Turkey and Syria earthquake: Controversial Israeli rabbi describes disaster as ‘divine justice’

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A controversial Israeli rabbi has sparked outrage after claiming Monday’s devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria was “divine justice”.

Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed in northern Israel and a member of the Great Council of Rabbis, claimed that God was punishing the countries affected by the Holocaust for their alleged mistreatment of the Jewish people.

“God is on trial all the nations around us who wanted to invade our land and throw us into the sea,” Eliyahu wrote in an article published in the Olam Katan newspaper on Friday.

At least 28,000 people died in Monday’s devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake, and up to 18 million people were directly affected in southern Turkey and northern Syria.

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In his article, Eliyahu claimed that Syria had “abused its Jewish population for hundreds of years, invaded Israel three times, shot for years farmers who lived at the foot of the Golan Heights, abused and executed captives.” [Israeli spy] So Cohen.”

He also took aim at earthquake-hit Lebanon and facing a debilitating financial crisis, writing: “There is no doubt that the country that was once the ‘Switzerland of the Middle East’ has become hell on earth, and such things do not happen by chance.”

As for Turkey, which was the epicenter of the earthquake, he wrote: “We do not know what are the accounts of Paradise with Turkey, which have been distorted against us in every possible arena, but if God reveals that He will issue judgments on our enemies, we know that everything that happens is the cleaning and improvement of the world.”

Eliyahu, who is the father of right-wing MP and Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Ben Eliyahu, has repeatedly sparked controversy for his anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab statements, and has been charged with incitement to racism.

In 2008, he called on the government to take “state-sanctioned retaliation” against Arabs in order to restore what he described as Israeli deterrence following an attack on a Jewish school in Jerusalem.

And in 2019, he told teens suspected of killing a Palestinian woman in the West Bank that they should not fear imprisonment because this is where the path to political power begins, prompting several human rights organizations to demand disciplinary action and criminal charges against them. for him.

Since the devastating earthquake, dozens of countries from around the world have sent aid and rescue teams to Turkey, including Israel.

rocky relationship

Relations between Turkey and Israel worsened in 2011, when Ankara expelled the Israeli ambassador in the wake of a UN report on the 2010 Israeli raid on the aid ship Mavi Marmara to Gaza, during which nine Turkish citizens were killed.

The rift was healed in 2016 when full diplomatic relations were restored and the two countries exchanged ambassadors.

Late last year, Israeli President Isaac Herzog met Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Turkish capital, Ankara, in the first visit by an Israeli head of state to the country since 2008.

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