Rights advocates in the United States are urging President Joe Biden to end his administration’s “complicity” in Israeli rights abuses after key members of Israel’s government backed the idea of pushing Palestinians out of Gaza.
Far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich said this week that Israel should “encourage emigration” from the coastal enclave, home to an estimated 2.3 million Palestinians.
“If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after [the war ends] will be totally different,” Smotrich said on Sunday, calling for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians.
A day later, Ben-Gvir, who oversees national security, made a similar appeal, saying it was “a correct, just, moral and humane solution”, Israeli media outlets reported.
It’s a serious expression of the government’s values. Just because those particular officials lack the power to do what they propose doesn’t mean their words are meaningless. If Bibi and his crew weren’t in favor of genocide, they’d be loudly condemning these assholes and doing whatever they can to remove them from office.
It’s not. I already wrote a very long post about why you’re wrong in this case, why those people are in those positions, and why there’s less reason to be afraid of those statements (though good reason to be outraged) than this article suggests.