Beersheba performer to audience: Who thinks Zoabi is a bitch?

A band member in a concert at a Beersheba nightclub took time out from the performance on Friday night to call controversial Arab MK Hanin Zoabi “a bitch,” to an apparently rapturous response from part of the audience.

“Who here thinks Hanin Zoabi is a bitch?” the performer, Ron Leshem, asked, drawing applause and cheers from some audience members at the Baraka Club, according to a leaked recording broadcast by Army Radio Sunday.

The controversial Arab Joint List MK is a vociferous critic of Israel, and has been the subject of previous incitement investigations and numerous failed attempts by fellow lawmakers to remove her from the Knesset for her opposition to Jewish statehood, her past participation for the 2010 Turkish flotilla to Gaza, among other positions.

The band member continued: “I want you to chant with me. Dead! Her father is dead!” Some audience members can apparently be heard enthusiastically joining in the chant.

Zoabi said she was not surprised by the incident, saying it reflects the meaning of Israeli identity.

“When the state continues to extort loyalty from the indigenous [Palestinian], while persecuting and killing his people — that’s where this begins, and it reaches into popular culture, into the deepest culture of the Israeli psyche. To be Israeli is to hate Palestinians. To be in power is to persecute Palestinians, and the easiest target to hate and persecute is Hanin Zoabi,” the firebrand lawmaker charged.

Baraka’s owners criticized Leshem, saying his “attempt to create provocation and interaction with the crowd by offering a public discourse tailored to a certain stream [of Israeli politics] distracted him from his job as a guest artist.”

Leshem was removed from the stage, the owner noted, but added that Baraka would not in principle interfere with the content of an artist’s performance.

“In the wake of the incident, and the provocative performance, it was in any case decided to remove Ron Nesher from the stage toward the end of the performance,” a statement from the club noted.

The statement went on to explain that Leshem wasn’t removed for the content of his politics.

“We, as a performance club for the past 16 years, have never interfered with the content that an artist brings to the stage. If the performance had reached a point where it was hurtful to a particular community, we would have asked to stop the performance, or to return to the real reason [Leshem] came to the club. We don’t use the club’s audience as a platform to advance any interest other than entertainment. It is important to note that [Leshem] wasn’t taken off the stage because of his views, or anything else connected to content,” the statement concluded, adding: “We leave politics at home. We come here to dance and have fun.”

Zoabi first came under fire for taking part in the Mavi Marmara flotilla to Gaza in 2010. Then, in 2014, she refused to label as “terrorists” the Hamas-affiliated terrorists who abducted and killed three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, an attack that set off a chain of events that culminated in the summer 2014 war in Gaza.

Later that year, police recommended that Zoabi be put on trial for incitement, threats and abuse directed at a police officer. In June of 2015, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein approved a criminal probe into the incident. Last week, under a plea bargain, Zoabi was charged with “insulting a public official” during that incident. She also agreed to send a letter of apology to the subjects of her comments, and pay a NIS 3,000 fine.

In November 2015, Zoabi was bitterly criticized by leading Likud politicians for a speech at a Holocaust memorial event in Amsterdam, where she equated Nazi Germany’s genocide against the Jews to current Israeli policies toward Palestinians and Arab Israelis.