He tells late night LBC radio session: 'Kahane was a violent person - but also a visionary in terms of saying that there would never ever be peace in the Middle East'
April 9, 2019 11:21
The chair of Likud-Herut UK, an advocacy group which describes itself as the voice of the right-wing Israeli party in Britain, has praised the late Jewish extremist leader Rabbi Meir Kahane as a “visionary”.
Zalmi Unsdorfer was invited onto LBC’s Tom Swarbick show late on Monday evening to discuss the Israeli election and made a series of contentious statements including the suggestion that Palestinian mothers were to blame for the deaths of children during protests on the Gaza border.
He also said: “The real Palestinians are the Jews because Palestine was simply a renaming of Judea.”
Mr Unsdorfer was asked for his view on Benjamin Netanyahu's deal with the far-right grouping that includes the national-religious Jewish Home party and Otzma Yehudit, or “Jewish Power”, a small extremist party led by disciples of Rabbi Kahane.
Mr Unsdorfer said: “Certainly far-right wing Otzma Yehudit is originally a Khahanist Party.
“Kahane was a violent person - but also a visionary in terms of saying that there would never, ever be peace in the Middle East.
“Those people who believe the Arab/Israeli conflict is a territorial conflict are completely mistaken. The Arabs don’t want a two-state solution. They want the complete elimination of a Jewish state in any borders.”
American-born Rabbi Kahane proposed many extremist laws when he sat in the Knesset in the 1980s, including banning sexual relations between Jews and Arabs. His party Kach, was banned from standing in Israeli elections in 1988 for being "racist" and "anti-democratic".
Mr Netanyahu's deal with Otzma Yehudit appalled many and 50 members of the Board of Deputies urged the body to condemn its "racist and extremist ideology".
Mr Unsdorfer also said the deaths of 35 young Palestinians during the Hamas-backed March of Return demonstrations was the responsibility of their mothers.
He said: “There has been something like two-dozen weeks of riots with upwards of 50,000 people every weekend.
“Can I ask you – what do you think children are doing on a border? Which mother brings a child to the border?
“The mother who brings a child to the border is a mother who is paid by Hamas. ‘Please take your children to the Gaza border, we need them as human shields’. That’s the story, that’s the real story of Gaza.”
He then added: “Unfortunately the children will sometimes be trampled on, be caught up in all sorts of things. There’s gas, water cannons I don’t know what they use.
“We don’t need to shoot anybody, if nobody comes to the border we don’t have to shoot anybody. But on the other hand, if you have hundreds of thousands of people brought to the border for the sole purpose of showing the world Israel kills innocent civilians then that’s going to happen.”
Mr Unsdorfer also hit out at suggestions that Israel discriminated against its Arab population.
“Israeli Arabs are frankly the happiest Arabs in the whole of the Middle East – 1.6 million of them are Israeli citizens and have full rights like every other Israeli,” he said.
“They are equal citizens. When you talk about Palestinian Arabs, they call themselves Palestinian, but I would say the real Palestinians are the Jews because Palestine was simply a renaming of Judea.”
He added that he would “not bore” listeners “at this time of night” with his reasoning behind these claims.
The Likud-Herut UK chair said he sympathised with the ordinary people on the streets of Gaza who were “in a terrible state” because of the actions of Hamas leaders who had “flittered away” millions in European aid into “Swiss bank accounts.”
Likud-Herut UK says it "believes in the inalienable right of all Jews to live and settle in all parts of the Land of Israel and in the support of all government and community efforts and programmes directed to assist the maximum level of Aliyah to Eretz Yisrael".
