On Saturday, July 22, Israel’s Minister of Regional Cooperation, Tzachi Hanegbi (Likud), threatened Palestinians with a “new Nakba,” referring to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and country during the 1948 establishment of Israel. “You’ve already paid that crazy price twice for your leaders,” he wrote on Facebook, alluding to the 1948 and 1967 Middle Eastern wars. “Don’t try us again because the result won’t be any different.”
MK Oren Hazan, Likud, snaps a photograph with President Donald Trump, May 22, 2017. (Photo: Twitter)
Another Likud lawmaker, MK Oren Hazan, said on Saturday that he would be prepared to “execute” a Palestinian assailant’s family as revenge for an operation in which three Israelis were stabbed to death in an occupied West Bank settlement.
On his official Facebook account, Hazan posted a video (in Hebrew) last weekend in which said he would demolish the home of the Palestinian assailant, Omar al-Abed, who stabbed three members of the Salomon family to death last Friday night, July 21. The video soon accumulated more than 82,000 likes.
Hazan has been reprimanded in the past for violent rhetoric, including a recent threat to Communist MK Aida Touma-Sliman (Hadash – Joint List) and other similar comments. “We will wipe your smile from your face … We will wipe your ugly smile from your face,” he reportedly told Touma-Sliman recently at a Knesset function. On Tuesday, the Knesset’s Ethics Committee voted to reprimand Hazan for those comments.
The settler legislator Hazan also sparked controversy when he pledged his support for France’s far-right politician Marine Le Pen earlier this year, prompting criticism from left wing-Israelis and French legislators.
Another far-right politician, HaBayit HaYehudi (“The Jewish Home”) chairman and Minister of Education, Naftali Bennett, accused Joint List lawmakers of “supporting and inciting terrorism” in a speech to the Knesset on Wednesday, July 26. “For 10 days, we have been witness to an intentional heating up of the situation by Palestinian factors and some Israeli Arabs,” said Bennett.
