Racist MK Bezalel Smotrich from the Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party took to Twitter Tuesday, April 5, to support the separation of Arab and Jewish mothers in maternity wards in Israeli hospitals. The tweet followed a report on Israeli Radio saying that hospitals have been separating Arab and Jewish mothers in maternity wards when the mothers request it. After his tweet received negative replies, Smotrich went a step further, writing: “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie down [in a bed] next to a woman who just gave birth to a baby who may want to murder her baby twenty years from now.” He then added that “Arabs are my enemies and that’s why I don’t enjoy being next to them.”
A demonstration against racism in Jerusalem – among the signs, in the foreground is one displaying one of the political slogans of Hadash’s “Jews and Arabs Refuse to Be Enemies” (Photo: Activestills)
Smotrich’s wife, Revital, later told Channel 10 that she had “kicked an Arab obstetrician out of the [delivery] room. I want Jewish hands to touch my baby, and I wasn’t comfortable lying in the same room with an Arab woman.” She continued: “I refuse to have an Arab midwife, because for me giving birth is a Jewish and pure moment.”
Joint List lawmakers attacked Smotrich’s comments and sent a letter to Knesset Speaker MK Yuli Edelstein imploring him to immediately suspend the racist MK. The Head of the Knesset Women Rights Commission, MK Aida Touma-Sliman (Hadash-Joint List) linked Smotrich’s comments to racism against the Mizrahi, or Sephardic, Jewish community in Israel. “Beyond the overt justification for a racial segregation policy clearly similar to that which existed in the southern United States in the last century, Smotrich reveals something deeper here,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “This dangerous racist trend is not directed only against Arab culture, but extends to Sephardic Jews, Ethiopians, Russians, non-religious Jews and anyone who differs from the [political] right’s view.”
The Health Ministry denied the existence of a segregation policy, saying that “no separation on a discriminatory basis is allowed in hospitals. Health Ministry guidelines state that no separation by population is to be made — not by race, ethnicity, country of origin or any other factor.” Nevertheless, on the ground, there is clearly something going one, as the racist Smotrich couple’s remarks confirmed. The Coalition against Racism has blamed Israel’s Ministry of Health for any such racist measures in hospitals, as it is its duty to enforce and follow up on rules and regulations. Meanwhile, MK Touma-Sliman, called for a meeting to discuss this “worrying measure.”
Smotrich has a history of controversial statements. In August 2015 an Israeli NGO file a complaint to the Knesset Ethics Committee against him over an interview in which he said “gays control the Israeli media and the public agenda.” A month before, in an interview to the Knesset Channel, he offered to serve as an executioner should Israel pass a “death sentence for Palestinian terrorists.”
Five months earlier, during a discussion panel at a Ramat Gan high school, Smotrich boasted about being a “proud homophobe,” saying that gay people are welcome to be “abnormal” in their own homes, but shouldn’t “make demands of the state.” Also, a Knesset Interior Committee meeting erupted into a shouting match after MK Smotrich defended racist property developers who refuse to sell homes to Arabs. The meeting, held on July 15, 2015 was initiated by several MKs, among them Hadash MK Ayman Odeh (Joint List) following news reports that Galil Homes refuses to sell homes to Arabs in the mixed Jewish and Arab northern town of Ma’alot-Tarshicha.
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