Education Minister Naftali Bennett. Photo: Wikipedia.

A member of the Israeli government’s security cabinet drew a parallel between the Lebanon-based Islamist terror organization Hezbollah and the perpetrators of Wednesday’s shooting attack in Tel Aviv, which left four people dead and several others wounded, the Hebrew news site nrg reported.

During a conference in Kiryat Shmona on Thursday, marking the 10th anniversary of the Second War in Lebanon, Education Minister Naftali Bennett told a crowd of bereaved families, IDF soldiers and high-school students, “There is a connection between those villainous terrorists who entered a café yesterday in order to kill Jews because they are Jews, and the terrorist organization to our north, which wants to annihilate the Jewish state because it is a Jewish state.”

Bennett, chairman of the right-wing Jewish Home party, continued: “Their leader [Hezbollah chief  Hassan Nasrallah] once called his strategy ‘spider webs.’ It is a gray, murderous ideology with no justice and no path. And what does it say? Those Jews will break down; if we strike them again and again, ultimately they will crack. He is wrong. The people of Israel – Jews, Druse, Bedouin, who serve shoulder-to-shoulder with one another – constitute a steel wall.”

Bennett, who commanded a patrol unit during the 2006 Lebanon war against Hezbollah, expressed his frustration at the policy of the government and top IDF brass at the end of the fighting.  “When I came out of that war, I was upset and disappointed by the leadership…I swore then and I swear today — to every parent, soldier, boy, girl and citizen — that I will never lift a finger to send a soldier into battle if I am not certain that it is necessary.”