Quote: Olmert on the End of Israel

In unusually frank comments, Zionist regime's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that "the state of Israel is finished'' if a Palestinian state is not created.

He said the alternative is a South African-style apartheid struggle.

Olmert said the failure to negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinians could threaten Israel's long-term survival.

"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights ... then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished" Olmert said.

For 40 years, Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, home to 4 million Arabs. However, to annex the territory and its people would, Israeli leaders say, undermine what they call the Jewish nature of Israel, which has a population now of 7 million immigrants brought together in Palestine.

Olmert said Israel, which believes Arabs would in time outnumber Jews if it incorporated the land captured in the 1967 Middle East war, had little choice about peace if it wanted to survive as a so called Jewish state.

The explosive reference to apartheid came as he returned from the Annapolis peace conference in the US, hoping to prepare skeptical Zionists for difficult negotiations with Palestinians.