Rights advocates in the United States are urging President Joe Biden to end his administration’s “complicity” in Israeli rights abuses after key members of Israel’s government backed the idea of pushing Palestinians out of Gaza.
Far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich said this week that Israel should “encourage emigration” from the coastal enclave, home to an estimated 2.3 million Palestinians.
“If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after [the war ends] will be totally different,” Smotrich said on Sunday, calling for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians.
A day later, Ben-Gvir, who oversees national security, made a similar appeal, saying it was “a correct, just, moral and humane solution”, Israeli media outlets reported.
I don’t understand where the people taking these statements seriously (either to support them or to oppose them) imagine that the Palestinians could possibly go from Gaza. Egypt won’t take them. That means they’re not going anywhere.
They’ll eventually just push them into Egypt. It doesn’t matter that Egypt doesn’t want them. It matters more that Egypt probably won’t start shooting over it. And if they do they’ll be labelled anti-semites anyway and Israel will take the Sinai or something.
Israel can’t take the Sinai. There’s a peacekeeping force there specifically to prevent such a thing…
And yeah. Yeah they’re just going to lean on MFO Sinai to oversee refugee camps aren’t they.
I’d say the Israelis couldn’t attack American troops and maintain their support but uhhh they already managed that some decades ago.
Anywhere else… I think the point is to say that they should’ve figured it out. They had warning and opportunity to leave, even when they didn’t. The Nazis played the same strategy.
Honestly, no one takes either of those racist idiots seriously. They’re not serious people and this isn’t a serious plan. They’re both despised in Israel and, thankfully, neither really have any influence.
So the minister of finance and minister of national security aren’t influential in any ways in a country that gets billions of dollars from the USA and uses it to fund their national war effort?
Are you waiting for other people in their govt to say something about flattening Gaza? Some minor politicians have said that
The agriculture minister said this would be a second Nakba, that event where the Israelis took homes and made prisoners go through their own abandoned(stolen) homes taking books, furniture, and their whole cultural history for the Israeli to take as spoils of war.
Exactly this. Either Netanyahu controls the Likud-coalition and this is the aligned message of displacement/ethnic cleansing, or he dismisses these ministers and publicly refutes these statements, or he doesn’t have control and should immediately hold elections to secure a real coalition or majority. But that risks jail for Netanyahu, and his actions so far have openly spoken of cowardice in the face of the legal repercussions.
Because otherwise this kind of rhetoric is going straight into the ICJ evidence file for SA’s genocide complaint that Israel is contesting. Protestations of ‘blood libel’ don’t drown out cabinet ministers openly calling for ethnic cleansing going unpunished.
As odd as it may seem: yes, they aren’t influential in directing the war. They have those positions because Netanyahu promised them for supporting his coalition, not because they were “earned” or because they’re ideologically aligned. It’s a marriage of convenience and outside of Netanyahu’s deal to desperately cling to power, these two are far-right kooks from fringe parties. It doesn’t give them real legitimacy. Netayahu’s coalition deal was an enormous controversy even outside of Israel. A big reason they formed the emergency government was to keep extremely unserious clowns like these away from decision-making by bringing in grown-ups. They are both strongly disliked and would be crushed back into obscurity in an election.
This article presents their statements as something new and they aren’t. Both of these fucking morons routinely suggest horrific shit like expelling Arabs from Israel. Ben-Gvir was convicted in Israel of racist incitement against Arabs decades ago. A former head of Shin Bet once referred to Smotrich as a “Jewish terrorist.” They are both settler extremists and known quantites; it would be stranger if they weren’t spouting racist, extremist bullshit. They are not representative of the broader government. Netanyahu didn’t have to agree to a cabinet made up of his political enemies; even that far-right ghoul knows these people are clowns. Given all that, I don’t think there’s a compelling reason to believe that they’d be the ones to announce Israeli policy.
Are you waiting for other people in their govt to say something about flattening Gaza?
I’m waiting for someone who actually matters. These dipshits do not. I mean, really, none of the people currently in power are going to be around after this conflict anyway, so I’m more concerned with what Gantz is saying than with Netanyahu’s petulant tantrums.
One of them is in charge of the police and border patrol. I don’t think it much matters if the average person doesn’t like them.
Neither of those things give him the power to do what he said or the influence to have it done. Both of those things matter.
It’s a serious expression of the government’s values. Just because those particular officials lack the power to do what they propose doesn’t mean their words are meaningless. If Bibi and his crew weren’t in favor of genocide, they’d be loudly condemning these assholes and doing whatever they can to remove them from office.
