Naftali Bennett calls religious Jewish settlers “extremists” and again falsely accuses innocent Jews for Duma
Education Minister Naftali Bennett compares religious Jewish settlers to BDS and leftist anti-Semites.
Right and left-wing extremists are desperate and as such are trying to “burn down our house,” Education Minister Naftali Bennett said on Thursday.
He made these remarks while delivering a guest lecture to undergraduate students in an “Israeli identity” course, taught by Eldad Yaniv, director of the Institute for Social Responsibility at the Peres Academic Center in Rehovot.
According to Bennett, in Israel today there is a division between “an optimistic Zionist majority that believes in the State of Israel and a desperate and extremist minority.”
“Why do you think they carried out the attack in Duma?” he asked the students, referring to the murder of [an Arab] family by Jewish “right-wing extremists” in Duma [who were innocent and tortured by the Israeli government].
“The aim was not murder; that was just the means. We are talking about people who have given up on persuading the people of Israel of their positions and they want to bring our house down upon us. They’re trying to burn down our house,” he said.
Bennett said the extreme Left shares this “same dynamic.”
“Consider the person who served as director-general of the Foreign Ministry [Dr. Alon Liel] that briefs leftist groups such as ‘Breaking the Silence’ and B’Tselem and encourages them to create disturbances among Arabs so that there will be pictures to convince the world to boycott us,” he said.
Bennett called upon the “moderate forces” in Israeli society to “lead and make their voices heard” – both from the right and the left.
“Exactly in these situations we need to identify what unites rather than take groups of people and confront them against each other,” he said.
“Most importantly we must not besmirch an entire population because of minorities on both sides: Not to discredit all the Arabs of Israel and not to discredit all the Right and not to discredit all the Tel Avivians,” he said.
“I want Israel to be a country which is proud of being Jewish, a state that is in contact with world Jewry. There are millions of Jews around the world that we are not in touch with and we are losing them.” he said.
He added the future Jewish state should be a “democracy that provides full equality to all its citizens, in both rights and obligations” [including Arab Muslims that support the mass murder of Jews.]
At the end of the lecture, a student asked Bennett about his decision to ban the ‘Breaking the Silence’ group, from the education ministry.
“Breaking the Silence tours around the world and slanders the State of Israel and the IDF. They are looking for a way to bring international boycotts against Israel,” he said.
“Through their money they create events that slander Israel and worse they do not provide the information about the problematic events to the IDF so that it can address them,” he added.
“Through illegitimate means they are trying to bring down our house upon us,” he said, adding that the group is a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) organization, “in every respect.”
