Ramallah: A senior official from the Joint Arab List of candidates for Israeli legislative elections has caused outrage among Zionists after he likened them to Daesh.
“Daesh draws inspiration from Zionism,” Raja Za’atra, the head of the Joint List’s communication unit, said on Tuesday while participating in a panel on the upcoming elections at Bar-Ilan University.
“Where did Daesh learn those crimes? Look at what the Zionist movement did in 1948: rape, plunder, murder, massacre, that were carried out in these areas too,” Za’atra was quoted by the Israeli daily, the Haaretz as saying.
His comments came just days after Lieberman called for the beheading of Palestinian citizens of Israel at a public forum.
“Whoever is with us should get everything,” Lieberman said in a speech at the Interdisciplinary Centre in the western city of Herzliya on Sunday, referring to those Palestinians who are loyal to the Israeli regime. “Whoever is against us, there’s nothing else to do. We have to lift up an axe and remove his head, otherwise we won’t survive here.”
When asked, Za’atra refused to term Hamas a terrorist organisation. “Hamas is a legitimate part of the Palestinian people. A people under occupation has a right to resist the occupation,” he said.
The Zionist Union, a bloc headed by Labour’s Isaac Herzog, responded to Za’atra’s remarks: “We expect the leaders of the Joint List to distance themselves immediately from the scandalous comparison between Israel and Daesh, as well as the statement that Hamas is not a terrorist organisation. We believe that the [Palestinian] citizens of Israel expect the Joint List to promote their rights and needs, and solve their economic and social problems, not fan incitement and lies that will attain the opposite.”
On his Facebook page, the Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Za’atra’s remarks are “proof that the High Court of Justice made a serious mistake when it allowed Haneen Zoabi to run for the Knesset.”
“The High Court justices who legitimised the terrible things that Zoabi did and said over recent years have led to the fact that now that Za’atra allows himself to say things that in any other country would lead to the immediate revocation of his citizenship and his removal from the country. Right after the elections in the new Knesset we will work so that this will be the case in Israel too, and the High Court will not be able to strike down Knesset laws and decisions of the Central Election Committee,” the minister wrote.
