Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is shocked by the manifestations of anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism and racism in Charlottesville. “Everyone should oppose this hatred,” Netanyahu wrote on the prime minister’s official English-language Twitter account Aug. 15. The same Netanyahu warned the public on the day of the March 2015 elections that Israel’s Arab citizens, who ostensibly enjoy full equality, were “flocking in droves to the polling stations.”

As always, Netanyahu’s response followed closely on the heels of calls by his coalition partner/rival Naftali Bennett, the head of the HaBayit HaYehudi party, demanding that US leaders condemn the latest displays of anti-Semitism. Bennett, the politician who headed up the chorus pleading for a pardon for Elor Azaria, the Israel Defense Forces soldier convicted of shooting dead a wounded, unarmed Palestinian terrorist. If the executed terrorist had not been named Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, but rather Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish settler who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in 1994 in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, not a single patriotic politician would have sided with the soldier.

Bennett’s Knesset faction includes Bezalel Smotrich, the lawmaker who demanded the separation of Jewish and Arab women in hospital maternity wards last year. Netanyahu and Bennett both lead parties that refuse to recognize the rights of millions of Palestinians to a state of their own, because they were not born to Jewish mothers nor converted according to the laws of the ultra-Orthodox, who constitute a minority stream within Judaism.

Look who’s talking, or, as the Talmud put it, “Remove the beam from between your eyes” (Arakin 16b). The beam is so thick that it blinds leaders of the political right to the image of their own shameful racist selves. The Israeli leadership exudes a stench of racism. The Jewish alt-right occupies the seat of government and the front benches of the legislature. From those perches it devises initiative after initiative that are anathema to those on the right, such as Likud Party Knesset member Benny Begin, who hold dear the principles of democracy. Following are two blatant instances of racism that Begin has lambasted through the media.