Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi on Sunday demanded disciplinary action against veteran Israeli journalist Dov Gil-Har, the Berlin bureau chief for the Kan News public broadcaster, over an X post in which he seemed to liken the Netanyahu government to the Hitler regime.
“It has come to my attention that Dov Gil-Har, a well-known content creator employed by the [Israeli Public Broadcasting] Corporation, published a tweet on the X network purporting to compare actions carried out by the current Israeli government to the burning of the Reichstag by the Nazis,” Karhi wrote in the letter, Maariv reported.
The tweet “constitutes Holocaust distortion and serious delegitimization of the elected government and its supporters,” according to the minister.
“Gil-Har’s remarks appear to constitute a disciplinary offense as defined in Section 17(3) of the Civil Service Law (Discipline),” continued Karhi, calling on the public broadcaster to “immediately take appropriate disciplinary action against Gil-Har due to his extreme statement.”
In the post, Gil-Har wrote, “The burning of the Reichstag, the parliament of the Weimar Republic, which happened on the evening of Feb. 27, 1933, was a central event in the stages of the rise of the Nazis to power.”
He added, “The newly elected regime quickly took advantage of this to get rid of its opponents and continue to establish a totalitarian rule while discarding what remained of the Weimar Republic constitution.”
שרפת הרייכסטאג, משכן הפרלמנט של רפובליקת ויימאר שאירעה בערב 27 בפברואר 1933, היתה אירוע מרכזי בשלבי עליית הנאצים לשלטון. המשטר שזה עתה נבחר מיהר לנצל את האירוע על מנת להיפטר ממתנגדיו, ולהמשיך לבסס שלטון עריצות תוך התנערות משרידי חוקת רפובליקת ויימאר. pic.twitter.com/isAW3gYvby
— Dov Gil-Har (@DovGilHar) November 17, 2024
The tweet was posted hours after three suspects were arrested on suspicion of shooting two flares at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence in Caesarea on Saturday evening.
Netanyahu and his family were not home at the time of the attack, which security officials called a “serious” and “dangerous escalation.” All three suspects are reportedly anti-government protesters, one of whom is a senior officer in the Israel Defense Forces reserves.
Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin condemned the incident as a “link in a chain of violent and anarchic actions, the purpose of which is to bring about the assassination of the prime minister and the overthrow of the elected government by means of a violent coup.”
Levin called for the government to resume its judicial reform push, which was shelved last year following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border terrorist massacre.
“It is time to support the actions I led that were halted. It is time for full backing to restore the judiciary and law enforcement systems and to put an end to the anarchy, lawlessness and attempts to harm the prime minister,” said Levin, drawing a rebuke from opposition lawmakers.
Gil-Har’s X post was condemned by Israelis from across the political spectrum on Sunday, including some of his colleagues at Kan News.
A former editor of the Behadrei Hadarim ultra-Orthodox news outlet, Avraham Greenzeig, commented, “When the Nazis wanted to harm democracy, they burned down the parliament—not the court, the state attorney’s office or that of the attorney general.”
In 2019, Gil-Har was briefly suspended over what Kan described as an unprofessional on-air joke about Netanyahu’s ongoing trial. Last year, he testified against the premier, claiming that pressure was put on him not to broadcast an interview with Netanyahu because the latter did not like it.
