Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is shocked by the manifestations of anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism and racism in Charlottesville. “Everyone should oppose this hatred,” Netanyahu wrote on the prime minister’s official English-language Twitter account Aug. 15. The same Netanyahu warned the public on the day of the March 2015 elections that Israel’s Arab citizens, who ostensibly enjoy full equality, were “flocking in droves to the polling stations.”
As always, Netanyahu’s response followed closely on the heels of calls by his coalition partner/rival Naftali Bennett, the head of the HaBayit HaYehudi party, demanding that US leaders condemn the latest displays of anti-Semitism. Bennett, the politician who headed up the chorus pleading for a pardon for Elor Azaria, the Israel Defense Forces soldier convicted of shooting dead a wounded, unarmed Palestinian terrorist. If the executed terrorist had not been named Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, but rather Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish settler who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in 1994 in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, not a single patriotic politician would have sided with the soldier.
