Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a dedication ceremony of the "Assuta" hospital in Ashdod, Israel December 21, 2017. (photo credit: AMIR COHEN/REUTERS)
Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros is behind the public campaign against the government's plan to deport Sudanese and Eritrean migrants to a third country in Africa, widely believed to be Rwanda, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
Channel 10 reported that Netanyahu made the comments at the weekly meeting of the Likud ministers. According to the report, Netanyahu said former US president Barack Obama “deported two million infiltrators, and no one said anything.”
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The comments came in reply to Science Minister Ofir Akunis, who claimed that foreign governments were behind the campaign to prevent the deportations.
Soros, who is Jewish, is a strident critic of Israel and has supported a number of NGOs with radical left-wing agendas, such as Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, Yesh Din and al-Haq.
He was the victim over the summer of an anti-immigrant billboard campaign sponsored by the Hungarian government, which many in the Jewish community there believed had antisemitic overtones. Soros called on Hungary to allow refugees into Hungary and the EU.
The posters, some of which were defaced with antisemitic graffiti, had a picture of Soros laughing, alongside the words, “Let's not leave Soros the last laugh.”
Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg responded to Netanyahu's comment by saying his decision to “deflect the fire to George Soros should worry us all.”
Zandberg said that Hungary has been “carrying out an antisemitic campaign against Soros” for the past year, a campaign which she said the Foreign Ministry has warned against, and which Hungarian Jews fear.
“Netanyahu's decision to light a fire around that antisemitic campaign and to to join it is a direct continuation of the dangerous ties that exist between the Likud and the extreme right wing parties in Europe,” she said.