A religious fundamentalist, a licensed incendiary, is settling these days on the fourteenth floor of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Appointed at the end of February to a tailor-made post of “minister within the ministry”, Bezalel Smotrich is called upon to become a true governor of the West Bank. As such, he indeed has authority over the “civil administration” – in reality a military body – which manages the occupation of the Palestinian territories on a daily basis. Purely military operations, however, escape him. This civilian snatched his unprecedented post from the high hierarchy of the army, under pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he helped bring to power in December 2022. At the head of his religious Zionist Party ( seven out of 120 deputies in the Knesset), he can defeat his coalition.
Aged 43 and already Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich set the country on fire on 1er March. Barely invested in his new functions, he wanted the Israeli army to commit ethnic cleansing in “shaving” the Palestinian village of Huwara. He was reacting to a punitive expedition of settlers – his electoral base – who burned cars, businesses and homes there on February 26, avenging the death of two of them. A Palestinian was killed in a nearby village. Mr. Smotrich declined to respond to the World. He claimed the media had twisted his comments about Huwara. Then he regretted the choice of his ” words “. But, on the merits, he assumes.
“I am a homophobic fascist, but I am a man of my word. » This is how he defined himself, in a private conversation of which the Kan public channel broadcast a recording in January. Jewish supremacist, racist, Bezalel Smotrich dreams of a theocratic state, subject to religious law. A state that would stretch from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, across the whole of the Holy Land. Before taking office, he proposed to the Palestinians to leave it, or to remain there as an inferior minority, without the right to vote. It now has the means to implement part of this programme.
Mr. Smotrich was trained in a small religious school in Beit El, near Ramallah: this colony is a “hardal”, ultra-Orthodox and nationalist stronghold. This current of religious Zionism has some 100,000 members and aims to be a vanguard. “They take the Bible literally. For Mr. Smotrich, history does not matter: what was true 3,000 years ago is true today and biblical laws are applicable to the present”analyzes Tomer Persico, a researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
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