Elie Yosef disrupted a Yesh Atid party election event for English-speaking voters on Sunday, accusing party leader Yair Lapid of assisting in the sale of Israeli weapons to South Sudan.
Lapid served as Israeli’s finance minister from 2013 to 2014 and approved arms sales to South Sudan, where mass rapes, killings and other atrocities have been carried out by government forces against civilians.
According to a 2015 United Nations report, these soldiers use an upgraded version of the Galil assault rifle, called an Ace, developed by Israel Military Industries (now called IMI Systems).
After being ejected from the event by security, Yosef told Vision Magazine that although he regularly disrupts the events of government ministers, Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid is a significant target because his father and grandmother were saved from the Germans by Raoul Wallenberg.
“This Thursday is the 17th of January,” Yosef said. “The day Raoul Wallenberg was kidnapped by the Russians and abandoned by us.”
For Yosef, Wallenberg is an inspirational figure due to the fact that he saved 100,000 Jews from the Holocaust. But he is also a tragic figure in that he was arrested by Russia following World War II and abandoned by the world, including the Jewish people. According to Yosef, Wallenberg was driven by a powerful compassion sorely lacking in Israeli society.
“Yair Lapid’s father and grandmother were saved by the compassion of Raoul Wallenberg. We have abandoned his legacy. In the last government, Yair Lapid was finance minister and a member of the cabinet. They sold arms to government forces in South Sudan and trained them. They were aware of the genocide of over 380,000 men, women and children.”
“Mass rape and hundreds of villages burnt,” Yosef added. “Often burning women and children alive. As a result, there are close to two million refugees and untold suffering. Yesh Atid does not understand that the future of Israel is to be a light to the nations, not sell arms to mass murderers.”
“I can’t live with the fact that, in my name, we’re arming murderers to slaughter women and children,” he continued. “The president of South Sudan gets weapons from us. His troops enter villages, murder men, rape women and burn people alive. And we carry on like it’s nothing. That’s the worst corruption that there is!”
Various international organizations have estimated that between 50,000 and 300,000 people have been killed in the South Sudanese civil war since it began in 2013.
Israeli arms dealers have been selling weapons and military equipment to the war-torn country, including drones, assault rifles and surveillance technology.
Yosef has been leading the charge to rally the Israeli public against arming regimes accused of war crimes.
“The abandonment of the values Wallenberg represented is cruelty to our own souls, to our children and grandchildren who could inherit cynicism instead of compassion.”
“What we sow is what we reap,” he warned. “We sow suffering in South Sudan, Myanmar and Cameroon. We could reap suffering by hate forces in the north of our country. Abandoning values is abandoning our very security.”
Elie Yosef and many others concerned with how a Jewish state is meant to behave on the world stage have rightly criticized Israel’s government and defense industry for betraying Jewish values through arming regimes like South Sudan. Israeli arms manufacturers prioritizing profits over human lives is perhaps one of the most destructive features of westernization in Israel.
Is a “Jewish state” merely a European-style nation-state with Jewish decorations or is it a state that expresses authentic Jewish values in its policies and institutions?
Just as we should oppose the United States arms industry profiting from Jewish and Palestinian blood while forcing us into a situation of dependency, we must also oppose Israeli weapons manufacturers profiting from the war crimes being perpetrated in South Sudan.
