Ramallah: Haneen Zoabi, an outspoken Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, has provoked controversy in Israel by comparing the Israeli occupation army to Daesh.

The Balad Party parliamentarian told a journalist from the Israeli Channel 2 website that Daesh “kills one person every time with their knives, but the Israeli army kills dozens of Palestinians with the push of a button.”

She argued in the interview that “both are armies of murderers, they have no boundaries and no red lines.”

“In Iraq and Syria they have their picture taken with a knife and here they have their picture taken with dead bodies and with their bombardments and they also laugh,” she said. “The M-16 and the bombardments kill more than a knife.”

The MK argued that the numbers of Palestinians of Israel joining Daesh is low, claiming that those people comprise a “very tiny number on the margins” and include people with “no option in life and their lives lacked meaning.”

She said that the systematic brutality, crimes and daily violations of the Israeli military forces constitute enough grounds to classify those troops as war criminals. In her view, with their categorical rejections of human rights, the logical place for them to appear would be in international courts. She said there was even no need to compare the Israeli army to Daesh as the daily violations of the Israeli troops spoke for themselves.

There is however one difference between Daesh and the Israeli army, she said — there is a hostile environment between Daesh and nations which clearly regard Daesh’s performance as terrorist, barbarian and against humanity, but the Israeli public is proud of the terrorism of the Israeli army.

The Jerusalem Post has reported the responses of Israeli politicians to the Balad MK’s comments, including Transportation Minister Israel Katz’s statement that “There is a limit to what a sovereign state and its citizens must accept from a certified traitor.”

Another Likud MK Miri Regev is quoted by the news source as terming MK Zoabi “a dangerous enemy of Israel who belongs in jail.”

Anti-Zionist activists in the West have also made comparisons between the Israeli regime and Daesh. American activist Max Blumenthal coined the acronym JSIL, which stands for Jewish State of Israel in the Levant, a play on one of Daesh’s acronyms Isil, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The acronym has caught on among Israel’s opponents on social media, giving rise to the #JSIL hashtag.