In 1942, a pair of Czechoslovak commandos assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, second-in-command of the SS and one of the principal architects of the Final Solution. In response, the Nazis razed two Czech villages to the ground, executed all their adult male residents and some women, and deported the remaining women and children to concentration camps.
84 years on, former Netanyahu foreign and defense minister Avigdor Liberman is calling for something similar in the West Bank.
“We must impose a heavy cost – there is no forgiveness for terrorism,” Liberman tweeted Sunday, shortly after a deadly shooting near the illegal settlement of Neve Tzuf in the West Bank, in which a settler was killed by a Palestinian man from the nearby village of Biddu.
🔊“The IDF must enter the village from which the terrorist came from and raze it,” Liberman demanded.
Falling out with Netanyahu in 2018 amid a clash of egos and charges that Bibi was “coddling” Hamas, Liberman currently positions himself as perhaps the most fascistic hardliner in Israeli politics, outdoing even frothing radicals in Netanyahu’s cabinet like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu is expected to win 8-11 seats in the next parliament after October’s elections. While this isn’t nearly enough to return him to government as PM, it could give him the role of kingmaker, as Netanyahu’s bloc and the opposition are locked in a neck-and-neck tie (estimated at 53-54 seats each -below the 61-seat threshold for forming a government).
Netanyahu being too ‘soft’ on Israel’s enemies – now there’s an image. What would Liberman do if he was in charge? Just nuke everyone, Samson Option-style?
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