Opposition heads pillory Smotrich for saying government with Arabs worse than Oct. 7; he claims his words were ‘distorted’

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich hits back as he is criticized for his remark that forming a government with the Arab party Ra’am was far worse than the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught.

Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot of the opposition accuses Smotrich of using the October 7 disaster as a “tool in the shameless campaign of his and the government’s” to belittle the failures surrounding the attack.

“Had you heeded the warnings of experienced professionals, even a failed government like yours could have prevented the disaster,” Eisenkot tweets. “The biggest failure in our history is an indelible stain that will never be removed from the October 7 cabinet.”

Yair Golan, head of The Democrats party, claims Smotrich’s words mean that “as far as he is concerned, a massacre of Israelis is better than a government that doesn’t include him, and this is the whole story: the life of the government is more important to him than the life of the citizens.”

Smotrich issues a follow-up statement claiming his words were “distorted” and accusing critics of playing “petty politics.”

“The question I was asked and which I answered was what was the worse political act — going for a government with Hamas knowingly and on purpose and due to lust for honor and power, or sitting in a government that had a terrible massacre happen on its watch in which Hamas attacked Israel and murdered thousands of people,” Smotrich says, referring to Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am party as “Hamas.”

“So yes, going knowingly to a government with Hamas while lying and stealing votes is the gravest political act Israeli politics has known,” he says.

“The massacre Hamas committed is one of the most terrible we have known since the Holocaust, and nothing compares with it,” he adds, claiming that if the media are “trying to take my words out of context and belittle the massacre, you are evil liars.”