Yesterday the Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich gave an extraordinarily brazen speech in which he openly bragged about the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza.
Here are a few selected quotes:
"We are dismantling Gaza, leaving it in ruins with unprecedented destruction, and the world still hasn’t stopped us."
"We are annihilating everything that remains in the [Gaza] Strip."
"The population will reach the south of the Strip, and from there, God willing, to third countries."
He also explained the Israel is only allowing in a few aid trucks (a tiny fraction of what’s required to meet demand for food and medical supplies) after over two months of total siege "so the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes"; openly admitted that Israel is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure; and even argued that Israel shouldn’t even allow water into the Gaza Strip.
Smotrich may think that it’s a clever tactic to allow a few aid trucks in to pretend that Israel is not committing war crimes in Gaza, but most of the rest of what he said amounted to open admission of genocidal actions and intent.
Targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime; cutting off food and water to civilians as collective punishment is a war crime; forcibly driving civilians from their homes is a war crime; expulsion of civilians to other countries is textbook genocide; and "annihilating everything" instead of targeting military locations is quite obviously a war crime.
It’s hardly a new thing to see another senior Israeli figure openly bragging about the their genocidal war crimes, especially since the South African submission to the ICC included pages of evidence quoting Israeli politicians, military figures, and journalists expressing genocidal intent.
But it is remarkable to see one of them openly admitting that they’re playing games in order to prevent the international community from holding them to account for their documented war crimes.
Meanwhile the British government remains deliberately complicit.
The likes of Keir Starmer and David Lammy pretend to care about the plight of Palestinian civilians, but behind the scenes they’ve allowed more arms exports to Israel in months than the previous Tory government signed off in the previous three years; they’ve flown over five hundred spy flights over the Gaza Strip; they outright refuse to impose Russia-style sanctions on Israel; they keep allowing US and Israeli aeroplanes to use RAF bases as stopping points for flights carrying who knows who and what; and they even instructed lawyers to lie in court that "no genocide has occurred or is occurring"!
They’re downright complicit, and these latest admissions of genocidal actions and genocidal intent from Smotrich make it absolutely clear that the UK government is complicitly playing exactly the game that these genocidal Israeli politicians want them to.
It’s not just that Israel is openly committing war crimes and genocide, and revelling in their atrocities, it’s that countries like Britain, the US, and Germany are wilfully complicit in allowing them to continue.
We’re seeing Israel brazenly ripping up international and humanitarian law in full view of the international community, and our governments are wilfully going along with it.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Bezalel Smotrich even sounds like one of the lesser known demons
and he's evil enough to be one of the more well-known ones.
These people are not fit to be called human beings which is a dangerous road to go down of course, and is exactly the thing they say about Palestinians, but how else can you describe these vicious lunatics? We passed the "I can't describe this depravity" stage months and months ago. Where the hell are we now?
The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
Apparently he bucks the trend of israeli politicians adopting Hebrew-sounding names. 'Smotrich' is based on a town where he says his family came from in... Ukraine:
However I found this interesting paper which examines the evidence of pogrom-type massacres of Jews by the OUN, ie: the Banderite Ukrainian nationalists:
The way the crimes are described are very similar to the massacres in the other article - Jewish inhabitants rounded up, taken to the river and shot or drowned. So it's not clear whether the first 2 articles are wrongly (or dishonestly) blaming nazi soldiers, or if they repeated similar crimes after the OUN perpetrated them shortly after the start of the nazi invasion.
Seems that the OUN perceived Jews as supportive of bolshevism and Moscow-based 'imperialism' and that they should be targeted as a group because of that alleged collective guilt. Around 100 were killed in the Smotrich river, after being forced to 'graze' like cattle on the bank. They repeated this with another 50 or so Jews in the nearby town of Kupyn. Apparently it harkens back to forced baptisms or the punishment for refusing, and common enough that 'the expression “to the river” was increasingly understood by the Jews as the threat of imminent death' (p.80). And getting them to graze like cattle, well: 'Such attempts to humiliate victims as much as possible and to dehumanize them to animals were fully in line with the position of the perpetrators as they could regard their actions as a sort of "revenge" for their own suffering, real or alleged, from the Soviet regime that was associated with the Jews.' - ibid. p.80
Remind you of anything?
Presumably using the name 'Smotrich' is this person's claim to a memory of family suffering in the 'old country' which has now been transcended by participating in the wonderful state of israel. Yet this sociopath is acting exactly like the fascists, nationalist fanatics and other murdering psychos who his family allegedly fled from, and he either doesn't see it, or feels it is justified against the 'human animals' that are the Palestinian Arabs. People like this are incredibly dangerous, substantially moreso when their malevolence is harnessed by state forces to inflict yet more unimaginable trauma on a captive population, 50% of whom are children. It's not going to end well, to put it mildly...
pre- Oct 7th article. Interesting closing remarks about trauma. I'll leave it there. Thinking about this man, even looking at pictures of him, is making me feel ill.
Bezalel Smotrich’s ancestors would have told him he was lying
The Israeli minister has dismissed the existence of a Palestinian identity. His grandfather’s family would know better.
Lorenzo Kamel Professor of History of International Relations at the University of Turin.
Published On 30 Mar 202330 Mar 2023
Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich dismissed the existence of a Palestinian people and history in a speech he delivered in Paris on March 19.
Born in 1980 in Haspin, a settlement in the occupied Golan Heights, Smotrich made these remarks from a lectern wrapped in a flag that showed Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as part of Israel.
Also on the stage next to Smotrich was a picture of the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky.
A century ago, in November 1923, Jabotinsky himself used words that seemed to suggest a very different understanding of Palestine to the one Smotrich has outlined.
“There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs […] it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority,” Jabotinsky wrote.
“Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised”.
Jabotinsky’s words remind us that the extremists of the 1920s had no problem recognising the existence of the Palestinians, nor that of what has been known as Palestine for many centuries.
Conversely, the current Israeli finance minister, whose family is of Ukrainian origin (Smotryc is the name of a town in western Ukraine), claimed that his grandfather, “who was the 13th generation in Jerusalem, was a true Palestinian”.
Thirteen generations correspond to about 300 years if not more. This means that, according to the family tree provided by Smotrich himself, some of his ancestors may have met the mufti Khayr al-Din al-Ramli, an influential lawyer in 17th-century Ottoman Palestine, who lived in the city of Ramla from which he drew his surname.
They might have also come across al-Ramlī’s manuscripts (Jews in Palestine spoke Arabic in their daily life), and the concept of “Filastin”, which al-Ramlī referred to as “biladuna” (“our homeland”).
Unsurprisingly, Filastin was commonly referred to in much older works too, including in al-Uns al-Jalil bi-Tarikh al-Quds wa’l-Khalil (The glorious story of Jerusalem and Hebron), written around 1495 by the Qadi of Jerusalem Mujir al-Din, who used the expression “‘Ard Filastin” (the Land of Palestine) 22 times.
A text from the 8th century, attributed to the scholar Abu Khalid Thawr Ibn Yazid al-Kalaai, argued that “the holiest place on Earth is Syria; the holiest place in Syria is Palestine; the holiest place in Palestine is Jerusalem [Bayt al-Maqdis]”.
Detailed references to Palestine, not necessarily of a strictly religious nature, can be found in a series of other manuscripts from the 9th and 10th centuries too. “Filastin”, wrote the Persian geographer al-Istakhri, “is the most fertile among the Syrian provinces.”
“At its maximum extension [Filastin goes] from Rafah to the edge of Al Lajjun (Legio), a traveller would need two days to travel across its entire length; and [this is also] the time [necessary] to cross the province across its breadth from Jaffa to Riha (Jericho),” he wrote.
But who lived on this land in previous centuries, alongside some of Smotrich’s ancestors?
The first official census in Palestine was conducted by the British authorities in 1922. A total population of 757,182 individuals was found, of whom 590,890 were Muslims, 83,794 were Jews, and 73,024 were Christians.
The most reliable estimates of the previous century reveal that in 1800 the total population of Palestine numbered 250,000 individuals, reaching 500,000 in 1890. As noted by American demographer Justin McCarthy, of the 411,000 inhabitants in Palestine in 1860, the overwhelming majority were Sunni Palestinians, with important “minorities” – in particular Christian, Shia and Druze – present.
They used the Ottoman lira (before 1844, the common currency was the kurush), spoke Arabic and lived scattered among 700 villages, demonstrating their bond to their land “with the tenacity of aboriginal inhabitants”, in the words of British writer Elizabeth Finn, who was the wife of the British consul in Jerusalem in the mid-19th century.
The villages were located mostly in the hilly and mountainous regions that stretch from north to south between Galilee and Jabal al-Khalil (Hebron). This was mainly due to safety and health reasons: The flat regions, like the coastal area, were more exposed to the periodic raids by Bedouins, as well as to the proliferation of illnesses such as malaria.
The rest of the population lived in mixed cities – where also most of the Jews of Palestine lived – like Jerusalem, Haifa, Tiberias, Jaffa and Safad. Or in fully non-Jewish cities such as Nazareth, Shefaraam, Nablus (which in the 18th and 19th centuries was the most prosperous city in the region), Yaffa, Beisan, al-Lidd, Ramla, Ramallah, Bir al-Saba, Beit Jala, Jenin, Khan Younis, Gaza, Bethlehem, Acca and Tulkarem.
These layers of history won’t disappear, nor will they be “wiped out”, as happened to 450 Palestinian villages in 1948, and, more recently, as was suggested by Smotrich himself in relation to the Palestinian village of Huwara.
Yet school curricula, exhibitions, and museums can indeed help to shed light on this rich but traumatic past, with the aim of creating a symmetrical dialogue in an asymmetrical reality.
As author Resmaa Menakem writes: “Trauma in a person, decontextualized over time, looks like personality. Trauma in a family, decontextualized over time, looks like family traits. Trauma in a people, decontextualized over time, looks like culture”.
Humanising and making visible the experience and scars of these previous generations of Muslim, Christian and Jewish Palestinians is still today the most effective antidote to the many Smotrichs of our time.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Lorenzo Kamel Lorenzo Kamel Professor of History of International Relations at the University of Turin. Professor Lorenzo Kamel teaches History of International Relations at the University of Turin. His latest book, History Below the Global. On and Beyond the Coloniality of Power in Historical Research, will be out in April 2024.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
on May 20, 2025, 3:47 pm