Knesset member Ofer Cassif, the lone Jew among the mostly Arab Hadash-Ta’al Party’s four lawmakers, will be banned from participating in plenary and committee meetings until May 2025 because of his incessant incitement against Israel, the parliament’s Ethics Committee decided on Monday.
The Ethics Committee, which is composed of four members of Knesset from the coalition and opposition, also voted to cut Cassif’s salary for two weeks during his suspension.
Cassif’s suspension, which will take effect on Tuesday, is one of the most severe sanctions imposed by the committee in recent years.
In February, 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 lead 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.
Late last year, Cassif was suspended from the Knesset for 45 days for anti-Israel comments he made in the wake of Hamas’s’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
The Ethics Committee based Monday’s decision on remarks Cassif made that 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.
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 2021, in a 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!”
