Israel's former parliament speaker has branded Israel as a 'Zionist ghetto', scoffing at the regime's self-definition as a Jewish state.
In an interview published in Ha'aretz daily on Friday, Avraham Burg said that this self-definition is the key to the regime's ruin. "It [Israel] can't work anymore. It's explosive. It's dynamite." said Burg, parliamentary speaker from 1999 to 2003.
Burg has newly written a book, Defeating Hitler in which Ha'aretz says he describes Israel as a "Zionist ghetto" and compares Israeli behavior in the occupied Palestinian territories against Palestinians to that of Nazi Germany.
Also a former chairman of the semi-governmental Jewish Agency responsible for immigration to Israel, Burg took issue with the law of return, under which any Jew is able to come to live in the occupied lands.
"The law of return is the mirror image of Hitler. I don't want Hitler to define my identity," he said.
A former activist in the anti-settlement Peace Now movement, Burg is today a businessman who considers Israeli society paranoid and comparable to pre-Nazi Germany.
Burg slammed Israel for construction of a separation wall in the West Bank, saying, "The separation fence is a fence against paranoia ... There is something so xenophobic about it. So insane," he said.
He also criticized targeted assassinations carried out by the Israeli army against Palestinian resistance fighters, comparing them to murder.
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