From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Feiglin urges resettling Gaza, says his far-right party will aim to replace Netanyahu
Canaan Lidor is a former Jewish World reporter at The Times of Israel
Moshe Feiglin, a far-right politician who left Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party a decade ago, announces his bid to run against it in the next general election.
Feiglin tells a crowd of about 500 people at Jerusalem’s Cinema City complex that the decision to have his Zehut party run for election for the first time since 2019 is because of what Feiglin perceives as Netanyahu’s failure, with regard to the war in Gaza.
“We need a different prime minister who is willing to stick his neck out to win. Zehut will provide, whenever elections happen, such a candidate,” says Feiglin, referring to the party he established in 2014, and which failed to cross the voting threshold in 2019, the last time it ran.
Hundreds of people chant “occupation, deportation and settlement” at the rally, whose focus is the future of the Gaza Strip. It is one of the first right-wing political rallies since war broke out on October 7.
“For us, the war in Gaza is not merely a defensive war. It’s a war of liberation, the liberation of the land from its occupiers,” Feiglin says. He advocates replacing the Gaza Strip’s Palestinian population with Jews.
The rally is occurring at the same time that frustration with the progress of the war is growing in right-wing circles, and with what they view as insufficiently hawkish policies by Netanyahu.
Feiglin, who left Likud in 2014 following efforts by Netanyahu to sideline him, pleases his listeners with descriptions of residential homes “with neat, green backyards” in a future Jewish Gaza. He quotes biblical verses to establish historical precedence and argue for Jewish ownership of Gaza. He shows the audience a drawing of the Great Temple in Jerusalem together with modern high-rise buildings: A vision for the replacement of the Al Aqsa Mosque with the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount.
Feiglin takes aim at Netanyahu: “The historian’s son failed to learn history’s lesson. He failed to act and failed to understand the greatness of the hour. The buck stops with him. Not the head of the Mossad. Not the head of the army.”
Zehut previously ran as an independent party, and, in one election in 2019, was widely projected in opinion polls to enter the Knesset with up to 10 seats, before faltering and failing to enter the parliament entirely.
