Politics & Diplomacy
Feiglin tells teenage interviewer Gazans must leave or die
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The far-right Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin said Gaza's residents face a choice of leaving or dying, pressed on live television by a seventeen-year-old interviewer who refused to let him hide behind the phrase voluntary emigration.
The exchange, on the Knesset Channel program First Vote with young host Eitan Neumann of Ra'anana, was recounted Thursday by Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, who called it a lesson in journalism for Israel's most celebrated interviewers.
Asked what happens to a Gazan who refuses to leave, Feiglin answered that he would be made to go, by any means possible: we will shut off his water tap, for example. Pressed on whether those who stay should die, he replied: then he will thirst. To drink, he must leave.
When Neumann asked whether that means killing them all, Feiglin answered after a silence: yes, let them all die. Either leaving or death.
Levy wrote that the unknown teenager exposed the lie inside the slogan of voluntary departure, forcing an admission of what he described as a total solution delivered with blood-chilling calm. Israel's professional interviewers, Levy concluded, have always been too cowardly to ask the real questions.
