Member of Knesset Ahmed Tibi, of the Arab-majority Joint List, utilized his speech at the Knesset plenum ahead of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day to bash Israel.
Addressing only 12 MKs, Tibi declared that the Holocaust “is a human product. A low point stemming from a distorted thought born there in the West, not here, on fertile anti-Semitic soil that has grown into a horrific crime against all of humanity. We are required to listen to a past that has not passed and lives here among us.”
Tying the Nazis to Israel and Israelis, he stated that “Nazism sought to destroy the Jewish race and then other Semites. Even today, we must stand up and shout loudly against any phenomenon of racism, of politics of hatred of the other, of the Arabs, of the Palestinians. We must protest against violent attacks, destruction, invasions of villages, beatings, burning of trees, damage to Palestinian herds by the [Israeli] youth of the hills.”
MK Shlomo Karhi (Likud) responded by calling Tibi “a supporter of terrorism, who uses his speech on International Holocaust Remembrance Day to make a horrific comparison between the situation of Palestinian rioters and that of Jews during the Holocaust. There are no more boundaries. There is no humanity”.
Turning to MK Eitan Ginzburg (Blue and White), who chaired the special session, who allowed Tibi “to continue more and more even though he had run out of time – shame on you! How low will you go? Even on a day like this?”
Proponents of the Palestinian cause often equate Israel, its policies and actions, to those of Nazi Germany, and borrow snippets from Holocaust history and utilize them vis-à-vis the Palestinian narrative.
Speaking during her inaugural speech in the Knesset Plenum in April 2021, Arab MK Ibtisam Mariana, of the Israeli Labor party, claimed that “Palestinian Arab society in Israel is suffering from ongoing post-traumatic stress, the kind that has never been treated and has never been overtly acknowledged.”|
Apparently providing an excuse for violence with the Arab society, she said that “as with any post-traumatic stress, we act from triggers, anxiety attacks, anger, fear, mistrust, loneliness and despair. [We feel that] soon there will be an expulsion, soon we’ll be taken away from here.”
The “expulsion” she was relating to appears to be a mass transfer of Arabs by the Israeli government, a policy never offered or executed. She may also by relating to the 1948 War of Independence during which Israel emerged victoriously and defeated several Arab armies that sought to eradicate the newly born Jewish state.
This post-traumatic stress-generating fear of expulsion “is not only mine and my people’s, it is also yours, my Jewish brothers and sisters. You too have wounds and no less pain. Six million Jews were cruelly annihilated in the Holocaust, soldiers were sent to battlefields and did not return home, people were murdered in terrorist attacks, citizens were victimized by hate,” she said.