An Israeli parliamentarian is calling for the expulsion of a far-left lawmaker from the Knesset for publicly endorsing the charges of genocide that South Africa has lodged against Israel in the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
MK Oded Forer from Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu Party began the process to oust MK Ofer Cassif of the Arab-Jewish Communist Hadash Party from the parliament in accordance with Basic Law: The Knesset, which allows lawmakers to remove a colleague who expresses “support for an armed struggle by an enemy state, or a terrorist organization against the State of Israel.”
Cassif, who is Jewish, signed a petition in support of the South African case against Israel and on Sunday said that members of the government were calling for ethnic cleansing and even actual genocide.
Forer is working to collect signatures from 70 members of parliament to expel Cassif, a process that would then require approval from a Knesset committee and finally 90 votes out of 120 in the plenum to pass.
“MK Cassif’s treasonous words can no longer be heard while the blood of our soldiers and citizens screams from the ground,” Forer said.
Responding to Forer’s calls to expel Cassif, Hadash-Ta’al leader MK Ahmad Tibi said that “the prosecution in The Hague is based on the words of [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich, of [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir and [Heritage Minster Amihai] Eliyahu, and not on the words of Cassif.
“The finance minister said that there are two million Nazis in Gaza. This is how you legitimize genocide,” Tibi said, referring to Smotrich‘s response to polls showing that most Palestinians residing in the territory support Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
Three months ago, Cassif was suspended from the Knesset for 45 days for anti-Israel comments he made in the wake of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7.
The Knesset Ethics Committee based its 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 murderous Hamas 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 World War II.
Cassif caused a firestorm in November 2022 by declaring that Aryeh Shchupak, 16, was a “victim of the occupation” after he was murdered in the terrorist bombings in Jerusalem earlier in the day.
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 security prisoners in Israeli jails as “political prisoners.” Cassif also shared an image of a prison cell with the caption: “May all the captives be released!”
