Bezalel Smotrich

So you're very critical of the settlement.

What's your reading of the settlements themselves, and especially in light of the current situation? government in Israel that is heavily, and you see the ministers, Ben-Gavir and Smotrich, especially Smotrich, you know, strongly kind of pushing for Jewish settlement in the West Bank to destroy any kind of hope for a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu himself and others were very You have elections coming up now, and everyone is very clear where there's no way Palestinians are going to have a state.

So what's your position? I mean, you kind of were critical about the settlements and the structural violence of the settlements, but kind of what's your view now of the whole project of the Jewish or Israeli settlement in the West Bank and kind of the efforts of the government to make sure that this continued to grow insofar as it would deny Palestinians their statehood and self-determination?

They're already doing this in Syria.

There's already the geopolitical alignment to get ready to do this in deeper ways all over the Middle East, and they're already starting to talk about it.

The likes of Smotrich are already showing maps that show Jordan as the new Israel.

So now we have Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and now you have other kinds of politicians that are entering the theater, like Moshe Feiglin, whose ultimate goal and vision is the establishment of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount.

You're a

Smotrich simp.

That's what you support.

I'm sorry.

In recent years, there have been more than a few Jews whose behavior has reflected poorly on our people and whose actions beget consequences that we all bear, sometimes at great danger to our well-being.

In Israel, leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gavir fuel the machines of war with an expansionist messianic fervor.

And at home, American ethno-nationalist aspirations are championed by politicians like Stephen Miller, who work on behalf of an administration that uses the excuse of Jewish safety as a tool for authoritarian control, while influencers like Ben Shapiro or Hayer Reitchik capitalize off of hatred for our most vulnerable and marginalized.

And then there are people like Jeffrey Epstein, who played directly into the worst anti-Semitic tropes of money, power, and abuse.

Yet the West Bank could matter significantly within Israel, religious and far-right.

As the election approach, polls are indicating that the religious Zionist party, headed by Bezalel Smotrich, who serves first and foremost as fine minister, but also holds significant power over the settlements within the defense ministry, is hovering around the electoral threshold.

So given the uncertainty surrounding the party and the possibility that the current coalition will not be able to return to power, in recent months we have witnessed not only an increase in settler violence but also an acceleration in government plans for settlement expansion and in the transfer of powers over the West Bank from military to civilian administration.

So government members pushed these initiatives to consolidate the so-called facts on the ground ahead of the election, bringing the West Bank increasingly close to an exemption before a possible defeat.

So there's this seismic event that happens in early 2023 in Israel that goes almost unreported upon in America, but it was, you know, quite a big story in Israel at the time where basically, you know, this new extremist right-wing government coalition forms smotrich who is the finance minister who is you know a total messianic um figure and a settler himself he pulls off this move where he basically inserts himself into the ministry of defense so that he can then take the levers of the military occupation, which by international law cannot be managed by the civilian government.

It has to be managed by the military.

So Smotrich puts himself in the defense ministry and builds basically a shadow government called the Settlement Administration and strips power away from these career bureaucrats and puts it in the hands of ideologues like himself, which then ushers in this period of unprecedented settlement expansion.

and also settler violence reaching levels that it had not reached in decades.

All this happens before October 7th, to be clear, and then it gets worse after October 7th.

They call it ethnic cleansing.

They're concerned about it.

They put together the legal legwork needed to sanction Smotrich, who is the key figure in this entire process.

You know, at the moment, while you've got Bibi in, you know, think you're going to be fine he'll hold the line you know he's not going to tolerate any threats to israeli security but what could happen if the government were to change yes

yeah yep this is this is something that um i think uh I think Bertrand Smotrich, I think it was Smotrich, said, you know, we need to be so...

We should not take it for granted that the right would win in the next election.

We cannot be apathetic about it, you know, because if we get some kind of leftish-leaning coalition, like Bennett and Lapid or something...

There are some people, if you want to call it a movement, I'm not part of that I'm not even sure what the movement is.

The current government in Israel, Netanyahu, and then he's got Ben-Gavir and Smotrich, some of his Kemen members, are horrible.

They're bad.

They're racist.