The negative nature of the current Israeli government violates the rights of the Palestinian people. Author: Pennsylvania

“There are no Palestinians because there is no Palestinian people,” Israeli Finance Minister and far-right MP Bezalel Smotrich said at a memorial service for the late Likud activist in Paris.

He claimed that the Palestinian people were an “invention” invented in the 20th century to fight Zionism, and that people like him and his grandparents were “real Palestinians”.

Speaking from a podium adorned with a map based on the coat of arms of the Zionist Irgun militia that depicts Israel nestled between the West Bank and Jordan, Smotrich said the French and US governments need to hear “this truth” about the Palestinians, he said. MEE).

“Do you know who the Palestinians are?” – said the head of the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionism party. “I am Palestinian.”

Smotrich referred to his grandmother, who was born in the northern Israeli city of Metula more than a century ago, and to his late grandfather, who was a 13th-generation Jerusalem resident.

Earlier, Smotrich claimed that his surname comes from the Ukrainian city of Smotrich, where, according to him, his ancestors lived.

The map displayed on the podium from which Smotrich spoke last Sunday also showed parts of Syria and Lebanon, regions included in the concept of Eretz Israel, Greater Israel, a key part of ultra-nationalist Zionism that claims all these lands. .

Last week, the team representing the British Consulate General in Jerusalem participating in the Palestine Marathon was heavily criticized in Israel for wearing T-shirts with a map of historic Palestine.

Smotrich’s appearance at the memorial of the late Likud activist Jacques Kupfer was supposed to be sponsored by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), but the organization withdrew its support due to the minister’s appearance, according to Haaretz.

The French Foreign Ministry said last week that government officials in Paris did not intend to meet with Smotrich during his visit to the country.

In addition to being finance minister, Smotrich now has significant powers in the occupied West Bank, which human rights lawyers at MEE say amount to “de jure annexation.”

In late February, the minister said the State of Israel should “destroy” the Palestinian village of Huwara in the Nablus region after it was attacked by Israeli settlers, whose level of violence is considered unspeakable. that he was supported and witnessed with the consent of the armed forces of the Zionist state.

A few days earlier, on February 23, the army attacked Nablus, located in the north of the occupied West Bank, killing 10 Palestinians, including a minor and an elderly woman, and injuring 102 people.

Former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said Smotrich, who also described himself as a “proud homophobe”, wants “another Nakba”.

The Nakba or catastrophe occurred on May 15, 1948, when the violent exodus of the Palestinian people began, whose lands and cities were transferred to the Israelis as a result of the creation of the State of Israel.

The expulsion by force or “forced displacement” of the indigenous Palestinian population has also witnessed other episodes, such as the 1967 Six Day War, after which many Palestinians were forced to leave the country, many of them for the second time.

For years, the Zionist state has pursued a policy of allowing Jewish settlements on Palestinian soil, resulting in a significant reduction in them, and the current government of Netanyahu, considered the most extremist in history, has given free rein to these usurpations and their persecution as a people.

Source: Juventud Rebelde