Sanctions against Ben G’vir and Smotrich
HOW DOUBLE STANDARDS REWARD HAMAS
Canada issued a joint statement with Australia, New Zealand, Norway and the UK, on June 10, 2025 sanctioning Ben G’vir and Smotrich, two despicable far right wing Israeli Members of Knesset (MKs), the Israeli parliament. The statement starts by condemning settler violence and attributes its cause to incitement by far right wing Israeli politicians. While that incitement is present and ugly it ignores the truth, that with the exception of Hilltop Youth, settler violence is caused by retaliation and self-defence.
The five countries suggest that these MKs are a major impediment to peace and completely ignores the Palestinian contribution to the insoluble problem other than a cursory mention of Hamas unleashing horror on October 7 and continuing to hold hostages.
Hamas will again be pleased with Canada’s actions since it ignores the daily war crimes committed by Hamas and focuses instead on Israel. Hamas has no need to give up the hostages when they are getting exactly what they want without surrendering their most valuable asset. Israel is being marginalized and vilified – the path to its destruction imagined by the Republic of Iran and Hamas. It is not just Smotrich and Ben G’vir who are chastised in this document. It is the entire Israeli government for not cracking down hard enough on settler violence.
Were our Western governments influenced by the masterful propaganda documentary of “No Other Land”? If we truly want peace in the Middle East, we need a strategy that continually undermines Hamas so that Palestinians will not be living under the yoke of a repressive terrorist organization.
We need to call out Hamas’ continued daily war crimes:
1. Keeping hostages
2. Torturing and starving hostages
3. Forcing hostages to make films in order to psychologically torture their families
4. Dressing as civilians rather than soldiers
5. Embedding themselves in a civilian population and refusing them the protection of a massive tunnel system
6. Turning hospitals, schools, mosques and humanitarian areas into army bases
7. Stealing aid to finance terror
8. Hoarding supplies and starving its own citizens
9. Shooting at their own civilian population trying to collect humanitarian aid that bypasses the terrorists
10. Maintaining the genocidal aims against all Jews that are outlined in their founding and revised documents
11. Using propaganda to incite violence
12. Targeting Israeli civilians (Thankfully this is no longer daily due to significant degradation of their abilities by the IDF)
By ignoring these ongoing war crimes and focusing on Israel and 2 heinous MKs this alliance of five has turned Israel into the criminal. Outlining their steadfast commitment to a two state solution in the opening, confirms a reward for Hamas. It frames this war as one about territory, negating that Palestinians have refused a state at least 6 times, as long as it means Jews will live freely next door. So the unwavering support for Israel that they claim rings a littler hollow.
This column is in no way to be taken as an apologia for two truly reprehensible far right wing Israeli politicians. I review their criminal and racist behaviour in detail so there can be no doubt about their stance and how marginal and deplorable their beliefs are to the majority of Israelis. But they have been elected officials for less than five years and the two state solution has failed to bring about peace for more than thirty years. In Western media, Itamar Ben G’vir and Bezalel Smotrich are painted with the same brush but they are different.
ITAMAR BEN G’VIR
Ben-Gvir’s major interest seems to be inciting hatred of Arabs. He’s often referred to as the arsonist in chief in Israel. Although he grew up in a moderate secular family of Israeli Iraqi Kurdish refugees, he became radicalized in his teens during the first intifada. He became a Kahanist, the outlawed, racist, political movement that supports the expulsion of Palestinians. His current political party, Otsma Yehudit, is the slightly moderated successor of the now illegal Kach party, which were Kahanists.
He studied law, only after being indicted many times for incitement and racism. Ben G’vir was initially blocked from taking his bar exams by the Israeli Bar Association. Eventually after settling three criminal charges, he was allowed to sit his exams and gained admission to the bar. He offered legal defence to the violent “hilltop youth” and the teens who were charged in the despicable Duma arson attack in which a young Palestinian family was burnt alive. He proudly states that he has had dozens of indictments and has been convicted eight times. Ben G’vir suffers frequent death threats. There were at least five foiled assassination attempts, one organized by seven Arab Israelis and four West Bank Palestinians.
Ben G’vir entered politics in 2013, barely garnering 1% of the vote. Otsma Yehudit, his political party, did not pass the election threshold of 3.25%. Deciding to tone down his extremism in order to gain a wider audience, he went through a period of reformation. In a Ma’ariv interview he said he’s not in favour of expelling all Arabs, just the terrorists. Ben G’vir removed his poster of Baruch Goldstein, the Kahanist, New York doctor and perpetrator of the murder of 29 Muslims praying at the Cave of the Patriarchs. It was only after his party formed an alliance with another far right wing party in 2021 that he managed to overcome the election threshold. He has been a fixture on the political scene for less than 5 years while the Palestinian war has raged on and off since 1929.
Since in power he has not managed the prosecution of the war but he has loosened Israeli firearm ownership. He also condemned the prosecution of the nine arrested IDF soldiers. They were accused of a brutal assault of a Palestinian prisoner at S’de Teiman.
Ben G’vir once pulled a handgun on a couple of Arab security guards in a parking lot over a parking dispute. At a protest at Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, he told police to shoot at Palestinian throwing stones, yelling “we are the landlords here, remember that, I am your landlord.” His visits to the temple mount and march through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem‘s old city have been incendiary. When five Haredi Jews were arrested for spitting on Christians outside churches he said “it’s not a criminal case” and should be addressed by “education.”
He was rejected for service by the IDF due to his criminally racist behavior.
SMOTRICH
Bezalel Smotrich is less combative, but also incorrigible. He’s a 15th generation Israeli and lives in the West Bank in a house built illegally. He’s been the Minister of Finance since 2022 and is a minister in the Department of Defense. His law degree precedes his activism. He opposes Palestinian statehood which puts him in line with the majority of Jewish Israelis since 30 years of terrorism followed the Oslo accords. He denies the existence of the Palestinian people which is a far right wing view given that Palestinians coalesced as a distinct nation in response to Israel in the mid-1960s. Their recent history does not make them illegitimate other than in a far right view.
He was arrested in 2005 with 700 L of gasoline and suspected of participating in an attempt to blow up a major arterial road, to protest the unilateral disengagement from Gaza. He was released after three weeks, after the disengagement, and never charged. Other than this, he has not faced criminal charges, unlike Ben G’vir.
In 2006 he was involved in organizing the “Beast Parade”which was a counter protest to bringing a Pride Parade to Jerusalem. Tel Aviv, a more secular city attracts a quarter million people to its Pride Parade. His homophobia is disgusting, although he admitted regret about his involvement.
He is cofounder of an NGO Regavim, which monitors and pursues legal action in Israel against unpermitted construction undertaken by Arabs in Israel and the West Bank. He had a key role in banning BDS movement supporters from visiting Israel.
Smotrich campaigned to “restore the Torah justice system” if he was made Minister of Justice, but Netanyahu distanced himself and appointed openly gay MK Amir Ohana as Minister of Justice instead. After a Palestinian terror attack on settlers, he called for “striking the cities of terror and its instigators without mercy, with tanks and helicopters.” He said Israel should act “in a way that conveys that the master of the house has gone crazy.”
On October 30, 2023 he froze the transfer of tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority objecting that money was going to pay terrorists in the Pay for Slay program, where terrorists and their families are rewarded for killing Jews. In November 2023, he called for voluntary immigration of Palestinians to other countries.
He has consistently been anti-Arab and homophobic. He portrays his views around imposing religious belief on the majority of secular Israelis as having softened explaining that those beliefs are not shared, and “we all have to get along.”
Smotrich, who is described as the more rational of the two would receive less than 1% of the vote if elections were held today. Ben G’vir would also likely be decimated by Naftali Bennet but could still get 7-8 seats. Ben Gvir’s party has gained popularity during the war. This is for one reason; he promises Israelis security when they face a war on seven fronts and thousands of terrorist attacks annually.
Each are reprehensible in their own way. The majority of Israelis would never vote for either. The biggest problem is their elevation to powerful positions by Netanyahu, who clings to power. Although Netanyahu is often accused ofprolonging the war to fend off his criminal trial, his trial continues. In addition he is overwhelmed by multiple wars, the divisions in Israeli society and negotiations to release the hostages.
Of all the mistakes Netanyahu has made, the worst was imagining that Hamas did not have the organization and power to conduct October 7. He believed that he was securing Israel by dividing Palestinians. He thought he was weakening the Palestinian Authority by supplying Hamas with funds. In his conception, Hamas would be content to raise their families in Gaza. He imagined Hamas wanted the same things that most Israelis and Westerners do; prosperity, happiness and life instead of war and death.
Netanyahu’s next biggest mistake was elevating Smotrich and Ben G’vir to positions of power, providing endless fodder for Jew haters in international courts, traditional media and NGO‘s. In spite of being a brilliant orator, Netanyahu barely says a word about Israel’s war goals – to defeat Hamas so they can no longer threaten Israelis and have the hostages returned. He barely mentions a day after or deradicalization of the Palestinian population. Instead he lets Ben G’vir and Smotrich fill the vacuum with calls for ethnic cleansing and occupation.
So why is the double standard problematic? Canada hasnot sanctioned any members of parliament from any other democracy. The way to deal with despicable, elected officials is through voting, not with interference by disapproving foreign governments.
UNITED STATES
Canada has never had a problem with Ilhan Omar’s steady stream of antisemitism, accusing Jewish students of Columbia of being pro-genocide. Marjorie Taylor Greene would be welcomed in Canada, despite her propagation of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Rashida Tlaib could travel here freely, even though Jews are being killed in the streets of American cities with cries of “Free Palestine.”
There were many homophobic and transphobic remarks made at the recent Republican National Convention without disapprobation from Canada. When Ron DeSantis passed his Don’t Say Gay law in 2022 the Canadian government was silent.
ENGLAND
In England, Jeremy Corbyn was never sanctioned despite the Jewish Labour Movement’s report in 2019 finding that he had “created endemic, institutional antisemitism.” There were thousands of cases of hate speech within the Labour party in just a four year term. Corbin described Hamas and Hezbollah as friends and laid wreaths at the graves of the terrorists who killed 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972. Canada would still welcome him. Violence against Jews in England has exploded.
PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY
Perhaps these examples of incitement to hatred with fellow democracies are too subtle. Maybe we need to look at Mahmood Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority in the 20th year of his four year term. Not only is he not being sanctioned, but he is being rewarded with the promise of recognition of the Palestinian state. Presumably he would be in charge. Given the only 6% of Palestinians trust Israelis, it’s hard to imagine who could peacefully govern a Palestinian state that Canada chooses to recognize.
Mahmood Abbas wrote his PhD thesis in Moscow blaming the Jews for the Holocaust. It is a fabrication and distortion of facts complete with Soviet era antisemitic slogans seen on campuses today, such as Zionism is racism, colonialism or apartheid. He proposes a conspiracy theory of Zionists collaborating with Nazis to steal Jewish European wealth in order to invade and conquer Palestine.
In the decades since, he veers between Holocaust denial and laying blame on the Jews as parasites of society. On August 24, 2023, he claimed that the Holocaust was caused not by antisemitism, but that Hitler “fought the Jews because they dealt with usury, money and so on.”On May 23, 2023 he likened Israelis to Nazis in a UN speech and said they “lie like Goebbels”. He accused Israel of committing 50 holocausts against the Palestinians in 2018. Mahmood Abbas said the Holocaust was caused by the “social role” of Jews as moneylenders. As recently as 2023 he called for the UN to expel Israel unless they grant every Palestinian the right of return, to effectively destroy Israel as a Jewish state.
In 2013 he made clear that not a single Jew could remain in a future Palestinian state. Although ethnic cleansing of Jews has been the rule in every Arab country, Abbas no longer has to call for it out loud since the international community accepts without question that every Jew would be expelled from the territories while Israel would remain 20% Arab Muslim.
If Abbas’s comments weren’t bad enough, his actions speak louder. He only recently gave up his pay-for-slayprogram where Palestinian families were rewarded for the number of Jews their terrorist relatives managed to kill. This was a prelude to his hope to rule a newly recognized Palestinian state. At the same time in Arabic, he stated that the program continues, “Even if we have one penny left it is for the prisoners and martyrs… They must receive everything, as it was in the past, and they are more precious than all of us!”
Mahmood Abbas oversees an education department that continues to teach Jew hatred in Palestinian schools. Gilad Erdan, Israel‘s ambassador to the UN tweeted moments after a Palestinian teen hacked Israelis Jews in Jerusalem with a cleaver. He wrote “just as Abbas blames the Jews for the Holocaust, he also blames the Jews for all the Middle East issues. The world must wake up and hold Abbas and the Palestinian Authority accountable for the hatred they spew and ensuing bloodshed it causes. There must be zero tolerance for Palestinian incitementand terror!”
But there are no sanctions against Abbas just rewards.
QATAR
Qatar may be more successful at incitement. Not only do they entirely fund Al Jazeera, the mouthpiece of the Muslim Brotherhood, but they have spent billions to spread an antisemitic narrative in elite American universities as well as public schools. Al Jazeera regularly entertains Holocaust denial and prints the views of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi , who endorsed suicide bombing and glorified the suffering of the Jews under Nazi rule. Another Al Jazeera journalist, Jazeera Al Dwairi, tweeted about the “hidden hatred that fills the Jewish heart against the members of the human race, throughout history, fuelled by the forged books of the Old Testament and the Talmud.”
Qatar is still a signatory of the Arab League boycott against Israel but is inexplicably viewed as an impartial negotiator between Israel, the US and Hamas.
In May 2024, Qatari MP Essa Al Nassr got a standing ovation in the Shura Council meeting of legislators as he regarded Jews as “killers of the prophets” and promised that the October 7 massacre was “just a prelude” to the entire destruction of the “Zionist entity.”
Qatari textbooks are filled with antisemitic education. A grade 11 history text talks about Mein Kampf and Hitler in positive light, failing to mention the Holocaust or antisemitism.
Qatar not only funded Hamas but collaborated with the terrorists. They provided luxurious lives that many Hamas leaders enjoyed in Doha before their demise.
And yet the emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani was embraced by Trump on his recent mid-east tour. Al Thani was welcomed on the red carpet by Keir Starmer and King Charles when visiting the Britain earlier this year.
CANADA
When Canada sanctions these two Israeli MKs and fails to hold Mahmoud Abbas or Tamim Al Thani accountable for incitement to hatred, this is clearly a double standard.
At the heart of this double standard is the belief that Israel is responsible for all wars in the region. It is a talking point of Hamas. To see Smotrich and Ben G’vir, two marginal and despicable MKs as the impediment to peace is bizarre when it is Hamas, still supported by many Palestinians,who openly admits to its goal of annihilating all Jews. To imagine that the two state solution is the only pathway to peace when it has resulted in tens of thousands of lives lost in thirty years, since the failure of the Oslo accords, is beyond diplomatic incompetence. To insist that Israel blithely accept living next door to an openly genocidal neighbour, where more than 97% of the population hasbeen indoctrinated into hatred of Jews is a fantasy that will only result in more bloodshed. There is no mention of deradicalization first.
Are our leaders ignorant and understand nothing about the Middle East, antisemitism and the real threat to Jews? Or do they just care more about their performance and approval from left leaning Westerners now that their citizens have also been swayed by Hamas propaganda spewed from our traditional and social media? Rather than promoting peace, these actions are an embarrassment that vilify Israel, foment antisemitism and strengthen Hamas. Their ignorance will condemn both Israelis and Palestinians to further agony.