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Opponent of Jewish ‘assimilation’ indicted for incitement to terror

Gopstein warned that “if there was an Arab waiter here, he would not be serving food; he would be looking for the closest hospital.”

By World Israel News Staff 

Bentzi Gopstein, head of the Lehava organization, which opposes Jewish assimilation, was indicted on Tuesday on charges of incitement to terrorism, violence, and racism.

The indictment was announced by the Jerusalem District Attorney’s Office as having been handed down by the local district court.

The charges leveled against Gopstein were said to be in connection with statements he made about Arabs during the period of 2012 to 2017.

It also included an incident in 2012 in which a number of Jewish youths physically attacked three Arabs at Zion Square in Jerusalem.

The Lehava leader had been banned from running in the September 17 Knesset election by the Supreme Court.

One of his comments deemed inflammatory was made during an interview on Channel 2 when he spoke of keeping Arabs away from working at the hall where his daughter was getting married.

He spoke of “the purity of Jewish labor,” adding that “if there was an Arab waiter here, he would not be serving food; he would be looking for the closest hospital.”

In stating his objection to intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, Gopstein is quoted as saying: “There’s no shortage of Arabs who deserved to be beaten up,” adding that “an Arab who is going with a Jewish girl, I don’t think that he needs to continue to go in the street with his Jewish girl.”

Describing the Muslim Dome of the Rock, he said: “The Temple Mount has the largest cancer growth of them all.”

In response to the indictment, Gopstein decried that the Israeli legal establishment had “decided that the war against assimilation in the Holy Land is against the law.”