dated statement on the record is quoted above. In a France 24 interview broadcast on 15 April 2026 he said that without partition Israel is “heading to apartheid,” which is a warning in the future tense rather than a description of the present.

What rests on the Ben-Gurion entry?

A single recollection published 38 years after the event. The compilation’s earliest entry quotes David Ben-Gurion in 1967 as saying Israel should “better rid itself of the territories and their Arab population as soon as possible,” and that if it did not, “Israel would soon become an apartheid state.” CAMERA UK, a media-monitoring group with an advocacy mission, traced the widely quoted version in 2017 to one source.

That source is a 2005 book by the journalist Hirsh Goodman, “Let Me Create a Paradise, God Said to Himself,” in which Goodman recalls hearing Ben-Gurion on the radio at the end of the Six-Day War. Writing for CAMERA UK on 29 March 2017, Adam Levick reported that Goodman, when asked, declined to name the station or the interviewer; that the remark does not appear in Ben-Gurion’s Six-Day War diary as published by Brandeis University; and that the Ben-Gurion Archives’ archivist had never heard of it. He also reported that the historian Martin Kramer called the quote “dubious” and Ben-Gurion’s biographer Anita Shapira found it “implausible.”

Those findings come from a monitoring organisation with a stated mission, and they are carried here as its reporting rather than as a settled verdict. What they establish is limited and checkable: the Ben-Gurion entry does not rest on a document from 1967. It rests on a memory recorded in 2005, which may be accurate and cannot currently be tested against anything else.

The Ben-Gurion entry is also the one that gives the list its reach back in time. Without it, the earliest verified use by a named Israeli leader is Rabin’s 1976 remark, itself a warning, recorded privately and published only in 2015. Like Rabin’s, the Ben-Gurion wording is conditional, a warning about a future rather than a description of the present. The oldest present-tense use by a former officeholder on the list then becomes Aloni’s, some four decades later.

Which former UN leaders used the term, and through what forum?

Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general from 2007 to 2016, told the Associated Press on 22 June 2023 that “this may constitute apartheid.” He spoke while visiting the region for The Elders, a private group of retired leaders, alongside its chair, Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002.

The two spoke through different channels, and the wording differs between them. The Elders’ own statement of 22 June 2023 says the pair “heard from Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organisations about the ever-growing evidence that the situation meets the international legal definition of apartheid.” That sentence reports what they were told. Robinson’s own quoted words to the Associated Press were: “It’s clear that now we have a one-state rule and in fact, it’s worse than that under the current government.” The word apartheid is not in them.

The Elders is a self-constituted association, founded in 2007, whose statements are issued in its own name. A statement made through it is not a UN document, carries no UN symbol, and was voted on by no UN body. Ban’s wording, “may constitute,” is also conditional in its own way, and it is quoted here in that form rather than as a finding that it does.

A third case is different in kind. In March 2017 the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia published a report by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley concluding that Israel had established “an apartheid regime.” Secretary-General António Guterres asked that it be withdrawn from the commission’s website, and on 17 March 2017 its executive secretary, Rima Khalaf, resigned, as the Times of Israel reported that day. The one time a serving UN official stood behind the word, the Secretariat removed the document.

Does a Special Rapporteur’s finding speak for the United Nations?

No. The Special Rapporteur who concluded in March 2022 that the situation met the prevailing standard for apartheid, Michael Lynk, reported to the Human Rights Council as an independent expert serving in a personal capacity, unpaid and outside the UN staff.

A Special Rapporteur’s report is submitted to the Council, presented and discussed. It is not put to a vote the way a resolution is, and presenting it does not make it the Council’s own conclusion. Lynk held a mandate that John Dugard had held from 2001 to 2008, and Dugard’s own case for the characterisation appeared as peer-reviewed argument in the European Journal of International Law in 2013, with a rebuttal by Yaffa Zilbershats at pages 915 to 928 of the same issue.

The practical consequence is that the UN-side speakers in this report hold four different positions. A former secretary-general speaking in an interview, a private group’s statement about what it was told, a regional commission’s withdrawn report and an appointed independent expert’s submission are not four instances of one thing. Only two of them are UN documents at all, and one of those was taken down by the Secretariat within days.

The same holds on the Israeli side in reverse. Every present-tense statement in this report was made by a person after leaving office. The institutions those people once led issued none of them, and no Israeli ministry, court or state-commissioned review located for this report applies the term to Israeli policy. A reader who hears “Israel’s own intelligence chief says” is hearing a former official’s view, not the agency’s.

Has a UN court or Israel’s own courts used the word?

Neither in an operative finding. The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 has nine operative subparagraphs, each separately voted on majorities from unanimous to eleven votes to four, and the word apartheid appears in none of them.

The central finding, that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied territory is unlawful, carried eleven votes to four, the narrowest margin in the opinion. The opinion is advisory: it arose on a General Assembly request and binds no party. Its reasoning discussed Article 3 of the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which names racial segregation and apartheid together, but the operative subparagraphs name neither.

Israel’s own record points the other way on the premise the characterisation of the territories runs through. The Levy Report, signed on 21 June 2012 by a three-member commission appointed by the Prime Minister, concluded that “the classical laws of ‘occupation’ as set out in the relevant international conventions cannot be considered applicable” to Israel’s presence in the West Bank. It is a legal opinion by a commission of a party to the dispute, and it was never adopted as government policy.

In HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, an eleven-justice panel of Israel’s Supreme Court dismissed the petitions against Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People on 8 July 2021, while holding that the Knesset has no authority to deny the state’s core character as Jewish and democratic. Both halves are the record, and neither uses the word.

Methodology and limitations

The unit of analysis is the statement: who said it, which office the person held and when, the date and forum of the statement, and the exact words. The 14 entries in the Foster compilation were each read against the press reporting it links or, where the link could not be followed, against contemporaneous reporting of the same statement.

Each entry was sorted by one question: whether the quoted words apply “apartheid” to conditions at the time of speaking. The five categories used (present-tense, conditional warning, word absent from the quoted words, not an officeholder, provenance not confirmed) partition the 14 entries, so each entry falls in exactly one. Olmert’s 2007 statement is both conditional and without the word; it is counted once, under the word’s absence. The Ben-Gurion and Ayalon entries are counted under provenance, because their quoted words could not be confirmed against a source independent of the compilation.

The sources are of three types. Primary and official records supply the advisory opinion’s recorded votes, the Levy Report, the Hasson judgment and the Basic Law. Press reporting supplies the statements themselves, each attributed to the outlet that carried it; most exist only as reported speech, not as documents issued by the speaker. Two organisations with a stated mission supply findings carried as their own: the compilation itself, and CAMERA UK’s 2017 reporting on the Ben-Gurion entry.

Three limits apply. Ayalon’s memoir, Aloni’s Hebrew original and the Sharon and Ben-Yishai items were not read in the original; they are assessed on the words the compilation’s own text quotes, read directly from the page. Ben-Yair is also widely described as having used the phrase in a 2002 Haaretz column; the text of that column read for this report does not contain the word, so only his 2022 op-ed is counted. And a list of named speakers can grow: nothing here bears on how many other former officials may have used the word, only on this roster.

Conclusion

So have former Israeli officials called it apartheid? Some have, plainly and on the record: two former ministers, a former Foreign Ministry director general, a former attorney general, a former general and a former head of Mossad, all after leaving office, three of them in 2022 and 2023. Two others, including the one prime minister to use the word while serving, used it to name a future they wanted to avoid. Three more are on the list for words that are not the word, and one entry is a journalist’s. The most-quoted Ayalon phrase matches a book reviewer’s sentence, and the earliest entry rests on a memory published 38 years after the broadcast.

The UN side sorts the same way. A former secretary-general said “may constitute” in an interview; a private group reported what it had been told; an appointed expert reported to a Council that did not adopt his conclusion; and the one document published under a UN commission’s name was withdrawn within days.

Six present-tense statements are not nothing, and the roster does not need inflating to be a real finding. What changes is the unit a reader carries away: named people, dated sentences and their exact tense, rather than a round number of “leaders.” When the evidence behind a claim is this specific and this checkable, why does the version that travels furthest so often turn out to be the one with the details removed?

Frequently Asked Questions

Did any serving Israeli prime minister call Israel an apartheid state?

No serving prime minister on the compilation applied the word to the present. Rabin used it in 1976, while in office, as a warning about a future he asked be kept off the record. Olmert, as prime minister in 2007, warned of “a South African-style struggle” without using the word.

How many former Israeli ministers are among the six present-tense statements?

Two. Shulamit Aloni and Yossi Sarid both held cabinet posts, Aloni as education minister and Sarid as education and later environment minister. The other four held appointed posts: attorney general, Foreign Ministry director general, a senior military command and the directorship of Mossad.

Why does the compilation say fifteen when it lists fourteen?

The page does not explain it. Read entry by entry, it names 13 people and identifies a fourteenth only by former office. No fifteenth entry appears on the page as published on 18 August 2024.

What did The Elders actually say in June 2023?

Their statement of 22 June 2023 said Ban Ki-moon and Mary Robinson had “heard from Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organisations about the ever-growing evidence that the situation meets the international legal definition of apartheid.” It reports what the pair was told. Ban’s own words to the Associated Press were that it “may constitute apartheid.”

Why was the 2017 ESCWA report withdrawn?

Secretary-General António Guterres asked that it be removed from the commission’s website days after its March 2017 publication. Its executive secretary, Rima Khalaf, resigned on 17 March 2017 rather than withdraw it, as the Times of Israel reported the same day.

Is a UN Special Rapporteur’s report a UN finding?

No. Special Rapporteurs are independent experts serving in a personal capacity, outside the UN staff, who submit reports to the Human Rights Council for presentation and discussion. Michael Lynk’s March 2022 report was submitted in that way and was not adopted by a vote.

Sources

• Boston Globe, 2007. Israeli leader refers to peril of South African-style apartheid. 30 November 2007. International press.
• Levick, A., 2017. Did the Independent just publish a fake Ben-Gurion quote? CAMERA UK (UK Media Watch), 29 March 2017. Monitoring organization (advocacy mission).
• Commission to Examine the Status of Building in Judea and Samaria, 2012. Report on the Legal Status of Building in Judea and Samaria (the Levy Report). Signed 21 June 2012. Official record (government-appointed commission).
• Dugard, J., and Reynolds, J., 2013. Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. European Journal of International Law 24(3), 867 to 913. DOI 10.1093/ejil/cht045. Peer-reviewed.
• Foster, Z., 2024. 15 Former Israeli Leaders Call it Apartheid. Palestine Nexus, 18 August 2024. Advocacy compilation.
• France 24, 2026. “If we don’t divide the land we’re heading to apartheid”: Ex-head of Israel’s Shin Bet. Tête à tête, 15 April 2026. International press.
• Haaretz, 2007. Olmert to Haaretz: Two-state Solution, or Israel Is Done For. 29 November 2007. Israeli press.
• Haaretz, 2008. Yes, It Is Apartheid. Column by Yossi Sarid, 25 April 2008. Israeli press.
• Haaretz, 2023. “There Is an Apartheid State Here”: Ex-Mossad Chief on Israel’s West Bank Occupation. Associated Press interview, 6 September 2023. Israeli press.
• International Court of Justice, 2024. Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024. Recorded votes at paragraph 285.
• Israeli Supreme Court, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Akram Hasson v. Knesset. Judgment of 8 July 2021. Official record (court judgment).
• Shehadeh, R., 2021. Ami Ayalon’s Political Journey. The Nation, 23 March 2021. Book review.
• Tablet, 2010. Barak Warns of “Apartheid.” February 2010. Press.
• The Elders, 2023. Elders warn of consequences of “one-state reality” in Israel and Palestine. theelders.org, 22 June 2023. Statement of a private association.
• TheJournal.ie, 2022. Former AG of Israel: With great sadness I conclude that my country is now an apartheid regime. Op-ed by Michael Ben-Yair, 10 February 2022. International press.
• Times of Israel, 2013. “Joint Israel-West Bank” reality is an apartheid state. 21 February 2013. Israeli press.
• Times of Israel, 2015. In 1976 interview, Rabin likens settler ideologues to “cancer,” warns of “apartheid.” 25 September 2015. Israeli press.
• Times of Israel, 2017. Head of UN body resigns as her group’s “apartheid Israel” report is withdrawn. 17 March 2017. Israeli press.
• Times of Israel, 2023. Ex-IDF general likens military control of West Bank to Nazi Germany. 13 August 2023. Israeli press.
• Times of Israel, 2023. Israel on verge of apartheid, hopes for peace “fading away,” says former UN chief. Associated Press, 23 June 2023. Israeli press.
• Zilbershats, Y., 2013. Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory: A Reply to John Dugard and John Reynolds. European Journal of International Law 24(3), 915 to 928. DOI 10.1093/ejil/cht043. Peer-reviewed.