Former Shin Bet head: Jewish terror slow-growing 'cancer' in Israel

Yuval Diskin, the former Shin Bet head, wrote with bitter irony in a Facebook post over the weekend that Israel was becoming an apartheid regime, or, in his words, “a state based on Jewish halachic law in which a divided Jewish minority rules the Palestinian majority in its midst by force.” According to Diskin, instead of establishing a Palestinian state in the territories conquered in 1967, “a ’state of Judea’ has been established there, controlled by anarchist ideologies opposed to the state, violent and racist.” The man who headed the security agency from 2005 to 2011 stressed that Jewish terrorism — “a cancer in the body of the state” — has been developing for years before the very eyes of the top political, judicial and defense echelons. He diagnosed a lack of leadership and direction as the main cause of this dangerous malady.

And, indeed, Israel is experiencing an acute deficiency of leadership. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could have successfully run a public relations agency. He may find a way to douse the fires set by that “state of Judea” that burn people in their sleep, damage mosques and destroy fields. But putting out fires is not leadership. Spreading lies about the Arab minority to delegitimize it (on election day, Netanyahu said, “They are heading to the polling stations in droves”) and boasting of superior Jewish morality (“We deplore and condemn these murderers. We will pursue them to the end.”) versus the murderous Palestinians (“They name public squares after murderers of children.”) are all, at best, a dead end, and in the worst case, these roads lead to a precipice.