Ze’ev Elkin
Ze’ev ElkinMiriam Alster/Flash 90

Minister Ze’ev Elkin told Arutz Sheva on Wednesday that he intends to continue to tell MK Ahmed Tibi what he thinks about him, despite being reprimanded on Tuesday for the way he addressed Tibi from the podium a week earlier, when the latter was presiding as chair over the session.

Tibi ended up ordering Knesset ushers to remove Elkin from the chamber, after a heated discussion between the two. When reprimanding Elkin over the incident, the Knesset’s Ethics Committee also decided to suspend Tibi from chairing plenum debates for two weeks - a punishment Elkin later described as “light” and “ridiculous”.

"I accept the reprimand and am ready to receive some more, and I will continue to say to Ahmed Tibi what I think about him and the activities of him and his associates. I'm not going back on anything I said, and I repeated the same remarks before the Ethics Committee," Elkin told Arutz Sheva.

"I will continue to tell Tibi what I think about him," he stressed, adding, "It is time to stop being nice and sweeping the problem under the carpet. The activities of Tibi, [MK Hanin] Zoabi, [MK Jamal] Zahalka and others are activities whose purpose and result is damage to the State of Israel. They say it openly.”

“The type of terrorism that exists today, not by arranged terrorist organizations but terror which results from the atmosphere created by the instigation we have today in the Arab street, in such cases the words of the leaders are viewed as gospel, so when Tibi shows up and tells lies about what is happening on the Temple Mount after he checked things out and he knows it's a lie, it has a direct bearing on the terrorists who take a knife and go out to kill,” continued Elkin. “That’s why I blamed him in the Knesset for spreading blood libels and lies and said that he and his colleagues are directly responsible for the wave of terror and the blood that is spilled on both sides.”

"I knew what I had to do, to tell him the truth even if is he is annoyed by it,” added Elkin. “It is not by chance that he has rarely given interviews about the incident. He knows that he lost control of himself. That means I told the truth, put a mirror in front of him so that the public understands who Tibi and his friends are and the significance of their actions. That’s why I would do the same thing again today.”