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(LifeSiteNews) — Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has appeared in a new documentary to announce his desire for a “Greater Israel,” effectively saying Palestinians in the West Bank can surrender their rights, ancestral homes, land and leave the country, or be killed. 

Smotrich, who as finance minister also holds responsibility for the program of armed land and home seizures known as “settlement,” has promised this year to bring “a million” new Zionist “settlers” to the West Bank, declaring this will make a two-state solution impossible.  

The land being seized has been nominally set aside for a future Palestinian state. He has described thwarting any future Palestinian State as “my life’s mission.”

Smotrich, who lives in an illegal “settlement,” has said he is presenting this plan by deception, to avoid the charge that he is moving to annex the Palestinian Territories, as the Times of Israel reported. 

The documentary shows Smotrich has announced a new three point plan for the Palestinians in the West Bank, which includes some of the last remaining historic Christians in the Holy Land. To those who will accept second class citizenship, “we offer residency with no right to vote,” explained the minister. 

The other two options are to “migrate” or face “defeat,” he added. 

Smotrich, speaking in the new documentary for the European channel Arte, goes on to explain, “I want a Jewish state.” 

The interviewer asks Smotrich what such a statement means in practice considering the fact that Israel refuses to officially define its borders. Does this mean Israel will expand “across the river Jordan” taking the land of other nations? 

Smiling, Smotrich replies, “Absolutely, but slowly.” 

He explains his inspiration for this plan, “Our great religious elders used to say, that the future of Jerusalem was to extend as far as Damascus.”  

Damascus is the capital of Syria. His reply appears to justify the title of the documentary, Israel: Extremists in Power. 

As the narrator explains, “Bezalel Smotrich has a maximalist view of the Promised Land. It includes the Palestinian Territories, and territory in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.”

This is described as “a radical vision, admittedly – but one that is accepted in public debate in Israel.” It is not his only extreme view. As the Jerusalem Post reported, he has claimed, “There is no such thing as Jewish terrorism.”

This radicalism is reflected in the views of the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose belief in the “mass expulsion of the Palestinians” is described later. Viewers see former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert say of Ben-Gvir, “I would never imagine that a criminal convicted of terrorism would become the minister responsible for fighting terrorism.”

Olmert explains, “If you had asked me two or three years ago who Ben-Gvir was, I would have told you he was one of those fanatics who wants to expel the Palestinians and kill them.”

Both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have attracted condemnation from the U.S. government for their calls to expel the entire Palestinian population. 

Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power Party continues the tradition of the extremist party Kach, founded by New York rabbi Meir Kahane, who was indicted by the FBI for promoting and undertaking terrorism to “combat antisemitism” in the United States through his Jewish Defense League 

Ben-Gvir’s party has been condemned by the Rabbinical Assembly for continuing this tradition of extremism. 

Kahane fled to Israel in 1971, following his arrest for illegal possession of firearms and explosives. He founded the Kach party, and was elected to the Knesset in 1984, promising the deportation of the entire non-Jewish population from Israel. 

The history of ‘Greater Israel’ 

Smotrich was pictured in 2023 delivering a lecture before a podium decorated with an emblem showing the map of this fantasized “Greater Israel.”  

Yet this map is no novel “maximalist position,” and nor is this conspiracy a new theory. 

A map of Greater Israel was present in Zionist propaganda before Israel was proclaimed over seventy years ago.  

The map featured on material distributed in 1931 by Irgun, the Zionist terror group whose attacks such as that on the King David Hotel in 1946 saw the British leave the Mandate of Palestine. 

Irgun was led by a future Prime Minister of Israel, Menachim Begin, who ordered and directed the attack on the King David Hotel – killing 96 British subjects. Begin wrote about this in his memoirs.  

In 2006, Benjamin Netanyahu attended a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the bombing, seen by him and other Zionists as a landmark in the foundation of Israel.  

This was condemned by British MPs at the time, though their motion to do so officially was not passed by the British government. The matter was complicated by the fact that the father of Israel’s then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, “was Irgun’s chief operations officer.”

Israel was founded by a terrorist group whose ultimate goal does not end with the absorption of the Palestine Territories. Greater Israel was the goal of the Zionist terror group Irgun whose actions, together with those of two others, prompted the departure of the British and led to the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948.  

When stated policy is treated as conspiracy theory 

With these new remarks, Smotrich announces the reality of a policy dismissed to this day by the Anti-Defamation League as an “antisemitic conspiracy theory.”

On the pages detailing the “conspiracy theory” of a “Greater Israel,” the ADL says: “By mid-day on October 7, 2023, a range of antisemitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories were circulating.” 

One of these was the “conspiracy theory” that Israel knew about the October 7th attacks in advance, and that Israel would use them to execute a plan for territorial expansion.  

READ: Israel knew about the October 7 attacks in advance. Why did it do nothing to stop them?

The ADL explains: 

Some claimed that Hamas is controlled opposition directed by Israel. ‘Shadow of Ezra,’ a large QAnon related Telegram channel, posited that the attack is a false flag attack orchestrated by Mossad designed to give Israel the opportunity to grab more land and create ‘Greater Israel,’ reflecting a classic antisemitic conspiracy theory. 

Benjamin Netanyahu himself has claimed that supporting Hamas is his strategy to isolate and neutralize support for a Palestinian State. Members of his own Likud party have boasted of this.  

He has also vowed there will be “no Palestinian State,” has openly rejected the idea, and there exists considerable evidence from within Israeli intelligence sources that both he and the Israeli State knew in advance that an attack like October 7th was imminent.   

Another ADL page provides an example from independent media which outlines this “classic antisemitic conspiracy theory” as follows: 

Greater Israel, world domination, Temple Mashiach, all the end times prophecy. 

The “conspiracy theorist” here connects these events to the attacks of September 11th, 2001. 

“[Zionists] needed 9/11 for that. It took out all their threats in the Middle East, it launched a war on Islam, destabilized all of their neighbors, all of it.”

The charge that Israel was intentionally committing war crimes was described by the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs as “antisemitic.” Yair Rosenberg wrote about the “latest antisemitic conspiracy theory” for the Washington Post in 2002, explaining, “Why People Love Accusing Jews of Genocide.”

Now the UN has found Israel was in fact “intentionally destroying the healthcare infrastructure of Gaza,” which is a war crime and a crime against humanity, being a move towards the “extermination of the civilian population.” 

It is Israeli military policy, under the Dahiya Doctrine, to intentionally target civilian infrastructure such as hospitals.  

READ: How Israel uses the ‘hasbara’ technique to deceive Americans into supporting their wars 

Of course, the UN itself has been called antisemitic by Israel’s foreign minister, as has the International Criminal Court by Netanyahu, the International Court of Justice by Itamar Ben-Gvir, and anyone else – including the many doctors, nurses, journalists, film directors and international witnesses who accuse Israel of genocide.  

Many of the accusers are Jewish themselves. This does not matter when the concept of law – to prevent crimes against humanity – is labeled as antisemitic. The Jewish accusers, including numerous rabbis, are written off as “self-hating antisemitic Jews.”

The charge of antisemitism is used in the same way as that of “conspiracy theory” – it neutralizes any attempt to hold Israel responsible for its actions.   

These two verbal weapons of mass deception present the truth as irrational hatred and the facts as the product of insanity. 

The state of Israel is taking actions which correspond to the “conspiracy theories” of expansion, expulsion and genocide exactly. Some of them admit these “conspiracy theories” as facts, openly. Why is Israel doing this?  

To accept that the Greater Israel goal is real, and that it is being implemented, is to completely revise the narrative of the Gaza war. It is to understand the constant expansion and escalation of Israel’s current wars, and throws new light on those wars that Netanyahu urged the U.S. Congress to start in 2002. Wars in Iraq and Syria followed. This is beginning to look like a plan.  

Would Americans still support Israel if its plans were widely known? It is doubtful. Given the power of Israeli propaganda to poison the public mind, it is also doubtful that Americans will discover the ability to see the obvious about the Greater Israel project – extermination, expulsion, expansion – that has been the plan of the Zionists all along. 

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