Shmuel Eliyahu

In May 2007, Eliyahu advocated "carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life". He further stated, "If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill 1,000. If they do not stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop, we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."[5]

In March 2008, Eliyahu called for "state-sanctioned revenge" against Arabs. According to Haaretz, Eliyahu wrote an article for the newsletter Eretz Yisrael Shelanu ("Our Land of Israel"), wherein he proposed "hanging the children of the terrorist who carried out the attack in the Mercaz Harav yeshiva from a tree".[6]

Eliyahu calls for a religious Prime Minister of Israel, saying that earlier prime ministers (presumably referring to Ehud Olmert) had been "without faith...without credibility...[and] without values".[7]

Eliyahu was involved in publishing the conspiracy theory pamphlet On Either Side of the Border, in cooperation with the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (OU). The OU later asserted that its connection with the pamphlet was unauthorized by senior management.[8] The pamphlet, citing the personal account of a recent convert to Judaism who had previously been a member of the Lebanese organisation Hezbollah, asserts that the Pope and the Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church allegedly help organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members, in order to teach them how to wipe out Jews. The pamphlet was distributed to IDF troops.[9] Danny Orbach, a Harvard-based Israeli historian, said that the pamphlet, supposedly written by a Lebanese, actually contains gross factual errors that no Arab could have made. In addition, there are also numerous other blatant geographical and cultural mistakes in the pamphlet, proving that the author is in reality an ultra-Orthodox Jew from Israel who knows very little about the Arab world. Orbach's conclusion is that Eliyahu took part in a forgery, clearly in order to propagate hatred against Arabs and Muslims.[10] Eliyahu failed to answer the accusations, but his spokesman vouched for the authenticity of the pamphlet in a conversation with Haaretz.[9][11] Furthermore, Eliyahu had widely quoted from the pamphlet in a subsequent article.[12]

Eliyahu has urged Jewish residents of Safed not to rent housing to Arabs, leading to calls for his suspension, and for his prosecution on grounds of racial incitement.[13][14][15] In July 2012, Israel's Ministry of Justice closed the investigation into allegations of incitement, on the grounds of lack of evidence that the statements could be attributed to Eliyahu.[16]

Following an address in December 2017 in which U.S. President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced plans to relocate the U.S. embassy there from its current location in Tel Aviv, Eliyahu organized a joint letter signed by 250 Israeli Orthodox rabbis praising Trump's historic proclamation, stating, "You will be remembered in the history of the Jewish people."[17]