During an independence day ceremony in Israel on Tuesday, the Israeli government honored an extremist rabbi known for bulldozing homes in Gaza and calling for Israel to “flatten” the Palestinian territory.
According to The Guardian, Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv was one of fourteen people chosen by the Israeli government for their “extraordinary contribution to society and the state” to light a torch at the ceremony.
Zarbiv serves as a rabbinical judge for an illegal Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and an Israeli state ombudsman recently ruled that he violated ethical guidelines by expressing “extremist views,” which included his call to flatten Gaza and boasting about the destruction of civilian homes and the IDF’s mass killing of Palestinians.
“Israel, let me tell you, we have crushed them. There are tens of thousands of dead. The dogs and the cats ate them because no one collected them,” Zarbiv said in a TV interview last year. “Tens of thousands of families – they have not a piece of paper, no childhood photo, no IDs, they have nothing. No home, there is nothing. They come, they have no idea where their house is. It’s something unbelievable.”
Zarbiv became well known in Israel for posting videos of himself destroying homes in Gaza, and his name has become slang for destruction. “We’re here in Beit Hanoun attacking this cursed village until we finish it,” Zarbiv said in one of his videos, which was shared by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem. “All the way to victory, to settlement. We will not give up until this village is erased.”
B’Tselem strongly condemned the Israeli government’s move to honor Zarbiv. “Bestowing one of the highest civilian honors in Israel on a citizen who committed war crimes illustrates how deeply the dehumanization of Palestinians has taken root in the Israeli mainstream. It is yet another terrifying signal that genocide has officially become part of the national ethos,” the group said.
