The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, and Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network call on all human rights and political organizations, social movements, and the free peoples in Brazil and around the world to reject the reception of the war criminal Naftali Bennett, former prime minister of the Israeli occupation, a criminal who carries on his shoulders the blood of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of crimes against our people.
This visit, organized by entities such as the Hebraica Club of São Paulo, is not only a demonstration of support for him but a direct endorsement of the ongoing project of occupation and aggression against Palestine. We urge the Brazilian authorities to immediately fulfill their legal and humanitarian responsibilities by arresting Bennett and preventing his movements.
Naftali Bennett is a war criminal par excellence, as demonstrated by his public statements defending genocide, killings and extrajudicial executions. In 2021, he openly supported the Israeli soldiers who shot the young Palestinian Muhammad Salima in the Bab al-Amud area of Jerusalem while he was lying on the ground. Bennett stated on his Twitter account that the soldiers acted “quickly and decisively” and demanded full support for them. These statements reveal explicit political directives that encourage the killing of Palestinians with complete impunity.
In a similar case, the killing of the Palestinian worker Abdel Fattah al-Sharif by the soldier Elor Azaria in 2016 is further proof of a systematic pattern of extrajudicial executions, repeated during Bennett’s tenure as prime minister and that of other leaders of the occupation.
Bennett’s colonial settlement expansion plans represent one of the central instruments of the occupation project: his government approved numerous settlement projects and expansions aimed at multiplying the number of settlers and annexing vast areas of Palestinian land, especially in the West Bank, including the so-called “Area C,” which represents 61% of the territory, as well as attempts to consolidate control over regions of Gaza. Bennett categorically rejected the creation of a free Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
These colonial policies destroy the land and forcibly remove the Palestinian people. These are crimes that require accountability and international prosecution. Among his most prominent projects are the expansion of the “Trump” settlement, doubling the number of settlers in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, and the implementation of 31 major colonization plans in the West Bank of occupied Palestine, deepening the occupation under a false political and legal cover.
We also draw attention to the reality of Brazilian lands, marked by continuous appropriations by internal and external colonizers at the expense of Indigenous peoples. We reject the entry of war criminals like Bennett into a country already exhausted by colonialism. Brazil must be a land of freedom and justice, not a safe haven for war criminals nor a collaborator in occupation and colonization policies.
Our demand to arrest of Naftali Bennett is legitimate on legal, political, and human grounds. He is a war criminal who must be held accountable both internationally and locally. We believe that radical struggle against Zionism and the dismantling of its projects is the essential and initial step in the broader struggle against the capitalism and imperialism that sustain and finance the occupation.
This campaign is the voice of freedom and justice. We will not allow normalization with the occupation nor complacency toward war criminals.
Freedom for all Palestinian prisoners.
Together in the struggle until liberation, from the river to the sea.