Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu visit Gaza area -Photo by Amos Ben Gershom, GPO
Elon Musk, the controversial owner of Twitter, visited Israel on Monday where he met with both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s President Isaac Herzog. Musk was also given a personal tour of the areas in southern Israel destroyed in the barbaric October 7 terrorist attack. He was also shown a video of the atrocities committed by Hamas during the attack.
Prime Minister Netanyahu and Elon Musk toured Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where the Prime Minister showed him the horrors of the massacre at the kibbutz on Saturday, October 7th. They also went to the Leibstein family residence where Musk heard about the heroism of the late Ofir Leibstein, the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council Chairman who was murdered on the morning of October 7th in exchanges of fire with terrorists who had entered the kibbutz.
The Prime Minister and Musk proceeded to the Itamari family residence where Musk heard about Avigail Idan (4), whose parents were murdered and she was abducted to Gaza and released on Sunday from Hamas captivity. At the family home, an IDF Spokesperson representative showed photographs that were taken a few days after the massacre.
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Musk’s visit was somewhat of a PR campaign on his part after the Tesla founder was accused by many of antisemitism.
In the meeting with President Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem, Elon Musk also met with representatives of families of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
The meeting with the President came after Elon Musk toured the areas near Gaza. On that, President Herzog told him, “…you’ve seen how evil can supersede everything. You’ve seen it this morning, you’ve seen what hate can bring about, you’ve seen how thought turns into evil, into hate, and into bloodshed. It is so close. And whilst you look forward with the most advanced technologies on Earth, it is clear that the oldest disease in humanity, antisemitism, lurks underneath and impacts so many societies.”
The President went on to talk about how Jews today are “inundated by antisemitism, which is Jew hatred.”
He told Musk that he has a “huge role to play” and that they “need to fight it together because on the platforms which you lead, unfortunately, there’s a harboring of a lot of all the hate, which is Jew hatred, of antisemitism.”
Elon Musk seemed to have been moved by what he saw during the day, saying that it was, “certainly an emotionally difficult day, to see the places where people were murdered. And also to watch the video where the murderers are rejoicing. Celebrating the murder of innocent people is extremely disturbing.”
Musk also seemed to acknowledge that he needs to do more to stamp out the proliferation of hate speech on Twitter.
“We have to do whatever is necessary to stop the hate,” he told President Herzog. “Essentially these people have been fed propaganda since they were children. And it’s remarkable what humans are capable of if they’re fed falsehoods, from when they are children, they will think that the murder of innocent people is a good thing. That is how much propaganda can affect people’s minds.”
President Herzog meets with Elon Musk – Photo by Haim Zach/GPO
“And I think there’s three things that need to happen in the Gaza situation,” he added, “there’s no choice but to kill those who insist on murdering civilians. You are going to change their mind. But the second thing is to change the education so the new generation of murderers is not trained to be murderers. And the third thing, which is also very important is to try to build prosperity.”
The visit came as a surprise to many after Elon Musk has been widely criticized for allowing the proliferation of antisemitic posts, as well as outright lies about Israel during the ongoing war in Gaza, on his Twitter social media platform. Musk has argued that he is concerned with freedom of speech so he does not wish to censor the posts on Twitter. But his critics have argued that as the operator of the world’s most used messaging platform through which countless people around the world receive news updates, he has a moral obligation to do something about its use for hate speech.
And Elon Musk has himself personally agreed with antisemitic posts on Twitter.
One such post read, “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”
To that Elon Musk responded, “You have said the actual truth.”
