Live UpdateFrom the Liveblog of Thursday, June 11, 2020

Smotrich says Bedouin birthrate a ‘bomb’ that must be defused

11 June 2020, 6:57 pm 0 Edit

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.”