Rights advocates in the United States are urging President Joe Biden to end his administration’s “complicity” in Israeli rights abuses after key members of Israel’s government backed the idea of pushing Palestinians out of Gaza.
Far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich said this week that Israel should “encourage emigration” from the coastal enclave, home to an estimated 2.3 million Palestinians.
“If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after [the war ends] will be totally different,” Smotrich said on Sunday, calling for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians.
A day later, Ben-Gvir, who oversees national security, made a similar appeal, saying it was “a correct, just, moral and humane solution”, Israeli media outlets reported.
Honestly, no one takes either of those racist idiots seriously. They’re not serious people and this isn’t a serious plan. They’re both despised in Israel and, thankfully, neither really have any influence.
So the minister of finance and minister of national security aren’t influential in any ways in a country that gets billions of dollars from the USA and uses it to fund their national war effort?
Are you waiting for other people in their govt to say something about flattening Gaza? Some minor politicians have said that
The agriculture minister said this would be a second Nakba, that event where the Israelis took homes and made prisoners go through their own abandoned(stolen) homes taking books, furniture, and their whole cultural history for the Israeli to take as spoils of war.
Exactly this. Either Netanyahu controls the Likud-coalition and this is the aligned message of displacement/ethnic cleansing, or he dismisses these ministers and publicly refutes these statements, or he doesn’t have control and should immediately hold elections to secure a real coalition or majority. But that risks jail for Netanyahu, and his actions so far have openly spoken of cowardice in the face of the legal repercussions.
Because otherwise this kind of rhetoric is going straight into the ICJ evidence file for SA’s genocide complaint that Israel is contesting. Protestations of ‘blood libel’ don’t drown out cabinet ministers openly calling for ethnic cleansing going unpunished.
As odd as it may seem: yes, they aren’t influential in directing the war. They have those positions because Netanyahu promised them for supporting his coalition, not because they were “earned” or because they’re ideologically aligned. It’s a marriage of convenience and outside of Netanyahu’s deal to desperately cling to power, these two are far-right kooks from fringe parties. It doesn’t give them real legitimacy. Netayahu’s coalition deal was an enormous controversy even outside of Israel. A big reason they formed the emergency government was to keep extremely unserious clowns like these away from decision-making by bringing in grown-ups. They are both strongly disliked and would be crushed back into obscurity in an election.
This article presents their statements as something new and they aren’t. Both of these fucking morons routinely suggest horrific shit like expelling Arabs from Israel. Ben-Gvir was convicted in Israel of racist incitement against Arabs decades ago. A former head of Shin Bet once referred to Smotrich as a “Jewish terrorist.” They are both settler extremists and known quantites; it would be stranger if they weren’t spouting racist, extremist bullshit. They are not representative of the broader government. Netanyahu didn’t have to agree to a cabinet made up of his political enemies; even that far-right ghoul knows these people are clowns. Given all that, I don’t think there’s a compelling reason to believe that they’d be the ones to announce Israeli policy.
I’m waiting for someone who actually matters. These dipshits do not. I mean, really, none of the people currently in power are going to be around after this conflict anyway, so I’m more concerned with what Gantz is saying than with Netanyahu’s petulant tantrums.
Now apply the same standard to the enemies of Israel. Part of the dehumanization that goes on with Israeli apartheid and occupation is that while Israeli politics is accepted as complicated and nuanced, with analysis like the one you offer here, the politics of the other side(s) is always considered morally unambiguous. Hamas: a terrorist monolith. Fatah: supports a terrorist fund. Hezbollah: Iranian stooges.
If we apply the same absolutist moral standard to Israel, the nuance you present simply doesn’t matter: if kahanist extremists are in government, the entire state is compromised, and Israel needs to be militarily defeated so that peace can exist.
If we allow for nuance also for Israel’s enemies then a whole bunch of racist assumptions go away. The conflict is no longer a fight between the only democracy in the ME and the forces of Sauron. It’s a political land dispute that is resolvable. But you have to talk to the political forces you’ve labelled terrorists, accept that they have valid and legitimate aspirations and concerns (just like the Israelis do) and negotiate in good faith.
Yes! I completely agree with you. I’m not totally sure if you’re saying that ‘people should’ apply that same standard or that I’m not applying it. I’m only talking about the people in this article, not suggesting that complexity or nuance only exist in Israeli politics. I think you need to take on a ton of nuance to even understand Hezbollah’s behaviour at the Israeli border, let alone understand them as an organization.
Yes, we are in complete agreement that the same standard of nuance should be applied!
One of them is in charge of the police and border patrol. I don’t think it much matters if the average person doesn’t like them.
Neither of those things give him the power to do what he said or the influence to have it done. Both of those things matter.
Dude they’re doing it in the West Bank right now.
They’re doing what in the West Bank?
They’re not expelling people from the West Bank for the same reason as OP said: there’s nowhere for anyone to go. The settlers, including the two absolute pieces of shit in the article, are responsible for horrific crimes in the West Bank but it’s not the same thing as Gaza and it’s not the same thing they’re talking about.
They’re emptying whole villages with death threats. Care to guess how the villagers know the threats are credible enough that they need to leave?
I’m sure the conversation you want to be having is happening somewhere. You should find someone who’s defending what’s happening in the West Bank and say this to them.
It’s a serious expression of the government’s values. Just because those particular officials lack the power to do what they propose doesn’t mean their words are meaningless. If Bibi and his crew weren’t in favor of genocide, they’d be loudly condemning these assholes and doing whatever they can to remove them from office.
It’s not. I already wrote a very long post about why you’re wrong in this case, why those people are in those positions, and why there’s less reason to be afraid of those statements (though good reason to be outraged) than this article suggests.