Rabbi accused of war crimes selected for Israel’s national celebration

Last week, the Israeli organisation Kerem Navot, which monitors illegal settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, filed a complaint to Israel’s judicial watchdog after confirming that Zarbiv had built his home illegally on private Palestinian land in the Beit El settlement, accusing him of violating the ethics rules for both judges and rabbinic judges.

That had no bearing, however, on Transport Minister Miri Regev’s decision to nominate Zarbiv for the torch-bearing ceremony.

“Rabbi Zarbiv, a father of six, continues to serve in reserve duty and combines in his life in an inspiring way between the book and the sword – between Torah and the army, between study and action, and between spiritual leadership and security responsibility,” the right-wing minister said.

She continued, describing the man now accused of multiple war crimes as representative of a generation “that refuses to part with responsibility, that chooses to bear the burden and continue to build, out of great faith in the future”.

Avraham Zarbiv in Gaza, December 2023. ‘The Rabbinical Court of Khan Younis’ is graffitied on the wall behind him [Courtesy of Social Media]

Nevertheless, in January 2025, The Hind Rajab Foundation, the Belgian-based NGO that seeks to prosecute Israeli soldiers on the basis of the video evidence they themselves frequently provide, filed an official complaint against Zarbiv with the International Criminal Court (ICC). According to the foundation’s lawyers, Zarbiv’s gleeful boast of destroying 50 buildings per week in Gaza, participating in the complete destruction of entire neighbourhoods, and having publicly incited violence and hatred through his appearances on Israeli media, were clear enough breaches of the Geneva Convention and Rome Statute to deserve prosecution.

Zarbiv was not a neutral public figure being honoured for civic virtue, Dyab Abou Jahjah, cofounder of The Hind Rajab Foundation, told Al Jazeera. Rather, “he is a notorious perpetrator of grave international crimes”, Abou Jahjah said.

“His selection [for the Independence Day ceremony] is therefore not incidental – it is revealing,” Abou Jahjah added. “When an individual implicated in acts that constitute genocide is elevated in this way, it reflects the underlying logic of a state project historically rooted in the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. From that perspective, his selection is entirely consistent.”

Avraham Zarbiv is an Israeli army reservist [Courtesy of Social Media]

B’tselem, the Israeli rights group, is also

among those objecting to Zarbiv’s selection.

“The government’s decision to laud Zarbiv as an ‘exemplary citizen’, after more than two years of genocide in Gaza and amid a reality of unprecedented state and settler violence in the West Bank, represents a state-level endorsement of the complete dehumanization of Palestinians and the systematic destruction of Palestinian life,” B’tselem said in a statement.

“This selection sends a clear message to the citizens of Israel and the entire world: In Israel, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes are the ‘spirit of the nation’,” the group added.