Israel’s finance minister, who demanded that a volatile Palestinian community be “erased,” won’t meet with Biden administration officials during his visit to the US next week, according to reports in Israeli media.
The White House announced at a press briefing on Friday that Bezalel Smotrich, who would be visiting Washington for the first time since accepting his ministerial role, will not meet US Treasury Secretary Jen Yellen or any other government officials.
In the midst of a wave of deadly Palestinian attacks and Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank, Smotrich made the remarks during a conference on Wednesday.
Smotrich responded: “I think that Hawara needs to be erased.” When asked about a weekend settler rampage into the Palestinian town of Hawara, which an Israeli commander on Tuesday termed as a “pogrom,”
The shooting of two Israeli brothers by a suspected Palestinian militant, which occurred only days after Israeli troops carried out their worst West Bank raid in almost 20 years and left 11 Palestinians dead in the northern city of Nablus, served as the catalyst for the rampage.
From March 12–14, Smotrich will present at the annual Israel Bonds conference in Washington.
His remarks drew widespread condemnation, with Volker Turk, the UN human rights official, calling them “an unfathomable statement of incitement to violence and hostility.”
The US State Department referred to his remarks as a call to violence and demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu officially denounce them.
They were careless, vulgar, and repulsive, said spokesperson Ned Price to reporters on Wednesday.
“We condemn these aggressive words that also amount to incitement to violence,” he said. “Just as we reject Palestinian incitement to violence.
In a joint statement issued on Friday, more than 120 American Jewish leaders demanded that Smotrich’s visit be boycotted. He “should not be given a platform in our community,” it stated, according to Israeli media.
The Times of Israel reported that the list of signatories to the statement “demonstrated that the desire to disassociate with Smotrich extended to more mainstream elements of the Jewish community” and “well beyond the more progressive groups who already called for the minister to be denied a visa to enter the country.”
On Saturday, delegations from 19 nations, including France, Germany, Japan, and the UK, visited Hawara. They then released a united statement “condemn(ing) in the strongest terms the heinous and violent acts committed by settlers.”
As the outcry grew, Smotrich made a statement claiming that the media had misconstrued them but refusing to take back his request for the village to be destroyed.
Smotrich said on local television on Saturday that “it is possible that the word was wrong.”
He tweeted on Saturday, “I did not mean damage to innocents when I declared that Hawara should be wiped away. Sometimes, even when they don’t want to, people use harsh language to make a point. Each person experiences it.