Video: Israelis back killing, transfer of Palestinians
A new video released by TeleSUR TV shows strong anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian sentiment among Israelis in Jerusalem.
A new video has shown strong anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian sentiment among Israelis in Jerusalem, with residents providing extreme solutions to the country’s conflict, such as killing all Palestinians and transferring them to other Arab countries.
“I would carpet bomb them – it’s the only way to deal with it,” one Israeli said in the video by the TeleSUR television network, released on Sunday.
Another young lady said, “We need to kill Arabs,” while one man proposed that Israel kick all Arabs out.
The interviews were conducted on Zion Street in Jerusalem. Many of those interviewed by TeleSUR were American Jews who had immigrated to Israel.
“I think that Islam is a very bad disease, not just for Israel, but for all around the world. We can see it. They think we all have to be Islam; if you’re not Islam, they will kill you,” one man responded.
A younger man from the right-wing organisation Lehava, which works to prevent interaction between Jews and Palestinians, said: “Jews are a special nation – God gave it to the Jews. We don’t want Jews to get mixed up with a different nation.”
READ MORE: ‘It’s okay to be racist in Israel’
In a study by the US-based Pew Research Center in 2016, almost of half of Israel’s Jewish citizens expressed their support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. For the statement “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel”, 48 percent said they agreed or strongly agreed.
Some 79 percent of Israeli Jews said they deserved preferential treatment in Israel.
Israeli politicians have also been complicit in fuelling hatred of Palestinians.
In July, an Israeli legislator, Oren Hazan, said he would “execute” a Palestinian assailant’s family as revenge for an operation that killed three Israelis in an illegal West Bank settlement.
In response to the comments, Mustafa Barghouti, former Palestinian information minister, told Al Jazeera in an earlier article that such comments were “very dangerous” and exposed “how deeply ingrained racism” has become in Israel.
“We’re talking about racism in every political speech and every television broadcast,” added Barghouti.
In 2014, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked published a post on Facebook calling for a genocide of Palestinians: “What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads.”
And in a speech to the World Zionist Congress in 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Adolf Hitler had no interest in exterminating the Jews of Europe until a Palestinian convinced him to.
Also, during Israel’s annual celebration of the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian territories, right-wing nationalist Jews often rampage around East Jerusalem’s Old City, carrying Israeli flags and shouting anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim slogans such as “Death to the Arabs”.