Prime Minister Netanyahu pans French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian for saying earlier this week that Israel is at risk of “long-lasting apartheid” in the event that the Palestinians fail to obtain their own state.

Le Drian was referring to Palestinians but also to violent riots by Arab Israelis that erupted in multiple locales amid the fighting with Gaza’s terror groups.

He said the unrest “clearly shows that if in the future we had a solution other than the two-state solution, we would have the ingredients of long-lasting apartheid.”

Netanyahu expresses “a strong protest against the French government and the outrageous comments of the French foreign minister on television.”

He rejects Le Drian’s comments as

“… an insolent, false claim that has no basis. In the State of Israel, all citizens are equal before the law, regardless of their ethnicity. Israel is a beacon of democracy and human rights in our region… We will not suffer any hypocritical and false moral rebukes on this matter.”

Source: TOI

Header: Palestinian protesters hurl stones during clashes with Israeli forces in the Shuafat Palestinian neighbourhood, neighbouring the Israeli settlement of Ramat Shlomo, in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem on May 14, 2021. – Israel faced a widening conflict, as deadly violence escalated across the West Bank amid a massive aerial bombardment in Gaza and unprecedented unrest among Arabs and Jews inside the country. The West Bank clashes where described as among the most intense since the second intifada that began in 2000 (Photo by Ahmad GHARABLI / AFP)