Editorial | Fire Israel's Far Right

Editorial | Fire Israel's Far Right

Haaretz.com

Sunday’s remark by Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu (Otzma Yehudit), who said that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip is an option, is a problem not for Israeli public diplomacy but rather for Israeli reality.

The problem is not any particular statement, but rather the power and legitimacy enjoyed today, in Israel as a whole and in the government, by the Kahanist, messianic Jewish far right, which supports annexation and occupation and Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, sees the current war as an opportunity and scorns the international community, international institutions and the laws of war.

This was not a slip of the tongue. In an interview with Radio Kol Barama, Eliyahu said that “there are no uninvolved [civilians]” in the Gaza Strip. Asked by his interviewer whether that meant Israel should drop a nuclear bomb on the Strip, he responded, “That’s one way.” And his subsequent “clarification” – “It is clear to anyone who is sensible that the nuclear remark was metaphorical” – is ridiculous. A metaphor for what?

Nor is he a lone exception. Eliyahu’s party colleague, lawmaker Yitzhak Kroizer, told Army Radio on Sunday that “the Gaza Strip should be flattened, and there should be one sentence for everyone there – death. We have to wipe the Gaza Strip off the map. There are no innocents there.” Entire swaths of the government belong to the dangerous far right: Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Simcha Rothman, Orit Strock, Avi Maoz, Zvi Sukkot, Limor Son Har-Melech and their confederates.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response was lame. Eliyahu’s statement, he said, was “disconnected from reality,” and the minister will be barred from cabinet meetings until further notice. He ought to have fired Eliyahu, but he chose not to do so; he prioritized preserving his government over preserving Israel.

Netanyahu isn’t the solution, but the problem. He has legitimized Kahanism and the far right. During his years in power, Israel has grown more extreme, and people who used to be loathsome pariahs are now senior cabinet ministers. Ideas and values that used to be outside the consensus, such as “transferring” Arabs from Israel, a second Nakba and Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, have been normalized under Netanyahu’s irresponsible leadership.

He is the one who lent legitimacy to political alliances with admirers of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein and the murderer of the Dawabsheh family. Under his leadership, the settlers have begun setting their sights on the West Bank’s Area B, which under the Oslo Accords is under Israeli security control and Palestinian civilian control. And the settlers’ radical “hilltop youth” have moved from being intelligence targets of the Shin Bet security service to serving as ministers, Knesset members, aides and advisers.

The far right’s membership in the government has painted the entire government, and all of Israel, in far-right colors. The only way to solve the problem is to remove the far right from the government, and from the bounds of Israeli legitimacy. The only way to repudiate Eliyahu’s statement is to repudiate him and those like him. The Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism parties must be fired from the cabinet immediately.

The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.