By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
Israelis are having “serious debates” on TV “as to whether newborn babies in Gaza are innocent or whether they should be killed,” the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi reports.
Parsi shared a clip from March 15th showing Moshe Ya’alon debating with Channel 13 hosts Eyal Berkovic and Moriah Asraf on whether Israel should kill babies.
Berkovic argued that there are no innocents in Gaza because “everyone is a terrorist.”
Ya’alon said the IDF should not be sent into Gaza “with the purpose to kill everyone” — to which Berkovic fired back, “so the nation disagrees with you! The nation disagrees with you!”
Berkovic insisted that “Gaza should be wiped out.”
Asraf, meanwhile, tried to scold Ya’alon for saying Israel tells soldiers to target babies.
“Do you think the current Israeli government is sending the Israeli soldiers to kill babies in Gaza?” Asraf asked.
“I think that the moment that rabbis talk about how there are no innocents in Gaza … and Smotrich and Ben Gvir talk about evacuating, thinning out the population so that Gaza will be clear of Arabs, that we’ll settle Jews in their stead, that’s not a goal of a war of a country I want to live in.”
“Okay, we disagree!” Berkovic fired back.
As Ya’alon noted, top Israeli rabbis have explicitly said that the Torah demands the killing of Palestinian babies.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to wiping out Amalek when he first announced the war:
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the war must not stop “until Amalek is finally destroyed.”
The troops on the ground were also explicitly encouraged to kill Palestinian babies in the name of “wiping out Amalek” and “erasing the memory of [Palestinian Amalekites]”:
Calls to “wipe out Amalek” are calls for genocide and a war of extermination.
This exterminationist attitude has been completely normalized in Israel as Berkovic pointed out so vociferously.
Ya’alon ended up being viciously attacked in the Israeli media for this interview and accused of spreading anti-Semitic “blood libels.”
Last year, in another similar instance, video went viral of Israeli lawmakers debating whether it’s okay to rape Palestinian prisoners.
When the Israeli government made minor overtures acting like they would punish a few soldiers who were filmed raping a Palestinian prisoner in their detention at an Israeli base, the Israeli public rioted against their own government and held a series of “right to rape” rallies to demand the soldiers face zero punishment.
One of the accused ringerleaders became a minor TV celebrity and was also blessed by a top Israeli rabbi who was close to Netanyahu.
“You beat the enemy, so what?” the rabbi told him. “It’s all good… Don’t we have the right to do it?… In any other country, they’d get medals… Don’t fear the goyim.”