Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he was “not angry” at U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides over the latter’s call to have him “thrown off a plane,” which were made in response to the Israeli minister’s own comments calling to “wipe out” a Palestinian village of Huwara, the site of a terror attack in which two Israeli brothers were killed.
Dozens of Israeli settlers took part in the rampage against Huwara, deemed the worst ever outbreak of violence from Israeli residents of the West Bank, setting fire to vehicles and houses. The rampage left one Palestinian dead and dozens more wounded, and was broadly condemned by senior officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog and was termed a “terror attack” by military officials and several arrests were made.
The Israelis responsible for the rampage said they were avenging the blood of Hallel Yaniv, 21, and Yagel Yaniv, 19, who were killed in Huwara in a terrorist shooting attack. The shooter is still at large.
Smotrich said it was not up to civilians to take the law into their own hands, but added, “I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it.”
Incensed by Smotrich’s comments, Nides (pictured, top) called Smotrich a “fool.”
“I am really angry with him. He is a fool,” the ambassador was reported to have said by Hebrew-language media. “He has a flight to Washington, and if I could, I would throw him off the plane.”
The U.S. Embassy in Israel denied Nides had made the remark.
“I’m not angry at U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides, and I’m convinced that he did not intend to incite my killing when he said that they need to throw me off the plane,” Smotrich wrote in a Twitter statement, tagging Nides.
“Just like I didn’t mean to harm innocent civilians when I said that we need to erase Huwara. People sometimes use harsh terms which they don’t mean literally to give a strong message. It happens to everyone.”
According to Israel’s Channel 12, the U.S. may consider denying Smotrich a visa over a planned visit to the U.S. next week over his remarks.
The U.S. State Department on Thursday called his remarks “disgusting.”
Spokesperson Ned Price told reporters that they “were irresponsible. They were repugnant. They were disgusting.”
More than 100 left-wing Jewish American leaders on Friday called for Smotrich to be denied entry to the U.S., saying he “should not be given a platform in our community.”
Smotrich told Channel 12 that the original incendiary statement was a “slip of the tongue” made in the “storm of emotions.”
He added he was upset “by the need to clarify and that there are those who think that I support harming innocent civilians.”
Last week, Smotrich noted that Huwara is a “hostile village,” where residents throw rocks and shoot at Israelis every day and that he was not against the IDF issuing a “response” against all acts of terrorism.
Later in the day he said: “So there isn’t any doubt, I did not mean wipe out the village of Huwara, rather act in a targeted manner against the terrorists and supporters of terrorism living there and to exact a heavy price from them in order to restore security to the [Jewish] residents of the area.”
He also shunned Israel’s term the rampage was an act of terror.
It was “a very serious nationalist crime, but not terror,” he said, and added that Huwara was a “village that is overrun with terror.”
The morning after the riots, Labor party lawmaker Yaya Fink launched an online crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for the Palestinians who had had their property damaged. The campaign has raised close to half a million dollars (NIS 1,700,000), from more than 11,500 Israeli donors.
Esti Yaniv, mother to the two murdered brothers, slammed the gesture as a “campaign of darkness” for a “village of murderers, where treats were handed out” in celebration of the murder of her sons.
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