“What I saw today made me feel ashamed to be Jewish”
– Don Pardo, former Director of Mossad
Tamir Pardo, the former Director of Mossad from 2011–2016, recently toured the West Bank, after which he delivered a sobering assessment of the mistreatment of Palestinian people.
“My mother was a Holocaust survivor, and what I saw reminded me of the events that happened against Jews in the last century,” Pardo said. “What I saw today made me feel ashamed to be Jewish.”
The former Director has, in the recent past, given other critical assessments of the Israeli government and Israeli settlers’ mistreatment of West Bank Palestinians. In 2023, he decried the ruling Knesset coalition as full of “horrible, racist parties,” and accused Prime Minister Netanyahu of “taking the Ku Klux Klan and putting them in the government.”
After touring the West Bank, the former director made it known that he fears Israeli settler violence and draconian Israeli policy in the West Bank are setting the conditions for a future, October 7th-style attack. “It will be in a different format, much more painful, because the region is much more complicated. The state has chosen to sow the seeds for the next October 7.”
The challenge, that Pardo noted, is that curbing settler violence could set off civil war in Israel itself. The settler militias are well-armed and well-connected to far right parties who are part of the ruling coalition in the Knesset.
“If we want, we can correct this, but the price will be very high.”
