An influential Israeli rabbi has said God should strike the Palestinians and their leader with a plague, calling for their death in a fiery sermon before Middle East peace talks set to begin next week.
“Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth,” Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual head of the religious Shas party in Israel’s government, said in a sermon late on Saturday, using Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s popular name.
“God should strike them and these Palestinians — evil haters of Israel — with a plague,” the 89-year-old rabbi said in his weekly address to the faithful, excerpts of which were broadcast on Israeli radio on Sunday.
PHOTO: EPA
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu distanced himself from the comments and said Israel wanted to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians that would ensure good neighborly relations.
“The comments do not reflect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view or the position of the government of Israel,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
The US said Yosef’s comments were “inflammatory” and an impediment to peace efforts.
“As we move forward to relaunch peace negotiations, it is important that actions by people on all sides help to advance our effort, not hinder it,” US State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in a statement.
US President Barack Obama’s administration is hosting Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Washington this week to try to restart direct Mideast peace negotiations after a nearly two-year hiatus.
The Iraqi-born cleric has made similar remarks before, most notably in 2001, during a Palestinian uprising, when he called for Arabs’ annihilation and said it was forbidden to be merciful to them.
He later said he was referring only to “terrorists” who attacked Israelis. In the 1990s, Yosef broke with other Orthodox Jewish leaders by voicing support for territorial compromise with the Palestinians.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said Yosef’s latest comments were tantamount to calling for “genocide against Palestinians.”
The rabbi’s remarks, he said, were “an insult to all our efforts to advance the negotiations process.”
Arriving at Netanyahu’s office for a weekly cabinet meeting, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai of Shas declined to comment when asked by reporters about Yosef’s sermon.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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