Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief Zionist rabbi of Safed said in a column on Friday that the catastrophic earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria earlier this week and killed tens of thousands of people was “divine justice.”
In the article published in Olam Katan, a popular conservative religious right-wing weekly newsletter, Eliyahu, who has close ties to National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, compared the earthquake to the drowning of the Egyptian forces in the Red Sea in the biblical story of Exodus, Times of Israel reported.
“There is no doubt that those who would have seen the Egyptians drowning in the sea and who did not remember the whole event from beginning to end would have been filled with great pity for them and would have tried to save them from drowning,” Eliyahu wrote.
“But the Israelites sang songs because they knew the Egyptians, and understood that these drowners wanted to kill some of them and to continue to enslave the rest. They sang songs because they understood that there was divine justice here intended to punish the Egyptians, who had drowned the children of the people of Israel in the Nile, so that all the wicked in the world would see and be afraid,” he said.
Turning to the massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake, which has killed at least 28,000 people in Turkey and neighboring Syria, Eliyahu said: “God is judging all the nations around us who wanted to invade our land several times and throw us into the sea.”
Pertinently, with chances of finding more survivors growing more remote, the toll in both countries from Monday’s earthquake and major aftershocks rose above 28,000 and looked set to keep growing. It was the deadliest quake in Turkey since 1939.
