Prime Minister Naftali Bennett must resign, chanted thousands of right-wing activists as they rallied outside his Jerusalem office on Thursday night.
“This government will fall, warned Binyamin Regional head Israel Ganz, as he stated that those on the Right “were heading out to battle.”
He stood on a makeshift stage set up on the closed off street. The crowd below him chanted “Bennett resign, we don’t want you anymore.”
They gathered under the slogan “No to razing Homesh” to demand that the government authorize the Homesh yeshiva situated on that West Bank hilltop in northern Samaria. They also called on the government to rebuild the settlement that the government destroyed there in 2005 in the aftermath of the Gaza pullout.
“This is our land. Judea and Samaria is an indivisible part of Israel,” Samaria regional council head Yossi Dagan said, adding “This government will fall on Homesh and the Negev.”
The event marked the 30th day since the terror attack that killed Yehuda Dimentman, 25, as he left the Homesh hilltop.
He had been a student at the Homesh yeshiva and had dreamed of restoring a Jewish community on that hilltop.
The speakers included parliamentarians mostly from the Religious Zionist party, including its leader MK Bezalel Smotrich and MK Orit Struk. Settler leaders and Yehuda’s wife Ethia and father Rabbi Mordechai Dimentman also spoke.
A few of the activists held up a sign that said, “Bennett is a liar.”
Speakers included a number of other issues, including the meeting of Defense Minister Benny Gantz with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas; illegal Palestinian construction in Area C of the West Bank and the decision to hook up some illegal Israeli-Arab homes in the Negev to the electricity grid.
MK Itamar Ben-Gvir called Ra’am Party head Mansour Abbas a terrorist and the crowd loudly chanted the slur “terrorist” multiple times.
The left-wing group Peace Now charged that the Homesh hilltop was a “hotbed of settler violence against soldiers and Palestinians.
“Every day the criminal outpost is not evacuated, is a mark of the Israeli government’s surrender to ‘hilltop youth’ and their patron Yossi Dagan. This will inevitably lead to more violence. “We call on Defense Minister Benny Gantz to stop bowing to criminals... and to order its dismantling... today.
“Only an uncompromising fight against the illegal outposts and their razing will prevent more cases of settler violence,” Peace Now said.