Smotrich Is Coming...Or Is He?

The issues swirling around the upcoming visit of Betzalel Smotrich to the United States are complex and troubling. On the one hand, he sounds like someone more than entitled to make such a journey: Smotrich is, after all, the Minister of Finance of the State of Israel and the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, one of the parties in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition. And yet he has a troubling history of making remarks that are beyond merely obnoxious and go all the way, at least in my opinion, to fully unacceptable. This is a man, after all, who has described himself as a “proud homophobe” who sees no problem with putting gay people in the same category with people who have sex with animals. (For more, click here.) And who has openly expressed his regret that the Arabs of Israel weren’t all expelled from the nascent State of Israel when statehood was first proclaimed in 1948, and that regardless of whether they were or weren’t prepared to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors in an independent Israel. But none of those previous comments (and they are legion) compare, I don’t think, to his remark in the wake of the pogrom carried out by Jewish settler types in the tiny Palestinian village of Huwara last week.

The events that led up to nightmare in Huwara are well known. Two brothers, Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, were murdered by a gunman who rammed their car and then shot them at point-blank range. The brothers, from the nearby Jewish settlement of Har Bracha, died instantly. This was a blatant act of terror, a murder that cannot be excused with reference to political rage. The residents of Huwara, however, did not see it that way; the reports of the villagers handing out candies and sweets in celebration of the brother’s murder, which I initially thought were probably exaggerated, appear to be true. This led to an attack against Huwara by about four hundred enraged Israelis in the course of which one man was killed, almost a hundred wounded seriously enough to require hospitalization, and thirty cars and about one hundred homes set on fire. The identity of the gunman was at the time unknown, so the rioters can’t have known whether he did or didn’t come from Huwara. The Palestinian man who was killed is not suspected to have had anything to do with the murder of the Yaniv brothers.

So that is the basic story. It’s a horrific tale, one featuring the deaths of innocents, the rage of an embittered mob, shockingly poor behavior on the part both of bystanders and participants, and an inexplicable absence of oversight by the people who are supposed to be in place to guard the peace.

And it was into this swamp of misery that Finance Minister Smotrich waded with his now-famous comment that the village of Huwara needs “to be wiped out” and that the State of Israel should “do it.” I understand that he was enraged. Who wasn’t enraged by the thought of Palestinians celebrating the cold-blooded murder of two innocent Jewish Israelis? Or by the thought that the killer might possibly have come from the very town in which the murders were perpetrated? But the thought that an appropriate response to the murder of innocents is the murder of other innocents is an idea that no decent person could rationally embrace, let alone express in public.

Even Prime Minister Netanyahu was apparently shocked by the remark. “I am asking you,” he said to the Israeli people in the wake of the events in Huwara, “while blood is boiling and winds are high—don’t take the law into your own hands. I ask that you allow the IDF and the security forces to do their work.” The President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, expressed the same thought in slightly different language. “Taking the law into one’s own hands, rioting, and committing violence against innocents,” the President said, “this is not our way and I express my forceful condemnation. We must allow the IDF to apprehend the despicable terrorist (i.e., the murderer of the Yaniv brothers) and restore order immediately.

And then, eventually, Smotrich walked back his original remarks, calling his comment about the village deserving to be destroyed “inappropriate.” And then he went further down that same path, noting that his comments were “incorrect…a slip of the tongue amid a storm of emotions,” and that he never meant for his comments to be taken literally.

To this walk-back, the Prime Minister responded with obvious relief. “It is important for us all to work to tone down the rhetoric,” he said, “which is why I wish to thank Minister Smotrich for making clear that his choice of words regarding the vigilante attack on Huwara following the murder of the Yaniv brothers was inappropriate and that he is strongly opposed to harming innocent civilians.”

So that sounded like it should (or at least could) be the end of the story. A man given to incendiary rhetoric spoke quickly and crazily in public, was then called on the carpet by his boss, and then withdrew his comments and more or less apologized for having spoken too hastily and without realizing he might be taken literally.

And now Minister Smotrich is headed for our country to speak at the Israel Bonds Conference that begins on March 12 in Washington, D.C. A White House National Security Conference spokesperson made it clear the other day that there are no plans for Smotrich to meet with any Biden administration officials or, for that matter, with any American political or government figures at all.

And that puts the ball squarely in the court of the American Jewish Community. Bonds is a big deal, a huge organization that raises funds for Israel in every conceivable Jewish venue in the United States, including at Shelter Rock. To reference their invitation to Smotrich as “just” a chance for a traveling Israeli to introduce himself to the leadership of a major American Jewish organization is really misleadingly to downplay the significance of the invitation. On the other hand, the man is a member of the Netanyahu government and, at that, one who leads one of the largest ministries within the government and who is in his own right the leader of a party with seven seats in the Knesset. Shouldn’t supporters of Israel feel obliged to listen to a leader well-ensconced within the power structure of the current government of Israel? The man did apologize for his remarks, after all.

Last Friday, 120 American Jewish leaders answered that question by signing a letter demanding that Smotrich “not be given a platform in our community.” (For a full list of signatories, click here.) And then, just a few days later, the JTA reported that the Biden administration is considering withholding an entry visa from Smotrich, despite the fact that he doesn’t appear to belong to any of the categories usually invoked for denying entrance to foreign nationals.

And so I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, Smotrich’s remarks were vile. Nor am I particularly convinced that he has changed his mind merely because his Prime Minister got him to say he had. But, on the other hand, I am fully afraid that many of those urging the Biden administration to bar Smotrich from entering the United States are not friends of Israel and are merely using this whole incident as a convenient peg upon which to hang their animus against Israel. On the third hand, I do support the right of Israelis to elect their own officials and then, if they become dissatisfied, to decline to re-elect them or even to bring down the government by turning public opinion dramatically enough to make the government unable to govern. As far as the Jewish leaders calling on the Israel Bonds people to deny an Israeli cabinet minister the right to address them, I have mixed feelings there too: who is to say that good couldn’t and wouldn’t come from a man like Betzalel Smotrich, an Israeli born, bred, raised, and educated in Israel, being exposed to the width and breadth of American Jewish culture—something that the Bonds Conference could well provide?

I write today, however, not to vent (or not just to vent), but to offer a concrete solution, one that could and even possibly would satisfy most parties to the affair.  Smotrich did a terrible thing when he, wearing his big yarmulke and openly identifying as a religious Jew, called for the murder of innocents and the eradication of a town merely because a wicked person committed a foul act on its streets. Issuing a press release walking back the remarks was a nice start, but cannot possibly be interpreted—not halakhically but also not realistically—as “real” t’shuvah. But the gates of t’shuvah are never closed, which is to say that the possibility of real repentance is always present. This truth, we repeat over and over and over in our High Holiday liturgy. Surely Smotrich knows those words by heart. So perhaps the time has come to act on them.

My suggestion is Betzalel Smotrich forego the opportunity to address the Bonds Convention and instead head to Huwara. He needs to find the courage to meet the people there and to evolve from an angry politician with a big mouth into a true worker for peace. He needs to find Palestinians to work with him, to find common ground, to build the kind of consensus that could conceivably lead to real change in the endless war between Israelis and Palestinians. He needs to take the bright light this whole incident has shone upon him and refocus it out onto the world as a force for illumination and the kind of open dialogue that can lead to peace. The trick is not to condemn the man for using intemperate language in the past, but to challenge him to make of this whole incident the framework for the kind of dialogue that leads, or at least that can lead, to peaceful coexistence.

It’s a cliché to say that no one but Nixon could have gone to China, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Perhaps the time has come for Betzalel Smotrich to go to Huwara.