Ofer Cassif
Ofer CassifYonatan Sindel/Flash 90

The Knesset Ethics Committee decided on Wednesday to temporarily suspend MK Ofer Cassif (Hadash-Ta'al) from the plenary following a verbal confrontation last month in which he called MK Almog Cohen (Otzma Yehudit), among other things, a "stinking Nazi", "zero", "stupid" and "bloodthirsty".

Cassif will be suspended from the plenary for three sessions and will not be able to use the parliamentary tools until the end of the winter session. The committee's decision also noted Cassif’s call for civil disobedience.

MK Nissim Vaturi (Likud), who took part in the same incident, received only a warning. In that confrontation, Vaturi called Cassif a "scoundrel" and a "despicable person". At another stage of the debate, Vaturi interrupted MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash-Ta'al), who was addressing the plenum in Arabic.

Cassif, the sole Jewish representative in Hadash-Ta’al, has repeatedly drawn criticism for his anti-Israel statements, including comparisons of Israeli leaders and even the State of Israel to the Nazi party and Nazi-era Germany.

Cassif once shared a Facebook post calling Ayelet Shaked, who at the time was serving as Justice Minister, a “neo-Nazi scum”.

In 2017, he was recorded during a class comparing the State of Israel to Nazi Germany, warning that Israel was “on a slippery slope” to fascism.

In another incident, Cassif said that Israel should not be compared to an apartheid state because, he claimed, it is “worse than apartheid”.

Before the election in April of 2019, the Central Elections Committee decided to disqualify Cassif from running, but the Supreme Court overturned that decision.