Bella Hadid Reposts Debunked ‘Proud Arab Killer’ Quote Attributed to Bennett

“What I actually said was that within the framework of my army service, we killed a lot of terrorists, and that’s a good thing,” said Bennett.

By: Lauren Marcus

Palestinian-American supermodel Bella Hadid took to Instagram on Monday evening to express her displeasure with new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, reposting a quote from him that’s been confirmed to be inaccurate.

Posting a picture of Bennett with the words “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life, and there’s no problem with that” to her 43.4 million followers, she wrote “I’ll just leave this here.”

Bennett corrected the misquote in 2015, when former MK Haneen Zoabi (Balad) referenced it at the Knesset.

During a speech in which she said that ISIS were not terrorists, Zoabi attempted to equivocate Islamic “militant groups” with Israeli military actions.

Setting her sights on Bennett, she brought up the fact that he had served in an elite unit in the IDF and claimed that he was proud of killing Arabs.

“We have here ministers and Knesset members who are proud they’ve killed! The Education Minister [then Bennett] said, ‘in my time…I’ve killed Arabs,’” Zoabi said, referencing a quote that was widely circulated in Arab media.

The quote alleged that Bennett said, “I’ve killed many Arabs in my life, and I’m proud of it” or an alternative version,“I’ve killed many Arabs, and I have no problem with that.”

Bennett took to the podium directly after Zoabi to correct her. “I never said that,” Bennett said.

“What I actually said was that within the framework of my army service, we killed a lot of terrorists, and that’s a good thing, and it’s a shame that we didn’t kill more terrorists, because anyone who tries to hurt the State of Israel should die.”

But the debunked Bennett quote is not the first time Hadid has published a fake quote attributed to an Israel politician.

In May, she reposted an image from an account called zionism.unveiled, which read, “@ayelet.shaked, the former minister of justice for Israel, the same Israeli politician who encouraged genocide against the Palestinians, specifically pregnant mothers, made a statement on how 95% of content they’ve asked Facebook to remove has been removed.”

“This is actually frightening, they are committing ethnic cleansing and do not want the world to know about it!”

Shaked responded publicly, writing, “Bella, you should be ashamed for sharing the completely false and deeply offensive lie that I ever called for ‘genocide.’

“It’s this kind of baseless demonization that is encouraging antisemitic violence. Unlike Hamas and its supporters, we target terrorists and protect civilians.”

   (TPS)