Elon Musk visited Israel on Monday, meeting with the country’s leaders and walking through a kibbutz destroyed by Hamas last month to calm outrage over his endorsement of an anti-Semitic post on his X social media platform.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took Musk to Kfar Azza, one of the kibbutzim that were attacked on October 7. The kibbutz was home to Abigail Idan, a four-year-old American dual citizen who was abducted by militants that day and released on Sunday.
In a live X chat with Netanyahu on Monday, Musk agreed with the prime minister that Israel must destroy Hamas.
“Those who intend to kill must be neutralized. Then the propaganda should stop,” Musk said. ” They are exactly training people to live killers.”
He also said that Gaza must be made “prosperous”.
still, I suppose it’s going to be a good future,” he said,” If( each) of that happens. “I’d like to help.”
Musk similarly met behind unrestricted gates with Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
In a report on the meeting, the president’s office said Herzog urged Musk to fight anti-Semitism online.
“Unfortunately, we are rife with anti-Semitism, meaning hatred of Jews,” Herzog told Musk, according to the statement. ” I suppose we need to fight this together because the platforms that you guide unfortunately have a large force of abomination, the abomination of Jews, anti-Semitism.”
Musk met with the families of the hostages
An earlier statement from the president’s office said that representatives of the families of hostages held by Hamas also joined the meeting to share “the horror of the terrorist attack by Hamas and the ongoing tingle and query for those held interned.”
Rachel Goldberg was among the family members who met with Musk on Monday. Goldberg told Jake Tapper on Monday’s “The Lead” that Musk seemed “genuinely concerned and touched” when she showed him the video of the moment her 23-year-old son Hersh Goldberg-Paulin had his arm torn off in the attack. Attacks on October 7.
” I suppose he was really surprised, and he was also really surprised by the fact that it happened while someone was at a music jubilee,” Goldberg said. “I think he’s a very nice man, clearly shocked and appalled by what he saw.”
Another parent, the father of a hostage named Omer Shem-Tov, gave Musk a token that read, “Our hearts are hostages in Gaza,” according to a post X sent by Herzog’s office Monday night.
Musk wore the badge around his neck, the video showed in the post, and later wrote on X: “I will wear it every day until your loved ones are released.”
During a visit to the destroyed kibbutz, Israeli officials described to Musk what had happened, according to the press service of the Israeli government.
“The prime minister and Musk went to the home of the Edan family, where Musk heard about the family history of four-year-old Abigail Edan, whose parents were killed, who was kidnapped in Gaza and released yesterday from the captivity of Hamas,” the message said. office added.
The billionaire’s visit to Israel comes more than a week after he agreed with claims that Jewish communities promote “white hatred,” prompting a rebuke from the White House and a large exodus of advertisers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
In an X post earlier this month, one user accused Jewish communities of “promoting dialectical anti-white hatred that they say they want people to stop using against them.” The post also appertained to” crowds of nonages” submerging Western countries, a popularanti-Semitic conspiracy proposition.
In response, Musk said,” You spoke the real verity.”
The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews want to transport undocumented minorities to Western countries to reduce the white majority in those countries is promoted by online hate groups.
Musk said in subsequent posts at the time that he did not believe that hatred of white people extended “to all Jewish communities.”
But he said the Anti-Defamation League( ADL), an association that fights anti-Semitism around the world, “ unfairly attacks the maturity of the West, even though the maturity of the West supports the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, on their terms, criticize the minority groups that are the main threat to them.”
The comments, which coincide with a surge in hate crimes in the US against Jews and Muslims, drew swift condemnation from human rights groups as well as politicians.
Musk has since denied accusations of racism, writing on X last week that any claims he is anti-Semitic could not be “further from the truth.”
Advertisers are fleeing
For X, the problem is too difficult to ignore. The dispute quickly turned into a huge commercial headache for the company, with at least a dozen major brands halting ad spending as of last Wednesday. Among them are Disney, IBM, Fox Sports, and indeed the European Commission.
Even before the latest riot, X faced criticism for the prevalence of anti-Semitic discourse on its platform. Organizations including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Center Against Digital Hate have reported an increase in hate speech on X over the past year, findings that Musk has either criticized or denied.
In September, Musk threatened to sue the ADL for defamation, claiming the group’s reports hurt ad sales on X.
The organization also recently reported a sharp increase in anti-Semitic posts on X, especially after the start of the Israel-Hamas war in early October.
X responded to similar claims by progressive media watchdog Media Matters, which also highlighted anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi content on X in an analysis earlier this month.
In response, X sued Media Matters, alleging that the group misrepresented the likelihood of ads appearing next to extremist content on the site. He also called on his advertising mates to help cover what he calls” freedom of speech.”
Musk’s visit to Israel comes during a lull in hostilities with Hamas. In the first three days of the truce, Hamas released a total of 58 hostages, mostly women and children, in exchange for the release of 117 Palestinian prisoners and said it wanted to extend the truce.
In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on Sunday, Herzog recounted the bittersweet moment when the freed hostages were reunited with their families.
“That’s what brings us happiness, but of course happiness with a lot of grief, because at least 200 hostages are still being held there,” Herzog told Blitzer.
Herzog said the truce could be extended, pointing to an initial agreement that there would be an additional day of ceasefire for every 10 hostages released, but he said Hamas must release more hostages.
