Netanyahu considering firing deputy FM over jab at US Jews — report

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday was reportedly considering firing Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely over her claims that US Jews struggle to understand the Middle East because they lead comfortable lives and don’t perform military service.

The report by Hadashot news came hours after the prime minister issued a swift and sharp condemnation of Hotovely’s remarks to i24 News the previous day.

The channel also reported that Netanyahu had spoken to Hotovely before she made the comments, telling her to stop antagonizing US Jews. Netanyahu also serves as foreign minister.

Earlier, Israel’s Reform movement called for Hotovely to be removed from her position.

“A Knesset member who enjoys pouring fuel on the flames of Israel’s ties with global Jewry should not serve as the State of Israel’s deputy foreign minister and ought to be fired,” said Rabbi Gilad Kariv, who heads the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism.

Lawyer Yizhar Hess, the CEO of the Israeli Conservative-affiliated Masorti Movement, accused Hotovely of “displaying incredible ignorance about North American Jews.”

Hotovely “permits herself to speak confidently, arrogantly, and most importantly, with provincialism about an entire Jewish culture about which she doesn’t have a clue or a fraction of a clue,” Hess said.

During the interview with i24 News, Hotovely depicted US Jews as being removed from the sacrifices other Americans make, as well as the threats that govern life in Israel.

“The other issue is not understanding the complexity of the region,” she said. “People that never send their children to fight for their country — most of the Jews don’t have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan, or to Iraq. Most of them are having quite convenient lives. They don’t feel how it feels to be attacked by rockets, and I think part of it is to actually experience what Israel is dealing with on a daily basis.”

Said Hess in a statement, “For many years the US army has not examined the religious [affiliations] of its soldiers, but the last time it checked, the data indicated that the proportion of Jewish soldiers in the American army was higher than their proportion in the population, not to mention the dozens of Americans who come every year to serve in the IDF as lone soldiers.”

The Diaspora Ministry said in response that it assigned “strategic importance” to the relationship between Israel and Jews abroad.

“The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people; we have a common past, present, and future with our brothers in the Diaspora and we must strengthen our trust, emphasize the common denominator and not what divides us, and work to strengthen the ties between Israel and the Jews of the world,” the ministry said in a statement.

Earlier on Thursday, Netanyahu issued a rare public rebuke of Hotovely.

Netanyahu “condemns Tzipi Hotovely’s offensive remarks regarding the American Jewish community,” a statement from his office said.

“The Jews of the Diaspora are dear to us and are an inseparable part of our people. There is no place for such attacks, and her remarks do not reflect the position of the State of Israel,” added the statement from Netanyahu.

During the interview, Hotovely also addressed rising tensions between Israel and US Jewry, including over restrictions on non-Orthodox prayer at the Western Wall and over the Israeli government’s policies on the Palestinians.

Opposition criticism to her comments was swift.

“Tzipi Hotovely’s comments about American Jewry are a combination of ignorance and arrogance. This government has to stop trying to divide the Jewish people, both in Israel and abroad,” Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid said in a statement Thursday.

Avi Gabbay, leader of the opposition Zionist Union faction, also blasted Hotovely, while pointing out that rather than serve in the military, she did a stint of national service in the US. Hotovely’s comments were “shameful and embarrassing,” he said in a statement that referred to her sarcastically as “the great warrior, the moral sermonizer who spent her military service in Atlanta.

“While Netanyahu has already found the time to condemn her comments, make no mistake – she’s accurately expressing the policy of a government that has decided to sacrifice [Israel’s] relationship with US Jews for petty political gain,” Gabbay said.

MK Nachman Shai of the Zionist Union, who chairs the caucus on Israel-US ties in the Knesset, called on Netanyahu to suspend Hotovely.

“The Jews of the US were here before her and they will be here when she’s gone,” he said in a statement. “They don’t need lessons from her — not on love for Israel and not on ‘who is a Jew.’ Their support for Israel is unimpeachable, and they are one of our most valuable assets.”

Responding to the rising backlash over Hotovely’s comments, her spokesperson issued a statement Thursday saying the deputy foreign minister maintained her comments were justified, while claiming that her views were taken out of context and that she had stressed to the TV channel the great importance of American Jewry to Israel.

The statement said that Hotovely had spoken to i24 news of “the complications of life in Israel under the persistent threat of terror and rockets aimed at the civilian population. People who don’t have the daily reality of Israel have great difficulty understanding the situation in the Middle East.”

“That is a basis for the distance between Jewry in the US and in Israel,” the statement continued. “Although only part of the full interview was circulated, it is important to say that most of the interview spoke about the importance that Deputy Minister Hotovely assigns to ties between us and US Jews, and that Israel is the home of all the Jews in the world. It is a shame that that part was dropped from the piece that was published on the internet. Deputy Minister Hotovely affirms that US Jews make a large contribution, but you can’t condition the relationship with Israel on the government’s policies.”

Speaking to Army Radio, Hotovely doubled down on her opinion that US Jews are far removed from the experience of having family members on the front lines of a conflict.

“They don’t have children who are soldiers,” she said. “Israel and the US are countries that have very different daily lives.”

JTA and Marissa Newman contributed to this report.