Member of Knesset Ofer Cassif, the only Jewish MK in the Arab Hadash-Ta’al Party, tweeted a picture of Jews lining up in 1938 to leave Vienna and compared it to the voluntary relocation plan for Gazans proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
“This month, exactly 86 years ago, the ‘Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration’ was established in Berlin with the aim of encouraging voluntary emigration of German Jews. Pictured: Jews waiting for voluntary emigration from Vienna, 1938,” Cassif tweeted.
MK Amog Cohen of the Otzma Yehudit Party submitted a complaint to the Knesset’s Ethics Committee against Cassif, calling the latter’s comparison “perverse and disgraceful.”
The Ethics Committee is composed of four members of Knesset from the coalition and opposition.
“I hope that he will again be severely punished and his salary will be withheld. This traitor is not worthy of being in the Israeli Knesset and certainly not as a public representative. He represents the interests of Hamas and the BDS movement and serves as a fifth column in our midst,” Cohen said
Cohen is collecting 90 signatures from Knesset members to oust Cassif from Israel’s parliament and called on opposition heads to support his move. “I hope that this time, they will stand up and help remove him,” he said.
On Nov. 11, 2024, the Knesset’s Ethics Committee decided to ban Cassif from participating in plenary and committee meetings until May 2025, due to his incessant incitement against Israel. He was suspended from the Knesset for 45 days over comments he made in the wake of Hamas’s’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre.
The Ethics Committee based its decision on remarks Cassif made that also drew a connection between the Holocaust and “current government policy in times of war.”
It referred to a statement by Cassif in an Oct. 15 interview with Irish journalist Finian Cunningham, in which he accused the government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of exploiting the Hamas terrorist attacks to implement a “final solution” to wipe out Palestinian Arabs.
The “final solution” typically refers to Germany’s effort to annihilate world Jewry during the Holocaust.
The Ethics Committee also voted to cut Cassif’s salary for two weeks during his suspension, one of the most severe sanctions imposed by the committee in recent years.
In February 2024, Israeli lawmakers voted against revoking Cassif’s Knesset membership over his public support for the charges of genocide that South Africa lodged against Israel in the International Court of Justice.
Eighty-five MKs voted in favor of ousting Cassif, below the 90 needed in the 120-member legislature. The opposition Yesh Atid Party, led by Yair Lapid, and National Unity, chaired by Benny Gantz, did not back the initiative.
Yisrael Beitenu’s MK Oded Forer initiated the impeachment attempt. The move was announced after Cassif signed a petition in support of the South African case against the Jewish state and claimed that members of the government were calling for ethnic cleansing and even genocide.
“MK Cassif’s treasonous words can no longer be heard while the blood of our soldiers and citizens screams from the ground,” Forer said.
Cassif caused a firestorm in November 2022 by declaring that Aryeh Shchupak, 16, was a “victim of the occupation” after he was murdered in a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem.
Earlier that month, Cassif asserted that Jews living in Judea and Samaria were liable for Palestinian attacks against them, as they are not innocent civilians. “They live as a thorn in the throats of the Palestinians,” he said, adding that Palestinian attacks were “not terror.”
In a 2021 Facebook post marking Palestinian Prisoners Day, Cassif referred to Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails as “political prisoners.” He also shared an image of a prison cell with the caption: “May all the captives be released!”