A former prime minister of Israel says his nation is united in fighting Hamas and that it made a historic blunder by assuming it could live in peace while the terrorist organization ruled the Gaza Strip.
Naftali Bennett served as prime minister of Israel from 2021 to 2022 until his coalition government fell, allowing for the rise of current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two men are members of different political parties, but Bennett says he sides with Netanyahu in his goals.
“Let me be clear: all Israelis, wall-to-wall, are now united to bring total defeat to the terrorist agents of death,” Bennett wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Life will prevail over death. Please don’t try to stop us because we won’t until we win.”
Bennett has been outspoken in his views on the war, telling journalist Piers Morgan that “we have an ISIS state on our border” that must be defeated.
“People [there] will rape, murder, dismember bodies, kill babies,” he said.
Piers asks former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett what is a proportional response by Israel to Hamas?
Naftali Bennett: “It’s not about proportionality to what happened. It’s about preventing what will happen… we have an ISIS state on our border.”@piersmorgan | @naftalibennett pic.twitter.com/piYV4O1O2f
— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) October 26, 2023
On social media, Bennett has served as an apologist for Israel. In the same social media post, he said Israel was not an “occupier” of Gaza and that it had hoped to live in harmony with its neighbor.
“In the Palestinian state in Gaza, there was no Israeli ‘occupation’ whatsoever,” he wrote. “Not one inch. Not one Israeli soldier or civilian. In 2005 Israel officially left the entire Gaza Strip to the very last inch. We pulled out ALL Israelis and ALL IDF soldiers. We pulled back to the 1949 borders. At first, we applied no blockade or siege. We handed the keys over to the Palestinian authority. At that point, they had an opportunity to turn Gaza into an amazing and beautiful state. A Singapore with beautiful beaches, hotels, tourism, business and culture. They chose otherwise.”
A majority of Palestinians, he noted, elected Hamas, “whose explicit goal is to destroy Israel.”
“They began shooting rockets from their new state into Israel,” he wrote. “Tens of thousands of rockets killed children and citizens of Israel ever since. THEY CHOSE DEATH FOR JEWS OVER LIFE FOR PALESTINIANS.
“Their goal has never been to live side-by-side with Israel but to destroy Israel. For the past 20 years, Israelis hoped again and again that our neighbors seek happiness for their families, and this will ultimately moderate them. We Israelis believe in the inherent goodness of humans. We were wrong. Dead wrong. This is the tough reality we’re facing.”
Israel, Bennett said, is in a “battle between an ideology of life and one of death.”
He cited the Hamas charter, which pledges the elimination of Israel. The charter reads, “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”
“We say ‘le-Haim’ — to life. We say ‘Shalom’ — peace,” he said.
“They say ‘itbach el yahud’ ‘ slaughter the Jews. This is our reality of 2023,” he said.
A fact that goes missed:
In the Palestinian state in Gaza there was no Israeli “occupation” whatsoever.Not one inch.
Not one Israeli soldier or civilian.In 2005 Israel officially left the entire Gaza Strip to the very last inch.
We pulled out ALL Israelis and ALL IDF…
— Naftali Bennett בנט (@naftalibennett) October 29, 2023
Photo Courtesy: ©Getty Images/Amir Levy / Stringer
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
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