It started with a secret plan to bring in troops to break a potential port strike.  That was followed by threats to move work to ports in neighboring countries.  But now Netanyahu’s far-right Minister of the Economy, Naftali Bennett, has gone one step further — he’s joked publicly, on Facebook, about ‘exterminating’ port workers.  Here’s what he wrote (in Hebrew):

Bennett targetted the port workers already during his successful election campaign and he’s made no secret of his desire to break Israel’s powerful unions where he can.  His joke prompted a fierce response from one Labour Party politician, Prof. Yoni Yona, who wrote “Bennett’s invitation to exterminators to exterminate the ports workers marks an escalation in Naftali Bennett’s battle against these workers. Bennett is stringing himself up from a high, monstrous, racist tree; his inspiration is fed from the racist Nazi strategy which held that if you want to prepare the ground to physically harm a human group, first symbolically shove it into the animal world.”  Read the full story here.