Hostages' families, Gadi Eisenkot berate MKs calling to resettle Gaza

Families of hostages and Israeli politicians berated on Monday ministers and MKs who partook in a conference calling for the re-establishment of settlements inside the Gaza Strip the night before.

“Is now the right time [to hold the conference]? When no family has been able to return to their home in their communities bordering Gaza, when soldiers are fighting together?” Izhar Lifshitz, son of Oded Lifshitz, who is being held captive in Gaza, asked at the start of a Knesset Aliyah and Absorption Committee special meeting to present the 2023 antisemitism report, timed to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The special meeting was hosted by Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli, who, according to the organizers, attended the settlement conference on Sunday.

“We feel like we were stabbed,” Lifshitz added.

Merav Leshem-Gonen, mother of Romi Gonen, who is also being held hostage in Gaza, said that the chants and signs at the settlement conference calling to “transfer” the Gazan population were “shocking.”

“Deporting another ethnic group – isn’t that what was done to us in Europe? Are we not here to discuss antisemitism, are we not here to be better?” Leshem-Gonen asked.

The event’s organizers claimed that 12 government ministers, 15 Knesset members, and some 3,000 people attended the conference on Sunday, which was held as a victory conference, under the slogan: “Settlement brings security – return to the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria.”

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in his speech called for the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s residents, and for penalizing terrorists. Several ministers and Knesset members were also recorded dancing at the event.

Gantz weighs in with conference criticism

Ministers-without-portfolio Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, both members of the war cabinet from the centrist National Unity party, issued criticisms of the conference on Monday.

“Those who participated... have not learned a thing from the past year,” Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff said in a statement. “They host events to divide Israeli society and increase the existing lack of trust in the government and its representatives, while troops are battling shoulder-to-shoulder in a righteous war.”

Later on Monday, Gantz published a video statement in which he accused the conference’s participants of “harming Israeli society during the war, harming our legitimacy in the world, and harming the efforts to create a framework to return the hostages” being held by Hamas.

Gantz also criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Gantz said he warned Netanyahu ahead of time about the damage that the conference could create, but that the prime minister did nothing. “Whoever danced and divided, does not make decisions, and whoever was silent and went along with it – is no leader,” Gantz said.

He added that “later on, when the situation stabilizes,” he and his party will leave the government and promote an election in which the people will have their say regarding those who “during times of a shared fate amongst the people, were too busy thinking about safeguarding their own, personal political futures.”

The Likud issued a statement that said: “Even if there are those who don’t like this, the Likud is a democratic movement and in the State of Israel there is freedom of speech for everyone – including the Right. Netanyahu already clarified that the decisions are made by the cabinet and government.”

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich made a similar argument in a weekly press conference on Monday, arguing that there were ministers who were publicly calling for a two-state solution, and therefore the Right had the prerogative of expressing its own opinions openly.

Ben-Gvir in his press conference on Monday argued in response to the criticism over the conference that resettling Gaza with Jews was the correct policy, and that “voluntary emigration” was the “correct, rational, moral and true” solution.

Similarly, addressing the backlash as well, Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan said, “There are people, and for some reason always in the Left, who are sure that they may speak during wartime about returning the terrorist Palestinian Authority to the Gaza Strip… and when most of the people talk about settlement as a national security response – it is divisive. I say to you – we will not be your punching bag! You will not shut us up.”

The ministers and MKs who participated in the conference came from the coalition parties Likud, Religious Zionist Party, Otzmah Yehudit, and United Torah Judaism.

Shas did not participate in the conference. Shas Welfare Minister Ya'akov Margi explained on Radio Kol Bramah on Monday that while he “had no intention to educate anyone,” the party held a “restrained and responsible” worldview and therefore did not want to burden the soldiers in Gaza with divisive arguments. “There is time for everything,” Margi said.

Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid and Labor Chairwoman Merav Michaeli, who criticized the conference already on Sunday, repeated their claims on Monday.

“The prime minister’s silence yesterday says one thing loudly: The country can burn, as long as I stay in power,” Lapid said in his weekly press conference.

“This is not the Likud. We are talking about a party that is already lost; a party that is no longer fit to rule. A prime minister who approved of participation in such an event is not fit to lead the State of Israel,” Lapid punctuated.