Racists are already everywhere, MKs respond amid plans to roll back Knesset ban

Labor party leader Merav Michaeli reacts to the incoming coalition’s plans to remove a clause from Israel’s basic laws barring racists and terror supporters from running for Knesset, saying it’s clearly ineffectual anyway.

In a Facebook post, Michaeli points out that the incoming coalition is made up of “one party that is only ultra-Orthodox Sephardi men, another one that is only ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi men who ban Sephardi families from school they run, a party run by someone who would not want his wife to give birth next to an Arab mother, a party that is the flagship of Jewish supremacy, and a group of parties that maintains Reform Judaism is a form of Christianity,” references to Shas, UTJ, Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit.

“Look at yourselves — why even bother canceling [the clause]?” she asks.

Hadash-Ta’al MK Ahmad Tibi responds that the law won’t only pave the way into the Knesset for banned Otzma Yehudit members. “In the future, Ami Popper and the Duma killers. Yigal Amir too, there’s no bottom to the barrel,” he tweets.

Popper killed seven Palestinians at a bus stop in 1990, Amir killed prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Amiram Ben-Uliel killed three members of the Dawabshe family, including an 18-month-old, when he carried out an arson attack on their home in the Palestinian village of Duma in 2016.