Arab lawmaker calls Russian-speaking MKs ‘drunks’

MK Ahmad Tibi (Ra’am Ta’al) assailed the Knesset members belonging to a partly Russian-speaking party, calling them drunk on vodka, after the party revived a bill to restrict the volume of the Muslim call to prayer.

“To the MKs of Yisrael Beytenu, I say: When will you internalize that laws against the muezzin [the Muslim call to prayer heard in Arab areas] and the religion of Islam will not be passed with a glass of vodka in hand,” he said in the Knesset plenum on Tuesday, adding, “You’re drunk, you’ve had enough.”

Tibi often taunts Russian-speaking MKs from the Yisrael Beytenu party with shouts of “immigrant” or by referring to a stereotype of Russian alcoholism.

A week ago, Yisrael Beytenu’s Knesset faction whip MK Robert Ilatov revived a bill to limit the volume of the Muslim call to prayer, which blares over a loudspeaker from mosques five times per day, starting before dawn, in areas with Muslim populations. The bill would label the calls to prayer “noise pollution” above a certain volume.

Tibi responded by writing a poem, rife with references to alcoholism, about Ilatov’s journey from his birth in the former Soviet Union nation of Uzbekistan to Israel, and read it aloud to the Knesset plenum, with Ilatov present.

Yisrael Beytenu has run election campaigns that accuse the Knesset’s Arab MKs of disloyalty to the state, and the party advocates handing areas with a concentration of Arab Israeli residents in Israel over to a future Palestinian state in the framework of any future peace deal.

Yisrael Beytenu’s voter base is composed largely of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Party leader Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman emigrated to Israel from Moldova.