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Shared values: Likud member says Prawer Plan akin to what ‘Americans did to the Indians’

Knesset Member Miri Regev (Photo: Tomer Appelbaum/Haaretz)
Knesset Member Miri Regev (Photo: Tomer Appelbaum/Haaretz)

The U.S. and Israeli governments love to hype how both countries share the same “values.” AIPAC has a whole webpage dedicated to the “progressive values [Israel] shares with America.”

I guess they won’t be mentioning these shared values:

“You want to transfer an entire population,” MK Hanna Swaid (Hadash) said.

Committee chairwoman MK Miri Regev (Likud) responded, “Yes, as the Americans did to the Indians.”

The remarks were made during a Knesset Interior Committee hearing on Monday as debate over the Prawer Plan, which calls for demolishing Bedouin villages and transferring their inhabitants to urban townships, continued.

(H/T Yousef Munayyer.)

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It is more complicated than that.

Anyway, what Americans did to the Indians was minor compared to what Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay did to Indians.

But there is a difference:

She talks about America in the 1800s.
We’re talking about Israel, today.

If she wants to compare herself to America in the 1800s, why not institute slavery, too? She can defend herself by saying that America used to do that, too.

I didn’t think Israel’s defence could get worse than “Yes but what about Saudi Arabia” as if that’s the country we should compare it to. But apparently it can get worse, it now wants to be compared to America centuries ago – because it knows what it is doing today is near-impossible to defend in 21th century America and across the Western world.

“Likud member says Prawer Plan akin to what ‘Americans did to the Indians’”

I am pretty sure that a senior Nazi (and it may even have been Hitler) delivered the same justification for what the Germans did in Poland in the 1940s.
Lebensraum is the same in every language.

>> Committee chairwoman MK Miri Regev (Likud) responded, “Yes, as the Americans did to the Indians.”

Ms. Regev appears not to understand – or, worse, she understands and simply does not care – that this is not something to be proudly emulated.

What a hateful and immoral person is this Miri Regev.

It’s a bit like Japan in the 30’s with its colonialist enterprise they called the “Co Prosperity Sphere.” In a sense it was like the European/America colonialism that reached it’s zenith in the prior century but times change and the acceptable becomes unacceptable.