Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Avigdor Liberman Suggests ‘Beheading’ Israeli-Arabs Who Oppose Jewish State

An Arab-Israeli Knesset member called Israel’s foreign minister “Jewish Islamic State” after Avigdor Liberman said that Arab citizens who betray the country should be beheaded.

Ahmed Tibi, the head of the Arab Movement for Change (Ta’al) party, on Monday responded to remarks made the previous day by Liberman in Herzliya, The Jerusalem Post reported. Tibi has served in the Knesset since 1999.

Liberman, who chairs the Yisrael Beiteinu party, said in his speech, “Whoever is with us should get everything. Whoever is against us, there’s nothing else to do. We have to lift up an axe and remove his head, otherwise we won’t survive here.”

The foreign minister also said that Umm al-Fahm, a large Arab town in the Galilee, should be part of a future Palestinian state and not Israel.

“Israeli citizens who wave a black flag on Nakba Day can leave, and I am willing to donate them to [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] very happily,” he added, referring to the day, also known as “the catastrophe,” in which Palestinians lament the displacement of their people following Israeli independence in 1948.

On Monday, several diplomats, including Israel’s former ambassadors to South Africa and France, also condemned Liberman’s comments.

“Israel’s No. 1 diplomat is waving an axe over the heads of citizens of the country that he represents, and in the same breath he preaches to the whole world about fighting anti-Semitism,” the diplomats said, according to the Post.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.