Benjamin Netanyahu's son Yair has a racist Twitter meltdown

It all started when Yair Netanyahu, the son of the recently re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted a tweet from a Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian inhabitants by Haganah, Irgun and Lehi -- Zionist groups that are widely considered terrorist organisations -- between 1947 and 1948.

The deliberately provocative tweet set off a chain reaction which resulted in online users reminding Yair Netanyahu of the history of the village.

The now abandoned Palestinian village of Lifta is one of the few to be frozen in time.

Many Palestinian villages that were either abandoned by Palestinians or their inhabitants were forced to leave due to Zionist paramilitary organisations. They were demolished or repopulated with Jewish inhabitants in a bid to change the demographics and history of the land.

Yair Netanyahu, however, chooses to double down. Firstly by claiming that there is no ‘P’ in the Arabic language and therefore no such as thing as Palestine or Palestinians.

And then claiming that there will never be a Palestine.

It didn’t take long for online users to point out the flaw in his reasoning.

And since the Arabic language doesn’t have other Latin letters, online social media users make other suggestions for land Israel could occupy.

One user, however, suggests that under one proposed definition of anti-Semitism, if someone denies the Jewish peoples’ right to self-determination, they could be considered anti-Semitic. How then to deal with Yair Netanyahu’s denial of Palestinian self-determination?    

And others had a simpler explanation for Netanyahu’s behaviour.

Netanyahu is not the only one making the smart argument that because there is no ‘P’ in the Arabic alphabet there is no Palestine.

Anat Berko, an Israeli lawmaker from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said in a discussion in parliament with regard to the Palestinian state: “As we’ve noted, the letter ‘P’ doesn’t even exist in Arabic, so the borrowed term [Palestine] is worth looking into.”

In the Arabic language, Palestine is referred to as ‘Fah-lah-steen’, the ‘F’ is an Arabic letter. But racism isn’t grounded in logic, of course.