I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it.’
I have read those words and read them again – and again. I have checked various news sources to be sure there was no error in translation or transcription. I have tried to parse the words to construe a meaning other than the one I know in my gut to be true. But it won’t work. The words mean what they say. They are a call for ethnic cleansing.
The words were spoken by Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and leader of Tkuma, a religious nationalist party of the far right. Smotrich was interviewed yesterday morning at a conference hosted by Tel Aviv based financial newspaper, The Marker. He was asked why he had ‘liked’ a tweet calling for Huwara, a Palestinian village in Samaria, to be ‘erased’. On Sunday, two Israelis were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist while driving through the village, which prompted dozens of Israelis to riot, setting fire to Palestinian houses and cars. One Palestinian was shot dead. I wrote about it on Coffee House on Monday.
The national religious politician added that, ‘God forbid’, he did not want to see civilians ‘take the law into their own hands’.
Read the article by Stephen Daisley in The Spectator.