Moshe Feiglin, leader of the Zehut party, has allied with Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party for the upcoming elections
Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin, the leader of Israel’s Zehut party, who has a clear path to a seat in the Knesset in the upcoming election, has said in a new interview that it would be “moral” to kill babies in Gaza.
Feiglin made headlines last year when he declared that every child and every baby in Gaza is the “enemy,” a viewpoint he doubled down on in an English-language interview that was published by The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
Feiglin said in the interview that he personally doesn’t want to see babies killed even though he thinks it is “morally” the right thing to do, and that he would prefer all Palestinians to be expelled from Gaza instead.
“I’m saying again again because I’m Jewish and I guess I’m a bit a little bit weak morally. I don’t want to see babies killed, okay? Morally, that should have been done, because of everything I explained. So, but because … I’m Jewish with a soft heart, I would open the borders and let them all go, but no one can stay. And it has to be a part of the Jewish land, Jewish state,” he said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Feiglin said it was “100%” a Jewish point of view to “wipe out” Gaza, expel all the Palestinians, and annex Gaza and the West Bank. He labeled all of Gaza as the “enemy,” not just Hamas.
“The baby that would be born — I’ll say something very tough now, excuse me for saying it — the baby that will be born tomorrow in Gaza, the Arab baby. Notice I’m not saying Hamas, I’m not saying Palestinian … the enemy is Gaza, not Hamas. The baby that will be born in Gaza tomorrow will do exactly the same — God forbid — to your baby that would be born in Jerusalem,” he said.
Feiglin served in the Knesset from 2013 to 2015 as a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and founded Zehut in 2015. Zehut is now running on a joint electoral list with Religious Zionism, the party led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, another outspoken proponent of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Feiglin holds the No. 2 spot on the joint list, and recent polling has shown the alliance clearing the electoral threshold needed to win seats in the Knesset.
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PAJU NOTE
The depravity of a good part of Israeli society comes to the forefront in what is once again a call to genocide against the Palestinians proffered by a prominent extreme-right Israeli politician. Moshe Feiglin calls for the murder of Palestinian babies in Gaza, a call which mirrors exactly the policy of the Nazis of the Third Reich during the Holocaust vis-à-vis Jewish children. The following facts regarding the murder of thousands of Jewish and Romani children by the Nazis brings to mind the same call by Feiglin regarding the children of Gaza (in effect, in reference to all Palestinian children):
During the Holocaust, children were especially vulnerable to death under the Nazi regime. An estimated 1.5 million children,[1] nearly all Jewish, were murdered during the Holocaust, either directly by or as a direct consequence of Nazi actions. This was among the most notable Nazi crimes against children.
The Nazis advocated killing children of unwanted or “dangerous” people in accordance with their ideological views, either as part of the Nazi idea of the racial struggle or as a measure of preventive security. They particularly targeted Jewish children, but also targeted ethnically Polish children and Romani (also called Gypsy) children and children with mental or physical disabilities. The Nazis and their collaborators killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks.
Following the massacres of defenseless Palestinians by a Lebanese Christian militia group , with the support of the Ariel Sharon-led Israeli army at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in September of 1982, Israeli academic and intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz coined the phrase “Judeo-Nazism” in reference to what he called the turning away from Judaic humanist values via Israel’s brutal and illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. Max Blumenthal has discussed the conflation of “Judaism” (Zionism) and Nazism with an eye to Leibovitz’s prediction that Israel would eventually create concentration camps.
I am somewhat reluctant to use the term “Judeo-Nazism,” given that hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews around the world today denounce Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime, the depravity of Israeli extremists, and the popularity these fanatics enjoy among a significant portion of Israeli society. I prefer the term “Judeo-Zionist Nazis“—so as not to tar all Jews with the same brush. It is undeniable that there are Jewish Nazis (Feiglin being one example), as Yeshayahu Leibowitz pointed out; however, a distinction must be made between Zionist Jews and humanist Jews to prevent world Jewry from becoming synonymous with Judeo-Zionist Nazis. Not all Jews are Zionists. The centuries of Jewish suffering under Christian rule do not provide a moral basis for the murder and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, including more than 20,000 Palestinian children. There is no such” moral basis”.
As for those feckless political and media mavens who grovel at the feet of the pro-Israel Zionist lobby, we will not hear a peep out of them regarding Feiglin’s call for a Final Solution of the Palestinian population. Nor will we hear any denunciation of this Zionist-Aryanism from the pillars of the pro-Israel lobby such as the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) or the B’nai Brith. Just imagine how all these wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing would have reacted if an Arab politician had called for the murder of Jewish-Israeli children. But then Palestinian children are not white; they are brown. As they constitute an “inferior race” for the white Judeo-Zionist supremacists, they fit into the notion of the White Man’s Burden, which underlies all of the West’s imperial projects, including that of colonizing Palestine.
Bruce Katz
PAJU
The opinions expressed in the PAJU notes are the author’s own
