[News] Smotrich unmasks Israel's truly genocidal face

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/smotrich-unmasks-israels-truly-genocidal-face>
Smotrich unmasks Israel's truly genocidal face

Ali Abunimah <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah> - 20
March 2023
------------------------------
[image: Two men in suits lean their heads close together]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and finance minister Bezalel
Smotrich hold a news conference in Jerusalem on 25 January. Smotrich’s
claim that Palestinians do not exist is in line with longstanding genocidal
Zionist ideology.
UPI

Bezalel Smotrich, the ultra-far-right Israeli finance minister, declared in
Paris on Sunday that Palestinians do not exist.

There is “no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as
the Palestinian people,” Smotrich said.

His remarks were “met with applause and cheers from attendees,” *The Times
of Israel* noted
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-lawmaker-bezalel-smotrich-declares-himself-his-family-real-palestinians/>
and as videos of the event show.

Smotrich went further, declaring that he – a West Bank settler
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-03-01/ty-article/.premium/west-bank-home-of-israeli-lawmaker-who-championed-land-grab-law-built-illegally/0000017f-e2b1-d804-ad7f-f3fbdc170000>
– is a “real” Palestinian.
Hanging from Smotrich’s podium was a flag depicting the whole of historic
Palestine, Jordan and parts of Lebanon and Syria as belonging to the
Zionist state – revealing a desire for even greater territorial expansion
that other Israeli officials have expressed
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/incoming-ambassador-uk-called-expanding-israels-borders>
as well lately.

The claim that Palestinians don’t exist or are an “invented people” is
widespread among Zionists.

In 2014, Sheldon Adelson
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/sheldon-adelson>, the late
billionaire mega
donor to anti-Palestinian causes
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/miriam-adelson-now-leads-sheldons-pro-israel-empire>
and the Republican Party
<https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/07/miriam-adelson-megadonor-back-in-politics-519912>,
similarly declared
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/adelson-palestinians-an-invented-people-out-to-destroy-israel/>
that the “Palestinians are an invented people.”

“The purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel,”
Adelson added.

Two years later Brooke Goldstein, a prominent Israel lobby activist in the
United States, asserted
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-lawfare-group-plans-massive-punishments-activists>
that “There’s no such thing as a Palestinian person.”

But perhaps most notorious is Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s 1969
declaration
<https://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/27/archives/a-talk-with-golda-meir.html>
that “There is no such thing as Palestinians.”

Meir was a stalwart of Israel’s ostensibly left-wing Labor Party
establishment.

Smotrich’s latest comment comes just weeks after he declared
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-calls-genocide-met-shrugs-washington-and-brussels>
that the Palestinian town of Huwwara should be “wiped out” by the State of
Israel.

There should be no doubt that Smotrich means what he says and if given an
opportunity, he and the ascendant political movement he represents would
carry it out.

There should also be no doubt that what Smotrich is talking about and
inciting is the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Nor are Smotrich’s remarks ill-considered outbursts; they reflect deep and
careful thinking and a coherent ideology.
Values of the German SS

In 2017, Smotrich set out a plan
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/eu-refuses-condemn-israeli-genocide-plan>
to force the Palestinian people out of their homeland and take their entire
land once and for all.

At the time, Daniel Blatman, a professor of Holocaust studies at Hebrew
University, wrote
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2017-05-23/ty-article/.premium/the-israeli-mk-heralding-genocide-against-palestinians/0000017f-e2ae-d804-ad7f-f3feb9200000>
that Smotrich took inspiration for his plan from the biblical Book of
Joshua, which describes the wholesale slaughter of a people by the
“children of Israel.”

Blatman called Smotrich, who was then deputy speaker of the Israeli
parliament the Knesset, “the most senior government figure to date to say
unabashedly that the option of genocide is on the table if the Palestinians
don’t agree to our terms.”

Under Smotrich’s plan, Palestinians would have to submit to complete Jewish
supremacy, or be forced out.

Today, Smotrich not only controls the finance ministry, but he has been
given special powers
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/incoming-idf-chief-halevi-to-meet-with-smotrich-who-wields-authority-in-west-bank/>
over the so-called civil administration, the Israeli military occupation
bureaucracy that runs the lives of millions of Palestinians – people whom
Smotrich does not believe exist.

“Smotrich’s admiration for the biblical genocidaire Joshua bin Nun leads
him to adopt values that resemble those of the German SS,” Blatman, a former
fellow
<https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/all-fellows-and-scholars/daniel-blatman-2005>
of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, added.

It should be emphasized that even at the time, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu was willing to give a tacit stamp of approval to Smotrich’s ideas.

“I was happy to hear that you are devoting the discussions at the
conference to the subject of the future of the Land of Israel,” Netanyahu
said
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/eu-refuses-condemn-israeli-genocide-plan>
in a recorded greeting played at the gathering where Smotrich set out his
genocidal plan.

“Up until not so many years ago, this country was deserted and abandoned,
but since we returned to Zion, after generations of exile, the Land of
Israel is flourishing,” Netanyahu asserted.
Liberal whitewashing

Liberal Zionists have already made intense efforts to portray the likes of
Smotrich and Israel’s Kahanist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/itamar-ben-gvir-0> as aberrations who
are somehow not true representatives of Israel and Zionism.

We can expect those whitewashing efforts to intensify.
But there should be no doubt that Smotrich is simply articulating Israel’s
foundational ideology and policy.

In 2004, the liberal Israeli newspaper *Haaretz* interviewed
<https://www.haaretz.com/2004-01-08/ty-article/survival-of-the-fittest/0000017f-e874-dc7e-adff-f8fdc87a0000>
Benny Morris, one of the Israeli “new historians” who in the 1980s used
Zionist sources to validate Palestinian accounts of the Nakba – the
systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 during which Zionist
militias perpetrated rapes, arbitrary murders and dozens of massacres.

Morris explained that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister –
like Meir, a pillar of the nominally secular, left-wing Labor Party –
personally directed the deliberate “transfer” of the Palestinian people
from much of their homeland.

“Ben-Gurion was a transferist,” Morris explained. “He understood that there
could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its
midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.”

“I don’t hear you condemning him,” the *Haaretz* interviewer told Morris.

“Ben-Gurion was right,” Morris responded. “If he had not done what he did,
a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is
impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish
state would not have arisen here.”

But for Morris, Ben-Gurion’s mistake is that he did not do enough ethnic
cleansing.

“If he [Ben-Gurion] was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have
done a complete job,” Morris asserted
<https://www.haaretz.com/2004-01-08/ty-article/survival-of-the-fittest-cont/0000017f-e86d-da9b-a1ff-ec6fb5000000>
.

“I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically
correct types,” Morris said. “But my feeling is that this place would be
quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and
for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the
whole country – the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River.”

“It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake,” Morris added. “If he
had carried out a full expulsion – rather than a partial one – he would
have stabilized the State of Israel for generations.”

No one who calls themselves a Zionist, whether on the “left” or the
far-right, can fundamentally disagree with Morris.

That’s why no one who calls themselves a Zionist supports the right of
return for Palestinian refugees.

It is why Zionists, even of the “liberal” variety, constantly fret about
the “demographic threat
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/demographic-threat>” from the births
of Palestinian babies.
This is genocide

And if no Zionist can fundamentally disagree with Morris, then they can’t
really disagree with Smotrich either.

Indeed, Smotrich himself echoed Morris almost verbatim in 2021 when he
yelled
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/israeli-lawmaker-regrets-ben-gurion-didnt-finish-job>
at Palestinian lawmakers in Israel’s parliament in 2021 that “It’s a
mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in
1948.”

They may feign shock and disgust with Smotrich’s language, but anyone who
believes that Israel must remain a “Jewish state”
<https://mondoweiss.net/2014/03/abunimahs-justice-palestine/> with a Jewish
majority has to at least endorse the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that
Israel has perpetrated to date, whether or not they actively advocate
further large-scale expulsions in the future.

Indeed, the position of the diminishing number of Israeli “liberals” and
other supporters of the so-called two-state solution can be summed up as
follows: We support all the ethnic cleansing and land theft that Israel has
already carried out but think future expulsions and land theft should be
limited – although by how much is open to debate.

Whereas the position of Smotrich and company is: We, like you, support all
the ethnic cleansing and land theft to date, but think there needs to be
much more.

Morally and practically there is no difference because both positions
relegate millions of Palestinians to living under brutal Jewish supremacist
rule and apartheid
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/what-makes-amnestys-apartheid-report-different/34771>
or exiled from their homeland solely and exclusively because they are not
Jews.

Coupled with the frequent claims that the Palestinians do not and have
never existed as a people, Israel’s expulsions and massacres transcend the
horrifying enough crime of ethnic cleansing and enter the realm of genocide
<https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf>:
the complete erasure of the Palestinians *as a people*.

Here too, Smotrich’s position that Palestinians have no existence let alone
rights as a people is no aberration but a reflection of Israeli consensus.

Recall that in 2018, Israel adopted its so-called Nation-State Law
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israel-passes-law-entrenching-apartheid>,
a constitutional instrument declaring that “the right to exercise national
self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,”
thereby denying to Palestinians any national rights or existence.

And when Benjamin Netanyahu’s new coalition government took office in
December, it declared
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/taking-apartheid-new-extremes/36986>
as its first guiding principles that “the Jewish people have an exclusive
and unquestionable right over all areas of the land of Israel.”
Israel returns to its roots

It is often said, understandably, that Israel’s current government is its
most openly racist and right-wing in history.

That may be true in terms of its rhetoric, but there is no practical
difference between Israel’s secular “socialist” founder David Ben-Gurion
and a fanatically right-wing religious Zionist like Smotrich.

But after decades of mostly suppressing Smotrich’s brand of openly
genocidal language in favor of presenting a “liberal” and “democratic”
face, why are Israelis now embracing it?

It is because Israel’s “demographic problem” – the existence of “too many”
living, breathing Palestinians on their own soil – is becoming urgent.

With Jews once again a minority
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/jews-now-a-minority-in-israel-and-the-territories-demographer-says/>
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, many Israelis clearly
feel they have no option but to return fully to their country’s genocidal
roots.

That is why ostracizing Smotrich – as French officials
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-03-13/ty-article/.premium/smotrich-heads-to-paris-after-chilly-u-s-trip-but-not-at-frances-invitation/00000186-da57-d9b0-a3af-db7f4bf60000>
have done by declining to meet him during his time in their country – is
insufficient and misleading because it falsely portrays one “extremist” as
the problem.

The problem is Zionism itself and the ongoing genocidal settler-colonial
nightmare it has unleashed on the Palestinian people and their land.
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