Israeli Finance Minister in Charge of West Bank Settlements Claims Palestinians 'Do Not Exist'
04:15 GMT 21.03.2023 (Updated: 10:27 GMT 30.01.2024)
© AP Photo / Ronen Zvulun
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The Israeli Finance Minister has a history of making incendiary comments about Palestinian people, most recently he called for the “wiping out” of the Palestinian city Huwara.
Israeli Finance Minister and Religious Zionism Party leader Bezalel Smotrich recently said the Palestinian people are “an invention that is less than 100 years old,” and that there is no such thing as Palestinian history or culture.
Smotrich was speaking at an event commemorating a prominent Zionist activist, Jacques Kupfer, who died in 2021. Smotrich was recently handed vast powers in the West Bank, including enforcement powers over illegal construction, authority over the planning and building settlements, and land allocation.
The Times of Israel said the authority being given to Smotrich gave the “ultranationalist leader sweeping powers over the territory, and allow[s] him to advance his goal of thwarting Palestinian aspirations for a state in the West Bank by enabling the Israeli population there to substantially expand.”
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian,” Smotrich said. “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”
Smotrich, who is a settler in the West Bank himself, gave the remarks at a podium draped in the flag of what is called “Greater Israel” by Zionists. While different iterations of the map have existed over time and sometimes vary by organization, they all include expanding Israel’s borders to include Palestine and other countries in whole or part. The map Smotrich stood behind included the occupied West Bank and Jordan as part of Israel.
In response, Jordan accused Smotrich of violating the peace agreement between Jordan and Israel and summoned the Israeli ambassador in Amman over the comments.
Smotrich also claimed he is a true Palestinian. “Do you know who is a Palestinian? I am a Palestinian. My late grandfather, who was 13th generation Jerusalemite, is the true Palestinian."
"Is there Palestinian history or culture?" Smotrich asked the audience. "No, there isn't."
Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a settler, has told an audience in France that ‘there is no such thing as Palestinian’ ⤵️
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 20, 2023
🔗: https://t.co/uQmbjsagUV pic.twitter.com/wanZZ165oh
Mohammad Shtayyeh, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), said the remarks were “conclusive evidence of the extremist, racist, Zionist ideology that governs the current Israeli government.”
“These inflammatory statements, which are consistent with the first Zionist claims of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, and that Palestinian lands are ‘disputed’, and which demonstrate the arrogance of power,” Shtayyeh said at a PA cabinet session in Ramallah, “do not shake our belonging to our land and history, and that all archaeological remnants and history prove the attachment of the Palestinian to his land since the dawn of human and human history.”
The comments came hours after delegates from Israel and the PA met for a regional summit in Egypt that was also attended by Jordan and the United States. That meeting was the follow-up to a meeting in Jordan last month that was the first talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in years.
