Netanyahu on Swedish Minister’s Remarks: Outrageous, Immoral, Unjust and Stupid

Israel announced Wednesday it will not receive Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom in view of her harsh comments on Israel’s disproportionate and extra-judicial killing of Palestinians during the recent spate of violence between Palestinians and Israelis.

In a statement, the foreign ministry said “she does not understand what is happening in our region and is apparently not aware of the hard situation facing Israeli citizens, and the continuous danger of murderous terrorism, adding that her comments “attest to her biased and even hostile attitude” toward Israel”.

“It is vital that there is a thorough, credible investigation into these deaths in order to clarify and bring about possible accountability”, Swedish media quoted Wallstrom as saying during a parliamentary debate on Tuesday. The troops shot and killed him, the military said.

Anadolu Agency said that it received a statement issued from the PA foreign ministry welcoming Wallström’s comments.

Rights groups have accused Israel of using excessive force to quell a surge in attacks, which has raised fears of wider confrontation, a decade after the last Palestinian uprising subsided. Israel says 92 of these were assailants, while most of the others died in clashes with Israeli security forces.

The Israeli prime minister said during a special event for the foreign press in Jerusalem that people are “protecting themselves from attackers who wish to kill them with knives”, calling Wallstrom’s call for an inquiry into the killings “absurd”. At the same time, Arab Palestinians who were forced off their land in what became Israel after the 1948 war are barred from returning.

When Nawi was arrested, in 2007, for attacking Israeli policemen during a West Bank demonstration, writes Leibovitz, more than 20,000 people – including prominent Israeli and American academics like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein – signed a petition demanding his release.

Around 150 Palestinians and 24 Israelis have been killed since October 2015 in new clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces in the West Bank.

As if relations between Sweden and Israel weren’t already awkward enough, Israel will no longer host Sweden’s foreign minister.

The wave of violence between Israel and Palestine erupted at the beginning of October after Israel tried to impose an entry ban to Al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Sweden, a staunch critic of Israel’s policies against the Palestinians, recognized a Palestinian state in 2014, to the ire of Israeli officials.