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Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister, is as contemptible as they come. He also may well be the most dangerous member, by far, of Israel's far right government. He proved this conclusively yet again earlier this week when he condoned the hypothetical mass starvation of millions of Palestinian civilians. I'm not making this up.
Smotrich threw down this particular putrid gauntlet on the heels of Vice President Kamala Harris remarks, following her meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on July 25, in which she expressed compassion for the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza while condemning Hamas as "a brutal terrorist organization" and reiterating her and the Biden administration's unequivocal support of Israel's right to defend itself against its enemies.
The part of Harris' statement that triggered Smotrich's latest outrage must have been her determination, shared by anyone with even a shred of humanitarian compassion, that she would "not be silent" in the face of "what has happened in Gaza over the past nine months . . . the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering."
Speaking at a conference in Israel earlier this week, Smotrich said that Israel was providing humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza "because there is no choice," and declared that while starving two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza to death "might be justified and moral," the international community would prevent this from happening.
Smotrich's exact words, lest anyone think I might be exaggerating: "Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned."
In other words, he would have no problem perpetrating and justifying a genocide, if only the world would let him get away with it.
Genocide? That's precisely what this paragon is saying. According to the 1948 United Nations Convention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is defined as any of a number of specified acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."
Does anyone in their right mind doubt that the horror that Smotrich is contemplating would fit four-square into that definition?
Let's remember that the killing of some four million Ukrainians by Stalin's Soviet Union in the Holodomor, or Great Famine, of 1932-1933 has been recognized as a genocide by both houses of the U.S. Congress, as well as a wide array of U.N. member states, as well as the Vatican.
And Smotrich was reckless enough to make this utterance at the very time that Israel is being accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice.
The genocide charge brought by South Africa against Israel at the ICJ is deficient as a matter of law since Israel's "intent" in its war against Hamas in Gaza was never "to destroy, in whole or in part," the Palestinians there. Rather, Israel's wholly legitimate goal was and is to eliminate that terrorist organization as an existential threat, bearing in mind that pursuant to its own 1988 Covenant, it is Hamas that is dedicated to the genocidal elimination of Jews living anywhere between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.
Still, what Smotrich accomplished with his declaration was to point out that while Israel's government envisages the permanent presence of the Palestinian population in Gaza after the end of the current war against Hamas, there is at least one senior member of that government who would countenance that population's destruction. This is a gift to Israel's many enemies and to other antisemites worldwide.
To their credit, the American Jewish Committee and the ADL have denounced Smotrich's comments in no uncertain terms, as have the U.S. State Department, U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and J Street.
A virulent racist who makes no secret of his hatred for all Arabs and Palestinians, Smotrich epitomizes the ugliest aspects of what is the most extremist government in the State of Israel's 76-year history.
Uglier than Netanyahu who repeatedly lies through his teeth, even to President Joe Biden, about his willingness to make a deal to free the hostages held captive by Hamas in Gaza for almost 10 months? Uglier than the buffoonish neo-fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who has publicly insulted Biden repeatedly despite the fact that it is the Biden administration that not only has had Israel's back since the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom but has provided it with literally billions of dollars in military aid and equipment? Uglier than Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli who disparages and denigrates non-orthodox Jews—in particular Reform Jews—and members of the LGBTQ community at every opportunity? Uglier than Justice Minister Yariv Levin who makes no secret of his desire to scuttle Israel's independent judiciary in the sycophantic service of his criminally indicted boss?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Throughout his political career, Smotrich has espoused bigoted views that belie his professed self-identification as an observant Jew. To highlight one appalling example, in 2016, while a member of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, representing the religious Zionist Jewish Home Party, he advocated separating Jewish and Arab women in maternity wards. "Arabs are my enemies and that's why I don't enjoy being next to them," he explained on that occasion, causing future prime minister Naftali Bennett, then the head of the Jewish Home Party and minister of education, to remind him that as a matter of Jewish religious law, "every human created in God's image is favored." That meant, Bennett added, "every human, Jewish or Arab."
It was also Smotrich who told Israel Army Radio in December 2023 that he was in favor of the mass emigration (ouster?) of most Palestinians from Gaza. "If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs," he said, "the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different."
In March of 2023, after militant Jewish settlers rampaged through the West Bank town of Huwara in retaliation for the fatal shooting of two Israeli brothers by a Palestinian terrorist from that town, Smotrich backed the rioters' violence that had left one Palestinian dead and several wounded and said that Huwara "needs to be wiped out," an utterance so extreme even for him that he found it necessary (perhaps with the proverbial gun to his head) to apologize for it.
Smotrich has unreserved contempt for Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. "Arabs are citizens of Israel, for now at least, and they have representatives at the Knesset, for now at least," he proclaimed on one occasion, calling into question, at least as far as he was concerned, the civil and political rights Israeli Arabs have enjoyed since the establishment of the state.
As regards the Palestinians, he contemptuously denies their national identity. "There is no such thing as Palestinians because there's no such thing as the Palestinian people," he declared at an event in Paris in March of this year. "The Palestinian people are an invention of fewer than 100 years ago. Do they have a history, a culture? No, they don't. There are no Palestinians. There are just Arabs."
Not surprisingly, therefore, he has long been an inflexible opponent of Palestinian statehood in any shape or form and instead wants Israel to formally annex the West Bank and dramatically expand Jewish settlements there, a priori impediments to any viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It would be convenient to dismiss Smotrich as an outlier who does not represent the vast majority of mainstream Israelis who despise him, except that he isn't. He and the aforementioned Ben-Gvir hold the balance of power in Netanyahu's government and could bring it crashing down at any moment.
Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir all aspire to emasculate if not totally eradicate Israel's democratic character and impose a top down quasi-totalitarianism bereft of checks and balances, in particular an independent judiciary that safeguards individual rights. However, while Netanyahu is widely regarded as the ultimate opportunist whose sole goal is to have absolute power, or as close to absolute as he can get, and to exercise it at will, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are true believers—modern day fascisti, as it were—who fit in nicely with many of the ultranationalist and xenophobic groups that are sprouting up across the globe.
In addition, Smotrich brings another noxious ingredient to the mix. He is a religious zealot who holds a simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic view of Jewish history—Nehemiah Shtraser of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has called him a "a disciple of Jewish race theory" and "a denier of science, equality and progress." In his myopic worldview, "historical truth" and "biblical truth" are one and the same. To give just one example of his antediluvian mindset, he believes that "God created the world in six days. The theory of evolution is passé . . . It's delusional to think we came from monkeys." Take that, Charles Darvin.
Such an approach has ominous implications. It certainly should not be lost on anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Jewish history that zealots and zealotry were key if unwitting allies of the Babylonians and Romans in destroying the Jewish commonwealths of biblical and post-biblical times.
According to recent reports, the Biden administration considered sanctioning Smotrich because of his refusal to convey hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority and for his role in blocking enforcement against illegal Jewish settlement construction on the West Bank but ultimately decided not to do so.
In light of Smotrich's latest vile utterances condoning a hypothetical genocide, perhaps sanctioning him should be put back on the table.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
UPDATED: This story has been updated to include greater condemnation for Smotrich from world bodies.
