Amichai Chikli has been appointed to the new Israeli government by returning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Minister of Diaspora Affairs. Chikli will also serve as the Minister of Social Equality and will be responsible for the work of the government against the delegitimization of Israel in the rest of the world. Chikli was originally elected as a member of Naftali Bennet’s party Yamina in March 2021, but repeatedly voted against the Bennet-Lapid government, eventually splitting-off to join Netanyahu.
Quotes from Amichai Chikli
On Palestinians
As a member of the 24th Knesset, Chikli was a prominent figure in the campaign of incitement against elected Palestinian MKs, falsely alleging that they support terrorism and calling them “enemies”.
In 2015, Chikli shared a doctored photo on his Facebook account, suggesting that members of the Joint List were terrorists, depicting them holding knives and an explosive belt.
In 2017 Chikli took to Facebook to call for the transfer of a number of Palestinian villages within Israel to the Palestinian Authority, which effectively means revoking the Israeli citizenship of Palestinian citizens of Israel. In the same post, referring to Umm al-Fahm, an Arab city in Israel, he wrote: “I am not interested in building housing complexes and renovating sidewalks in a city that breeds terrorists.” (Facebook)
On a podcast in 2021 Chikli dismissed the Palestinian identity and called for it to be eliminated by saying: “It is all built on opposition to Zionism. That is the national identity of Palestinians. There is no Palestinian national identity with a positive content of its own. Therefore we won’t be rid of this conflict until this national identity ceases to be.” (Ofer Casspi podcast)
Speaking at a Knesset special event about the Detention of Palestinian children in 2021, Chikli said: “There is not a single Israeli Jew whose teachers taught them to hate Arabs and hurt them, to stab them, to murder them. But from the Palestinian Authority we continue to witness education the likes of which the world has not seen since the thirties – no less than Goebbelsian anti-Semitism, that brain-washes the minds and souls of Arab youths. Anti-Semitic indoctrination that, shamefully, is represented in this very hall [the Knesset].” (News1)
Earlier, in 2019 he called Palestinian society “a barbaric society that breeds murderous children and admirers of martyrs who slaughter women and babies.” (Facebook)
On the judicial system
Chikli joins the incitement among members of the new coalition against the Israeli judiciary, and specifically the independence of the Supreme Court.
In March this year he said in an interview: “[The judicial system is] a disease-ridden system without any checks [on its power], whose connection to national and Zionist values is somewhere between questionable and non-existent. [And it] has a complete misunderstanding of the threat we face on the international stage. What we need is a clean break.” (Giluy Daat)
In 2019 he wrote: “There is a limit to the insolence and support that our judicial system gives to terrorism […] We need an Israeli court, not a court in the spirit of the UN Human Rights Council.” (Facebook)
Attacks against Israeli civil society organizations, Jewish diaspora and the EU
In 2023, despite widespread criticism from the diaspora, Amichai Chikli doubled down on using rhetoric against George Soros which was widely deemed to feed into antisemitic tropes – his ministerial brief includes fighting antisemitism, but he has failed to listen to the diaspora on the issue. (Times of Israel)
He has also met with controversial far-right figures including extremist evengelicals who opposes LGBTQ rights as well as women’s rights – again, despite pressure from the diaspora to avoid meeting with extremists. (Haaretz)
Chikli helped to found the ultra-nationalist right-wing organization Reservists on Duty, which was set up with the purpose of countering the work of Breaking the Silence (BtS) and was central in the smear campaign against the organization. Chikli was also awarded a prize by Im Tirzu, an ultra-nationalist right-wing organization which dangerously incites against Israeli human rights NGOs. Furthermore, Chikli spoke at a public event entitled “Human rights organizations operated by Hamas” sponsored by another notorious ultra-nationalist right-wing pro-occupation organization with a history of planting moles inside BtS, Ad Kan. At the event, Chikli stated “under the guise of human rights organizations and humanitarian activity hides a radical antisemitic and anti-Zionist ideology, whose purpose is to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel and spill the blood of its soldiers and citizens.” (Haaretz)
In 2017 Chikli referred to the support from European countries to civil society organizations in Israel and declared: “Anyone who wants to learn about the extent of the involvement of European countries in Israeli politics need only look at the public discourse surrounding B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, organizations that could not survive for ten minutes without foreign money. Organizations that exaggerate the discourse and that, through false propaganda bordering on anti-Semitism, blacken the face of the IDF and the State of Israel.” (Facebook)
Referring to the state of American Jewry in 2021, Chikli said: “Think of Peter Beinart, with all the filth and slander he spreads about Israel. In my opinion, some of Reform Judaism – the progressives and organizations like IfNotNow – are alienating themselves from their own people. It used to be difficult to be Jewish, so they made their Judaism easier; today it is difficult to be a Zionist, so they say to themselves: ‘We’ll go to the other side, where it is more convenient.” (Ibid.)
LGBTQ issues
As Minister for Social Equality, Chikli will be responsible for working with the queer community in Israel. He has expressed explicitly homophobic views on a number of occasions.
In March of this year, Chikli gave an interview to the right-wing think tank Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and stated “Now[days] it’s ‘let’s gather together, LGBTQ and BLM and the Palestinians, all these oppressed groups, and let’s find an enemy to unite against,’ and again, it’s us, the Jews.” (Twitter)
In 2017 he wrote on a now-deleted but still accessible Facebook post: “The LGBT flag is no longer the flag of the gay community, it is the flag of a new nation-religion, the progressive nation-religion that has hundreds of millions of believers. And these are the six commandments of the progressive religion: There is only one truth and that is that there is no one truth. The other is me even if he kills me on the way.
Zionism is the enemy of humanity and the Palestinians are the poorest victims in the Milky Way. Donald Trump is the second enemy of humanity after Zionism. Inclusive patience and acceptance of everyone who thinks like me or belongs to ISIS.
Zero patience for a Westerner who dares not to think like me.
Among the important religious customs:
Gay Pride Parade
Apartheid week
Prominent leaders in the world…”
In a news interview Chikli declared: “We believe that the family unit is the healthiest place to father a child, for him to grow, to develop, to give him an anchor, it’s an important thing. In the world, we know that the progressive view comes and says ‘no, it is really not relevant’ […] on the topic of gender, I can’t keep track of how many options there are […] it went from LGB to LGBT and then to Q…” (Now 14)