Bennett under fire for comments about killing Arabs
“If you catch terrorists, you simply have to kill them.”
By ARIEL BEN SOLOMONNaftali Bennett 370(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post)
Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett came under fire for comments supposedly made during the cabinet debate on whether to release Palestinian terrorists who have blood on their hands.According to Yediot Aharonot, Bennett said, “If you catch terrorists, you simply have to kill them.”National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror reportedly responded by saying that “this is not legal.”Bennett then allegedly retorted, “I have killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there is no problem with that.”Amnon Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, co-executive director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives, told The Jerusalem Post that it is unacceptable that Bennett generalizes that all Arabs are terrorists and that “in no country would they allow a minister to speak about its citizens using this kind of language.”In any other country, such a minister would be dismissed, he said.Furthermore, Be’eri- Sulitzeanu finds it problematic that nobody is complaining about this.“He cannot talk like this about citizens of the state,” he said. “We are not at war with all Arabs, but with some of them.”He called on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to condemn Bennett’s remarks and say that it is unacceptable for a minister in the government to speak like this.The Post contacted Bennett’s office and received a response that his comments were referring to the fact that there are two kinds of operations against terrorists, to apprehend them alive or to kill them.
“If in the end, we are going to let captured terrorists go, then maybe we should take action aimed at killing them,” read the statement.Be’eri-Sulitzeanu responded to this statement by saying that even this response is problematic because it talks about illegally killing terrorists.
