Far-right Israeli government minister Bezalel Smotrich said there is no such thing as the Palestinian people, calling them an “invention” from the last century, in an address to a private memorial service in Paris. Smotrich said that he and his ancestors are the real Palestinians, based on their long and continuous presence on the land. “My father was a 13th-generation native of Jerusalem and my grandmother who was born to Zionist pioneers in Metula 100 years ago, is a Palestinian,” Smotrich reportedly said. “There are Arabs in the Middle East who arrived in the land of Israel at the same time the Jewish Zionist return began, after 2,000 years of exile, and some Arabs in the region, do not like that. So, what do they do? They invent a fictitious people and claim fictitious rights in the land of Israel, just to fight the Zionist movement,” he also said. Smotrich was speaking at a private memorial service for prominent right-wing Likud activist and Jewish Agency board member Jacques Kupfer, who died in 2021. Smotrich raised hackles earlier this month when he said that the West Bank town of Huwara should be “wiped out” after a Palestinian shooting attack that left two Israeli brothers dead, though he later walked back his statement.
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