‘Terror supporter’: Ben Gvir slams far-left lawmaker Cassif over participation in Nakba Day protest
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir calls far-left lawmaker Ofer Cassif a “terror supporter” after he attended a Palestinian “Nakba” demonstration at Tel Aviv University.
“This terrorist supporter filed a complaint against me to the Knesset Ethics Committee for calling him a terrorist supporter… irony is dead,” Ben Gvir tweets alongside of an image of Cassif at the rally, which was organized by his Hadash party.
Police had to step in to physically separate Cassif and several dozen other demonstrators from a group of counter-protesters at the event marking the Nakba.
The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” refers to the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what is now Israel before and during the War of Independence in 1948 after rejecting the UN-proposed division of mandatory Palestine.
Events commemorating it are commonly held across the Arab world on May 15, which this year comes one day after Israel’s Independence Day — marked on the Hebrew date of the state’s founding.
The counter-protesters, who numbered “in the hundreds” according to a TAU official, included MK Almog Cohen of Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party and Yoseph Haddad, an Arab Israeli journalist and activist.
Cassif, who was photographed standing next to a sign calling for the end of the “genocide in Gaza,” was suspended from the Knesset for 45 days by the ethics committee after he made a series of statements linking “Holocaust imagery and the government’s policy during the war.”
Right-wing lawmakers attempted to impeach Cassif earlier this year over his public support for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice but the effort failed after centrist parties sat out the final vote in the Knesset plenum.