Arab MK invokes Holocaust in tirade against police

Israeli-Arab parliamentarian Hanin Zoabi berated police outside the Temple Mount on Wednesday and said Israel’s attitude towards the site and Palestinians was reminiscent of how the Jews were treated by Nazis during the Holocaust.

Zoabi tried to gain access to the Temple Mount in the morning as police inside clashed with Palestinian rioters after they threw rocks and fireworks at security forces.

In an amateur video of the confrontation, Zoabi can be seen angrily accosting Border Police officers who were blocking an entrance to the site in the Old City of Jerusalem.

“We know our rights and we know how to fight for them,” Zoabi said as she thrust her finger at the policemen’s faces. “The whole time they say to you that we are terrorists but we want to live, to pray, to go to our land. Is that terror?”

“Would you want someone to do that to your sister?” she challenged the officers, who remained stoic throughout the tirade. “After all, there were those who did that to you dozens of years ago, there were those who ruled over you and slaughtered you. What is the lesson of the Holocaust? Don’t murder and don’t be racist. Six million of you were murdered and for what?”

Police countered the masked rioters near the Mughrabi Gate with crowd dispersal methods including stun grenades, a spokesman told The Times of Israel.

Israel Radio reported that police chased the rioters into the Al Aqsa Mosque. Police took the rare measure of entering several meters into the mosque, where they saw a stash of stones, bottles, and Molotov cocktails that the demonstrators had prepared.

According to a Palestinian doctor at the site, two rioters were seriously hurt by rubber bullets fired by police, Haaretz reported. One was struck in the head and the other in the eye.

Zoabi, a member of the Arab Balad party, eventually entered the Temple Mount compound after police had dispersed the rioters and reopened the site.

Dozens of Jews who had tried to visit the Temple Mount compound in protest over the shooting of activist Yehudah Glick last week were also barred from entering while the disruption was in progress.

Glick, who is still hospitalized in serious condition, is a leading advocate for Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount, which has been forbidden by Israel since it captured the area in the 1967 war.

Last week state prosecutors recommended that Zoabi be put on trial for threats she made against two policemen earlier in the year.

In August police recommended that Zoabi be put on trial for incitement, threats and maligning a civil servant over an incident in which she insulted two policemen. According to Ynet, Zoabi called the two Arab Israeli policemen “collaborators with the oppressors of their own people” and said that “they should be used to wipe the floor.”

In June, Zoabi said the kidnappers of three Israeli teens later found killed were “not terrorists.” Following the abduction of Naftali Fraenkel, 16; Gil-ad Shaar, 16; and Eyal Yifrach, 19, on June 12, suspicions quickly pointed toward Hamas operatives as being behind the attack. The kidnappings set in motion a chain of events that led to the summer conflict in the Gaza Strip against Hamas, called Operation Protective Edge.

Zoabi also angered right-wing lawmakers who said articles she published during Protective Edge constituted advice to Hamas on how to defeat Israel.

The incidents prompted the Knesset Ethics Committee to banish Zoabi from Knesset meetings for six months. Zoabi has petitioned the High Court of Justice against the ban after an appeal to the Knesset assembly to nullify the exclusion was voted down.