Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett sparred with Jake Tapper during a Tuesday CNN appearance over his call to “denazify” Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Bennett laid out the call as part of a proposal to ensure that the deadly terrorist attack carried out by Hamas on multiple locations in southern Israel Oct. 7, killing over 1,400 people. On Monday, Israel agreed to extend the cease-fire with the radical Islamic terrorist group by two days after multiple groups of hostages were released since Friday. (RELATED: ‘He Needs To Get His Head Straight’: Former Israeli Operative Says Biden Is Falling For Hamas’ ‘Psychological Warfare’)
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“The first thing is to fully disarm Gaza and ensure that there is no more arms, no more explosives there after we dismantle and eliminate Hamas. The first thing is to kill the Hamas leadership and the terrorists, then clean up Gaza from weapons and explosives so something like this can never happen again,” Bennett told CNN host Jake Tapper. “The third thing I would do is create a buffer zone into Gaza about on and a half kilometers deep, which would be a no man’s land between Gaza and Israel so this sort of thing can’t happen and Israel would retain overall defense responsibility, but we don’t want to govern the Gazans.”
“So what I think we would do is create an interim technocratic self-government that would say, for about five years, govern Gaza, denazify Gaza, which means clean out all the incitement, that education that all Jews are pigs and devils, and after five years, we would revisit and figure out how to create a sustainable government,” Bennett continued.
Tapper questioned Bennett, citing concerns about free speech.
“What do you mean by denazify? No free speech? People can’t say nasty things about Jews?” Tapper asked. “Get rid of them how?”
“Free speech doesn’t mean educating and poisoning the minds and hearts,” Bennett said.
Bennett cited Hamas propaganda that promoted antisemitism. Hosts on one children’s TV show aired by Hamas taught young children to shoot Jews.
“When people are incited with propaganda from the moment they’re born, through they are 20 years old, that all Jews are pigs and devils and need to be slaughtered, they go out and slaughter Jews,” Bennett said. “If it is something that we used to sort of procrastinate on, or not take care of, we can’t ignore it anymore.”
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