Former US State Dept Aide: Israel Will Be ‘Gone’ in 20 Years

Retired Army Col Lawrence Wilkerson is the former chief of staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell who emerged as a leading critic of the neoconservatives.

In remarks to Mass Peace Action last June, he made some bracing assertions about Israel, saying: "Israel won’t exist as a state in 20 years because it is delegitimizing itself as an apartheid state."

He said the Israeli regime is a “strategic liability of the first order” for the United States and is “the most likely state in the world to take the United States to Armageddon.”

Wilkerson believed the US ought to tell Israel now to “change swiftly” or it will cease to fund and protect Israel, but the US will not do so.

The former US officials added that the neoconservative agenda in the Middle East was “to set the Levant on fire, to keep Israel’s enemies so at one another's throats” that they could not give Israel trouble.