Racist Itamar Ben Gvir, a firebrand fascist lawmaker for the far-right opposition Religious Zionism party, pulled out a pistol during an altercation Tuesday with two Arab security guards over a parking spot at the Expo Tel Aviv conference center. Both in their early 20s, Mohammed Issa and Mohammed Shwaiki, were working in Tel Aviv when they encountered Ben-Gvir and asked him to move his illegally parked car as it was parked in a prohibited spot.
MK Itamar Ben Gvir of the far-right Religious Zionist Party with the gun at the Expo Tel Aviv conference center on Tuesday, December 21 (Television footage)
The altercation was caught on video by one of the guards and, reportedly, also by Benzi Gopstein, the leader of the racist, anti-LGBT Lehava organization, who was accompanying Ben Gvir to the event.
Shwaiki told WAFA that Ben Gvir stepped out of a vehicle and began shouting profanities and yelling anti-Arab and Palestinian slurs at them and tried to physically attack them before asking his escort to bring his weapon which he pointed at their faces. He said that Ben Gvir called the Israeli police, telling them that “there are two Palestinian dogs threatening and beating me up.” Shwaiki noted that they videotaped the whole incident, Issa can be heard telling Itamar Ben Gvir “you pulled your weapon on me, everything is videotaped, I didn’t do anything to you.” Reports WAFA news agency.
After the attack, the Joint List asked state prosecutor Avichai Mandelblit to open a criminal investigation against Ben Gvir, and further demanded that Ben Gvir be stripped of his weapons license. Hadash MK Ofer Cassif (Joint List) said Ben Gvir’s presence in the parliament was “a disgrace for all of Israel” and he belongs in prison.
“When a terrorist supporter is brought into the Knesset, don’t act surprised when he pulls out a gun,” Cassif added, referring to Ben Givr’s history of support to American racist Rabbi Meir Kahane’s political party, a far-right Zionist group who has been designated as a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. According the Joint List, “The Kahanist Ben Gvir was convicted of supporting a terrorist organization. Today, under the cover of immunity as an MK, he calls for the murder of Arab citizens and threatens them with firearms. There is no room for this terrorist behavior in the Knesset.”
According to Haaretz, a Jerusalem high school has scrapped a meeting between 12th grade students and representatives of the Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace organization that had been scheduled for today (Thursday) morning, as Ben Gvir and fascists activists have threatened to protests outside the school. “Have we gone crazy, bringing the families of terrorists into the schools?” Ben Gvir wrote in Facebook
The Boyar High School’s administration wrote to students on Tuesday, saying the meeting with the organization would be held “at a later date,” because “some of you are not ready or available.” Others at the school said that the decision to postpone the event was instead the result of “a shameful surrender to pressure from the extreme right.” As they had in past years, 12th graders were supposed to have a 90-minute-long encounter with representatives of the organization, which is also known as the Parents Circle-Families Forum.
In October, Ben Gvir was involved in a physical clash with the Joint List chairman, MK Ayman Odeh (Hadash). The two confronted each other at the Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot, where a Palestinian administrative prisoner and hunger-striker was being treated.
Related: https://maki.org.il/en/?p=29453
