Netanyahu challenger thinks Israel isn’t attacking enough neighbours

Israel’s former prime minister, Naftali Bennett has said he will declare US ally Qatar to be an “enemy state” if he succeeds in replacing current Benjamin Netanyahu this autumn.

The far-right politician also told Bloomberg he wants to start a war on Turkey. Bennett, who used to be Netanyahu’s chief of staff, clearly thinks Israel is not waging war on enough of his neighbours.

Qatar was trying, at the request of the US, to facilitate a peace deal between Israel and Hamas when Israel bombed the capital city, Doha, to try to murder the Palestinian negotiators.

Bennett has boasted of how many Palestinians he has killed, says he will never allow a Palestinian state and dismissed objections to Israel’s starvation blockade of Gaza. He appears to think Qatar trying to help bring peace is hostility.

Israel ex-PM: Every accusation is a confession

In a classic ‘every accusation is a confession’ speech, Bennett told an Israeli ‘security’ conference that Qatar is an “antisemitic cancer” that wants to destroy Israel. He added:

[Qatar is] a violent antisemitic cancer that is spreading metastases to the West and even to the office of Israel’s prime minister, with the aim of destroying the State of Israel…[and has conducted] a powerful global influence operation that may have caused Israel very major damage.

If “powerful global influence campaign” sounds familiar, Israel has massively increased its propaganda budget and boasted of running a 60,000-strong influence operation to counter outrage at its Gaza genocide.

Bennett also claimed that Qatar “directly” funded the Gaza resistance group, Hamas. In fact, Israel “approved and encouraged the transfer of Qatari funds into Gaza to prop up Hamas” as a tactic against rival Palestinian group Fatah.

Failing election campaign

Qatar dismissed Bennett’s comments as an attempt to revive a failing election campaign. Pointing to Qatar’s involvement in regional peace negotiations, an official at the country’s embassy in the US said that Bennett was:

spread[ing] disinformation about Qatar in an attempt to further his own political ambitions.

Featured image via Gil Cohen-Magen/ Pool via Reuters

By Skwawkbox