Israeli politician and former Likud member of parliament Moshe Feiglin on Sunday favourably quoted Adolf Hitler while arguing in a TV interview for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
“As Hitler said, ‘I cannot live if one Jew is left’,” Feiglin said during a panel discussion on Channel 12.
“We can’t live here if one Islamo-Nazi remains in Gaza,” he continued.
On @N12News Israel’s most watched news show, former Likud MP Moshe Feiglin invokes ***Hitler*** to justify Gaza resettlement:
“As Hitler said, ‘I cannot live if one Jew is left,’ we can’t live here if one ‘Islamo-nazi’ remains in Gaza.”
— Etan Nechin (@Etanetan23) June 16, 2024
He then went on to call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians again, stating Jews “are not guests in our own land, it is entirely ours,”, adding that he believes Israel should “turn Gaza Hebrew”.
Feiglin was a member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament) for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party between 2013 and 2015.
He then left to establish the far-right Zehut (“Identity”) party, only to rejoin Likud in 2021.
In January, Feiglin once again left Israel’s ruling party, announcing his intention to re-establish Zehut and run against Netanyahu, who he said had let the country down by being too soft on Gaza.
“We need a different prime minister who is willing to stick his neck out to win. Zehut will provide, whenever elections happen, such a candidate.
“For us, the war in Gaza is not merely a defensive war. It’s a war of liberation, the liberation of the land from its occupiers,” Feiglin said at a rally of his supporters in January.
In an interview with Al Jazeera in October, Feiglin called for the “complete destruction of Gaza … [d]estruction like Dresden and Hiroshima”.
Though Feiglin is not a member of the Israeli government, his comments on ethnically cleansing Gaza echo repeated statements by government ministers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Under the January interim ruling by the International Court of Justice on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, Tel Aviv was ordered “to prevent and punish incitement to genocide”.
However, as the war on Gaza has gone on, not a single Israeli has been reprimanded for such statements, including Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu who called for Israel to use a nuclear weapon on Gaza.
On Friday, Israeli government accounts on social media site X shared a video with a quote saying “there are no innocent civilians” in Gaza.
Israel’s war on Gaza has so far killed over 37,347 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are civilians.