Smotrich says ‘morally wrong’ to compare settler attacks to terror against Israelis

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the coalition’s far-right Religious Zionism party, issues a statement on the rising settler attacks in the West Bank after security chiefs denounced the violence as “nationalist terrorism.”

“The IDF and security forces must act with much greater firmness against terror and rioting by Arabs,” he writes on Twitter. “We can’t accept a reality in which settlers feel like sitting ducks on the roads and around settlements every day and count their dead.”

“But even in this complex situation taking the law into one’s own hands is bad, damaging and may lead to a loss of control and dangerous anarchy,” he adds, calling on “everyone to refrain from acts that harm settlement.”

Smotrich denounces “The attempt to create an equivalency between murderous Arab terror to [Israeli] civilian counter-actions, however serious they may be, is morally wrong and dangerous on a practical level.”

He also rails at the controversial use of administrative detention for far-right Jewish suspects and claims security forces are carrying out “collective punishment” in Ateret following the attack earlier today on the nearby Palestinian village of Umm Safa, referring to reports of checks at the settlement entrance.