Israel’s Netanyahu ejects party member over Holocaust mockery during judicial protest
- A video showed Itzik Zarka spitting at demonstrators and shouting: ‘I’m proud that six million of you were burned!’
- Zarka, who is Jewish and the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, said his comments had been ‘taken out of context’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the ejection on Sunday of an activist from his Likud party who mocked the Holocaust while heckling anti-government protesters, in remarks that suggested ethnic tensions beneath a constitutional crisis.
Video circulated on social media showed Itzik Zarka swearing and spitting at demonstrators at a traffic junction near the working-class town of Beit Shean on Saturday.
“It’s not for nothing that six million were killed,” he shouts. “I’m proud that six million of you were burned!”
“We will not tolerate such disgraceful behaviour in the Likud movement,” Netanyahu said in a statement on the ouster of Zarka, for years a towering figure at party campaign events.
By framing the mostly European Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide as adversaries, Zarka appeared to be distinguishing between them and Mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern descent who have been a traditional core of support for the conservative Likud.
Some members of Netanyahu’s religious-nationalist coalition have cast the prime minister’s push to overhaul the judiciary as redressing elitist overreach by the Askenazi, or European-descended, Jews who dominated the country’s founding generation.