Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli Minister of Finance, came to Paris on Sunday March 19. At the invitation of a far-right Israeli group, he spoke to around 100 people. And he stood behind a desk, where was displayed the map which represents the territory of the British Mandate of 1920 from which Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories originated. While two Israeli journalists were barred from attending the conference — a first for Israel — he denied the existence of the Palestinian people, a denial that amounts to contempt.
But who is Bezalel Smotrich? The provocations of this racist, sexist and homophobic minister are incessant. Some examples ? In July 2015, in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, the deputy defends real estate developers who refuse to sell houses to Arabs. In April 2016, he advocated the separation of Jews and Arabs in maternity hospitals. In July 2016, he declared Reform Judaism – which seeks to insert Jewish religion and culture into modern life – to be a “false religion”.
In October 2021, Smotrich asserts that David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of Israel, should have “finished the job” and expelled, upon his founding, all Arabs from the country. In April 2021, he declared that “Arabs are citizens of Israel, for now at least. They have representatives, deputies, for now at least”. In August 2021, he implied that the Tel Aviv gay pride parade had sparked a new wave of coronavirus infections. In November 2022, he accused the Israeli internal security service, the Shin Bet, of having assassinated former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
In my worst nightmares, I would never have imagined that Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – the current Minister of Internal Security, an Israeli far-right agitator – could sit in a government. But these appointments are the sole fact of Binyamin Netanyahu who, moreover, is accused of corruption in a series of cases.
It is this reform of justice that scandalizes more than half of the Israeli population, which has entered into resistance. For twelve weeks, hundreds of thousands of Israelis, including former voters of Binyamin Netanyahu, attached to the democratic values ??of their state, have been demonstrating in the streets.
Because I love this country and its people, I refuse emotional blackmail, the diktat which would consist in prohibiting Jews from the diaspora from speaking and criticizing the current government. If the Jews hoped so much to be able, one day, to find the land of Israel, it was in the name of the fundamental values ??of Judaism and in particular respect for justice and respect for others: “You will love the foreigner as you yourself, for you were a stranger in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).
We want Israel to be a living and respectful democracy. So, to Diaspora Jews, I want to write this: If you love Israel, you must fight for an Israel of light and not of darkness. So, to Israelis, Jews and Arabs, I say: continue your struggles; fight so that Israel still resonates in your/our heart; be the actors of a true democratic revolution. Because, wherever you are in the world, and in Israel too, the peoples must protect themselves from the makers of hatred.
* Marc Knobel is a historian, member of JCall and Peace Now. He published, with Hermann, in 2021, “Cyberhaine. Propaganda, anti-Semitism on the Internet”.