Two former chiefs of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency have urged US President Joe Biden to refrain from hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House next month, Israeli media reported.
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Ami Ayalon, who headed the Shin Bet from 1995 to 2000, said that “an official visit of Netanyahu to Washington will be seen as legitimizing the government coup that he is leading with the aim of weakening the judicial system and establishing an authoritarian regime in Israel.”
Protests in Apartheid Jewish Ethnocratic State are Neither Revolutionary Nor Egalitarian
For his part, Yuval Diskin, who headed the Shin Bet from 2005 to 2011, reportedly accused Netanyahu of turning Israel into a “hollow democracy”.
Haaretz cited Diskin as saying that:
“Netanyahu established an illegitimate government in which critical ministries … are held by right-wing extremists, racist Jewish supremacists, who are trying to promote the de-facto annexation of the West Bank and by doing so, create a binational apartheid state.”
In July, Israel’s national security adviser, Netanyahu said that Biden had invited him to the White House in a phone call, months after his reelection.
However, according to Haaretz, the US president only said that “they would meet sometime this year without committing to timing or location.”
(The Palestine Chronicle)
