Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister and leader of the Religious Zionism party, is scheduled to visit the United States this month to address an Israel Bonds organization.
Smotrich made headlines earlier this week when he condoned recent settler attacks in Huwwara and called for the area to be destroyed. “I think the village of Huwara needs to be erased,” Smotrich told a reporter at the Israeli business magazine The Marker. “I think the State of Israel needs to do this, and not – God forbid – private citizens.”
Smotrich’s comments have been criticized by human rights organizations, U.S-based Jewish groups, and the Biden administration. “I want to be very clear about this,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price this week. “These comments were irresponsible. They were repugnant. They were disgusting. And just as we condemn Palestinian incitement to violence, we condemn these provocative remarks that also amounts to incitement to violence.”
“We call on Prime Minister Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials to publicly and clearly reject and disavow these comments, we condemn, as we have consistently terrorism and extremism, and all of its forms and we continue to urge that there’ll be equal measures of accountability for extremist actions, regardless of the background of the perpetrators, or the victims,” he added.
Smotrich is scheduled to address a meeting in Washington, D.C., of the Development Corporation for Israel-State of Israel Bonds, which is taking place between March 12-14 and closed off from the press. The group sells Israeli government bonds to investors abroad. The CEO of Israel Bonds is Dani Naveh, a former Likud Party minister and Benjamin Netanyahu’s first cabinet secretary.
The Adalah Justice Project has launched a campaign calling on the U.S. government to revoke Smotrich’s visa. “Smotrich is clearly inciting atrocities against the Palestinian people, and he should not be allowed to come to the U.S. to raise funds to support his racist ideology,” reads its petition. “It is fully within the power of the State Department to revoke Smotrich’s visa immediately and deny him entry.
These sentiments were echoed in a statement from Jewish Voice for Peace Action Political Director Beth Miller. “It is time for the Biden administration to end its hollow words of concern and condemnation and to start taking action. Bezalel Smotrich, an Israeli government official with sweeping power over the occupied West Bank, is publicly and unabashedly inciting genocide and supporting settler pogroms, said Miller. “If Biden fails to take action at this moment, the U.S. will be fully complicit in the violence that comes next.”
So where is the outrage then? Ned Price used words like “repugnant” and “Disgusting” among other (truthful) descriptions, but we have to expect this too will fizzle out, as it always does, and the US apparently is laying out the red carpet for the racist/terrorist Smotrich when he comes here soon. If this was a Palestinian leader, he would have been banned from this country, and you can be sure Jonathan Greenblatt, Dershowitz, and MANY members of Congress, would have howled, whined, and shown such outrage, that an anti-semite dared to suggest Israelis be erased off the map, and how poor Israel is picked on again. A so called leader of the only democracy in the Middle East calling for an entire town to be erased because there are Palestinians living there?
How uncivilized and violent.
But now there is such a noticeable silence from these American zionists, who in fact may be very busy organizing a warm welcome for this terrorist who seems to have shown how bloodthirsty he is, and has shown the world just how deep his hatred is for those they occupy, steal, and kill. These are ingrained zionist convictions, and we have seen it many times. Once again, the zionists act and talk as if only Israeli lives are precious, and the Palestinians are sub human, and can be erased from this world by the apartheid nation.
Israel’s crooked PM denounced the protesters who protested outside the salon his wife decided to get some grooming from, but says NOTHING about one of his racist partners calling for the annihilation of an entire Arab town. Is that okay Jonathan Greenblatt and Tom Nides? Are only zionists entitled to call people snakes, beasts, and want them erased?
Next time the hasbara trolls accuse the Arabs/Palestinians of wanting to wipe Israel off the map, we should remind them of these “irresponsible, disgusting, repugnant and provocative remarks that also amount to incitement to violence.”
Smotrich should be arrested the moment he lands abroad , and tried at the ICC in Hague.
Meanwhile we can support the people of Hawara:
https://giveback.co.il/project/71541
Any other nationality and Washington would have revoked his visa. They shutdown the Palestinian Authority’s office in DC, the same PA that carries water for Washington. Abbas simply has no dignity. But that’s another story.
I find it entertaining how those who with a wink and a nudge make excuses for successive Israeli governments, their bulldozing of Palestinian villages and homes, are somehow now indignant because this fascist came out and said what a million others have been thinking the entire time since before 1948, as if Plan D that Ben-Gurion carried out, was somehow an aberration. One must point out that since it became public knowledge, that is, outside the sphere of academia, in Israel at least, Plan D in recent years has been sanitized and spun in such a way to excuse it and make it more palpabale, for those still clinging on to the notion that Israel is a pure nation, founded by a group of innocent, persecuted underdogs who just wanted to live in peace and harmony. The Wikipedia article, for example, is absolute garbage.
An eye roll doesn’t quite capture the disgust I have for such hypocrisy.
#BDS has already arrived at a Detroit-area City Council —
“Hamtramck city council this week approved a proclamation expressing support for Palestinians and opposing military aid to ‘all repressive governments.’ ”
See Detroit Free Press, 3/2/2023:
https://freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2023/03/02/hamtramck-city-council-approves-proclamation-supporting-palestinians/69956283007/
It’s the 1st such City Council action in the United States. And more are coming.
The US White House, Congress, and the media are twisting themselves into challah to distance themselves and condemn Smotrich and Ben-Givr and make a point of desperately trying to frame and sanitize the narrative in a way that suggests that these two are the rare “exception to the rule” and that most Israelis and advocates for the Jewish Zionist Apartheid Republic of Israel don’t “share these views” or “agree with these statements”.
They have clearly NEVER read the comments section of Israeli media, like the Jerusalem Post, where these EXACT toxic sentiments and calls for crimes against humanity and far worse are espoused by thousands and thousands of Israelis and Israel-firsters on virtually every single article for more than a decade.