Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotritz This evening (Wednesday) he published an open letter to the citizens of Israel, to the Air Force pilots, to the IDF soldiers and to his commanders in which he apologized for his controversial statements from the last few weeks, including his call to “wipe out Havara”, and admitted: “I failed in my responsibility, I cannot absolve myself by blaming others. I am required to take stock,” he wrote.
“I started the morning in shock. And it gives me many thoughts that I want to share with you,” Smotrich wrote. “I have a friend, a senior-ranking reserve air force pilot, who reflected to me the feeling that my statement evoked in his fellow aircrew members after the horrible murder of Hillel Weigal Yaniv Hid and her contribution to the pilots’ protest.”
The minister admitted that “it took me a while to understand at all what the connection was and what he wanted from me. He explained to me that some of the pilots took my statement as a call for the air force to “delete” the village and its inhabitants from the air.”
“Such an intention on the part of a senior minister and a member of the political and defense cabinet, combined with what they understand as the granting of unlimited power to the elected government as a result of the reform of the judicial system, put them in real anxiety, since it could lead to, in their view, in the future giving such an obviously illegal order to the Air Force, and of course they are not Ready to take part.”
“Hence, according to his words from the internal discourse in the Air Force, the outcry of the fighter pilots that reached some of them to the point of taking the serious and dangerous step of an extroverted absence from operational training. According to this friend of mine, and I trust him 100 percent, this is not some cynical campaign excuse by the pilots within The opposition to the reform, but with a deep and real fear that brought them to do what they did.”
“And the truth is that I’m quite shocked. When left-wing elements in the media in Israel created a storm out of things, I didn’t attach any importance to it. I saw it as the continuation of their false and biased campaign against the right-wing government and against me. I’ve been living this false demonization that they’ve been doing to me for years and I don’t allow myself to be influenced by it.”
“When political and media figures overseas made use of my statement and attributed to it intentions that did not exist and were not created to attack me and the government, I similarly attributed it to hypocrisy and the continuation of the blackening campaign that I have been going through there for years.”
“With certain parties, it is clear to me that this is even part of the BDS campaign against the State of Israel, which is operating in an impossible reality against a murderous terrorist machine from among the civilian population and against the civilian population, and does so while maintaining moral and legal principles that no country in the world would have been able to do.”
“With others, I attributed it to a lack of understanding and acquaintance with me by those who only meet me through the trending and false media blackening campaign. I assumed that if someone is able to attribute to me a call for the indiscriminate killing of women and children, it is only from his fevered mind and that he also does not really believe in it and is doing it on purpose to to hurt me”.
“But when it comes from good, smart, serious and dedicated people, who devote the best of their years to Israel’s security, and when I hear that such serious people attribute such terrible intentions to me in all seriousness, I can no longer resolve myself by blaming others. I am required to take stock.”
Smotrich claimed: “I am a witness that such an delusional thought did not cross my mind even for a split second. It is simply not in my lexicon. When the storm arose from my words, I tried to think to myself how far they could be taken to criticize and attack me. I thought as much as possible of an interpretation according to which one should destroy the village houses on both sides of the road to prevent the continuation of terrorism on the road, which is used for the movement of thousands of settlers, men, women and children.”
“Something like what Eric Sharon did around roads in the Gaza Strip in the 1980s and like the High Court forbade carrying out sweeps in the road that later killed Tali Hatuel and her 14 daughters. At most, something like the president of Egypt did just recently a kilometer from the border with Gaza as part of the fight against the smuggling tunnels between Egypt to the Gaza Strip. In none of the cases was there injury to the soul. Only property.”
“I assumed that such a step would also be seen as excessive and disproportionate, hence the attack on me and my accusation of war crimes and the call not to let me into the US, etc. But that’s the maximum. Until this conversation this morning, I really did not imagine that anyone serious could understand my words as a call for the indiscriminate killing of women and children in the village.”
“And then the token fell to me. Pilots who get into their hands a destroyer with tremendous firepower like a fighter jet are constantly busy with this tension. They study it, talk about it and live it every day, hour by hour. Every time they put on the flight suit, get on the plane and go into action In enemy territory, just before they press the stick and release the bomb, they live the dilemma between the just and moral and critical goal for the security of the country they were sent to accomplish and the collateral damage that may occur.”
“In the professional legal language it is called “proportionality”, in life this word takes the form of life and death. It is a dilemma that only those who hold in their hands a tremendous responsibility for human life and carve out destinies with the push of a button can probably understand. And blessed are the people who are his sons. Who live this moral tension, their hearts Not rude about it, and they guard it with all vigilance even after decades of service and countless operations.”
“As someone who did not have the privilege of serving in combat service, I only know this tension from the theoretical level. From the discussions, from the transcribing of the standing orders and orders of the General Staff, and from the investigations of the exercises and operational activities that I had the privilege of taking part in in the operations division of the General Staff in regular and reserve, from the series on the values of the IDF in the trainees , from the yeshiva study lessons on the mitzvot of Amalek’s life and the Torah sayings seasoned with the wine of the Purim feasts, and from the public and social discourse in Israel surrounding the morality of fighting. I can only imagine what this tension looks like in truth – from the air, the sea or the land – when you hold in your hand a mighty weapon like a fighter plane, A tank or other war machine.”
“And here I come to two insights: the first concerns how much we don’t know each other. How much alienation and alienation there is between the different parts of Israeli society. We are so close and so far. So close in our practical partnership in the Zionist enterprise, our national revival enterprise, we learn Together, we serve together, work together, build the country together. And are so far apart in their lack of familiarity with each other’s values and worldview.”
“For years I have struggled to understand the gap between the image I have in certain parts of the nation and who I really am. After all, I know myself. The home I grew up in, the values I bring with me from home, from the environment I grew up in, from the Torah I studied. I know how much light and goodness and justice and morality And love of man and nation is in all of these, and rubs my eyes against the black figure that often stares at me in the mirror of the media. I can blame it on the media until tomorrow, but it doesn’t change the result.”
“And if there is a huge gap between who I am and how I am perceived “on the other side” to the extent that I can be attributed a call to murder women and children, who knows what gap there is between how I often perceive people or the statements of parties on the other side and who and what they really are?! Maybe Am I also falling into exactly the same mistake?”
“The last few weeks reveal something that is much more than a debate about one or another detail in the legal reform. They reveal deep currents that probably contain sharp value disputes that touch our most exposed nerves, but they also reveal a lot of our mutual fear and apprehensions of each other. Fear and apprehensions that arise only a little From the disputes themselves but much more from the fact that we don’t know each other enough. We don’t talk enough, we don’t listen enough, and we don’t learn enough from each other.
“In this sense, whatever the results of the legal reform (which, as you know, I believe with all my heart that it is good for Israeli democracy and the core values shared by all of us), we must start a process of national discourse. of tearing down walls and a new unity. With and out of disputes, but on the basis of true and free acquaintance Stigmas, mutual respect and matter-of-fact discourse”.
“The second insight, as the Sages said, “No one stands by the words of the Torah unless he fails in them” – I never understood it as I understand it today. How far does the required caution go and how heavy is the responsibility placed on us, not only for what we say, but for how things can be interpreted, even in faraway places and in far-fetched directions that we never imagined they could be taken to.”
“To the extent that I, who live in a world of certain concepts and do not imagine at all that it is possible to understand from my words that Hvara should be wiped out from its inhabitants, I must take into account how my statements can be received by people like our heroic pilots, who do not know me and for whom these concepts are not something theoretical, just Words intended to transmit a message of a demand for a sharp response, but something taken from the real world, alive and very sensitive that they deal with day by day, hour by hour.”
“So after I failed in this responsibility, and believe me I am still shaken by the thought that this is how I could have been understood, it is important for me first of all to apologize to the IDF and its commanders, with an emphasis on the Air Force personnel, if I had a part in breaking the trust that is so important between the IDF, As the people’s army, to the elected political level. And now to say things I thought I would never have to say:
“Brother pilots, the IDF and its commanders, Israeli society: the basic humanitarian values of the State of Israel are shared by all of us. It is possible and necessary to specify our war ethics in its details and balances, and we have had and probably will continue to have arguments and disputes about this, but it is on the margins. As a country, we have been experiencing the discourse surrounding these exactions all these years: in the Line 300 case, in the procedure that Yair Golan thought was moral and in the High Court of Cassation, in the Kissuf case and in the Alor Azaria case, and more.”
“And again, we are blessed that these are our dilemmas, that this is the world of values that we live in and believe in. We can discuss the application of the exact formula of proportionality and proportionality, the relationship between the quality of the target and the collateral damage that we always try to reduce, but sometimes it is unavoidable, but a clearly illegal order to kill You will never be indiscriminate! Under no circumstances! These are values we all share.”
“The IDF is the people’s army and has a clear ethical and moral framework. Generations of soldiers and commanders are educated in the light of that framework. This framework is important because it captures around it all the soldiers, commanders and fighters, who come from different parts of the nation. These are the necessary values for maintaining a basic contract between the state and those who are willing to give their lives for it and use the most lethal weapons for it.”
“This contract is simple and written in the blood of many fighters. The side of the fighters is simple but as extreme as it can be – they are willing to give their lives in order to protect the country. The country, for its part, undertakes not to obey orders that are clearly illegal. Those that have a black flag flying over them.”
“As a senior minister, as a member of the cabinet, I stood in the past, stand in the present, and will continue to stand by this code in the future. It is the basis of our cohesion. Together with the other members of the cabinet, who constitute a variety of voices, who balance and challenge each other, I will continue to back the uncompromising integrity and professionalism of the IDF and his commanders in the processes of exercising his power.”
“I stood and with God’s help I will continue to stand by my side of the contract! On your side – there is no need to talk. Your stand and you have stood by it since the establishment of the State of Israel, including yesterday in the Jenin MP. I appreciate you. I love you. Bezalel,” he concluded.