In 1976 interview, Rabin admits Israeli apartheid

In a previously unpublicized recording of a 1976 interview, Israel’s fifth prime minister Yitzhak Rabin can be heard calling the still-nascent West Bank settlement campaign “comparable to a cancer,” and warning that Israel risked becoming an “apartheid” state if it annexed the West Bank.

The recording is being publicized for the first time in the documentary “Rabin: In His Own Words.”

The film, timed to the 20th anniversary of Rabin’s November 1995 assassination by a Jewish man, traces Rabin’s life using original and sometimes never-before-seen footage.

In the 1976 interview in which Rabin delivers the searing critique of the settlement movement, he prefaces his comments by saying, “I have said, and this I ask really not be used, I’m not going to [say it publicly], and I’m not a political lunatic for saying this.”

“I see in Gush Emunim [a settlement campaign,] one of the most acute dangers in the whole phenomenon of the State of Israel,” he confides.

“What is ‘settlement’ anyway? What struggle is this? What methods? ‘Kadum’ [a settlement] is a bloated fart.”

He adds: “Gush Emunim is not a settlement movement. It is comparable to a cancer in the tissue of Israel.”