The Knesset must put a stop to unbridled anti-Israel incitement in its halls, MK Nissim Ze'ev of Shas said Wednesday in an impassioned speech from the Knesset podium.
“The time has come to put a stop to the wild incitement that Members of Knesset voice here,” he declared. “They curse the state, attack the state, insult it, they tell us, ‘you are cursed.’”
“What has not been said here, from this podium? I don’t understand, what is this?
“Mr. Knesset Speaker,” he said, turning to Knesset Speaker Yuli-Yoel Edelstein, “I am begging you, when a Member of Knesset gets up here and says, ‘you are criminals, you are thieves, you’ – I don’t know, what didn’t he say? ‘You are cursed,’ when he reads a verse of the Qur'an with all of the curses – stop him!”
Ze'ev praised Edelstein for his patience, but said it had gone too far. “They eat here, drink here, what don’t they do? Then they vomit all this excrement on us. Enough.”
His angry reproach followed a stormy debate during which Arab MKs made a display of ascending to the Knesset podium and ripping up a proposed solution to the ongoing land dispute between Bedouin tribes in the Negev and the government. Edelstein has said he will file a complaint against the MKs for their behavior.
Ze'ev also turned his criticism on the Arab MKs. “Where do Arabs live in some Arab country like they do here? Where, in which country? In Syria they slaughter them, in Egypt? Where, in Jordan? Where are you safe? In what country are you safe like you are here?” he demanded.
Turning back to Edelstein, Ze'ev said that every year a group of Bedouin Israelis goes to the United Nations to seek autonomy. “Right under our nose, ‘We don’t recognize the State of Israel, we request that the U.N. adopt some resolution against Israel so they will give us autonomy’… If you have demands, legitimate or not, that’s what negotiations are for.”
“I’m not here to defend the government,” he added. “But the time has come to defend the honor of the State of Israel, and this rioting, this incitement has to stop.”