Yamina MK Bezalel Smotrich, known for his less-than-wholesome rhetoric on Arabs, says during a tour in the Negev that the birthrate among the Bedouin population there is “a type of bomb, and if we don’t defuse it, it’ll blow up in our face,” Haaretz reports.
He says the Bedouin “double their numbers every 12 years, so it’s something that needs to be taken care of,” adding “the more Western you make them, the more birthrate will come down.”
Smotrich says he wants “to maintain the Jewish majority, not just in Israel but in the Negev. That’s the vision of [David] Ben-Gurion, not of Yamina.”
Bezalel Smotrich speaks at a conference organized by the Makor Rishon newspaper in Jerusalem, November 11, 2019. (Noam Rivkin Fenton/Flash90)
He adds that the nomad Bedouin population should be encouraged to live in towns, get formal education and join the workforce.
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