Netanyahu again rebukes Likud MK for mocking disabled lawmaker

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday evening again blasted junior Likud MK Oren Hazan for disparaging remarks he made about a disabled lawmaker from the opposition Yesh Atid party.

In his second, more fiery condemnation of the day, the prime minister said he “cannot tolerate racism, I cannot tolerate discrimination, I cannot tolerate cruelty.”

Without naming Hazan, the prime minister said there had been a “serious” infraction by a member of his Likud party earlier on Tuesday.

“Need Issawi to help you?” Hazan shouted at wheelchair-bound MK Karin Elharar, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, during an overnight vote on amending the universal draft law.

Hazan had last week accused Elharar of illegal double-voting after she asked Meretz MK Issawi Frej to help her cast her vote in the plenum.

“I inquired about the details, and it turned out [to be true],” Netanyahu said. “A Knesset member in my party said something unacceptable to MK Karin Elharar, something that should not be said, and I condemn it wholeheartedly.”

The prime minister said he called Hazan and rebuked him, and “told him that these things cannot be heard.”

Hazan enraged fellow lawmakers early Tuesday morning when he mocked the opposition MK’s physical disability. And after Netanyahu’s second rebuke, the rookie lawmaker took to Twitter to dispute the account.

“Mr. Prime Minister, they are misleading you and giving you false information,” he wrote. “I never addressed MK Elharar, we never spoke, and I certainly didn’t insult her!”

Earlier Tuesday, Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister considered Hazan’s remarks to be “grave,” and that “if indeed they were said, the prime minister demands that statements of this sort not be repeated. This was also said to MK Oren Hazan.”

The Zionist Union, the largest opposition party, said Tuesday that it would no longer cooperate with Hazan on any legislative work. It will not sign on to bills with Hazan’s name on it, nor agree to an “offset” request by Hazan whereby he could absent himself from a plenum vote if one of their own would be absent as well.

Meretz MK Ilan Gilon, co-chair of the Knesset caucus for the disabled and himself wheelchair-bound, called on the Knesset Ethics Committee to penalize Hazan.

The freshman Likud MK is no stranger to controversy. Hazan, who entered politics ahead of the March elections, has been at the center of a number of scandals earlier this year after television exposés accused him of sexual assault, soliciting prostitutes and using crystal meth when he managed a European casino.

Last month he filed a libel lawsuit against a Channel 2 reporter for a “tsunami of false accusations” against him.

Hazan’s father Yehiel Hazan lost his Knesset seat after he was caught casting a double-vote in the plenum, and then attempting to remove a voting computer from a Knesset storage room to hide evidence of the act.

After Monday night’s vote, Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid called on Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein to eject Hazan from the plenum for making fun of Elharar.

“An MK constantly mocks the disability of another MK, you can’t not do something about the matter,” Lapid is seen telling Edelstein on Knesset Channel footage from the plenum. “He sits there and scorns her. You need to throw him out of here… I intentionally waited until after the vote on the [universal draft law] to complain,” Lapid said, as Likud needed Hazan’s vote to pass the bill, which Yesh Atid opposes. “Now kick him out of the hall.”

Edelstein urged Lapid to lodge a complaint against Hazan with the Knesset Ethics Committee, but refrained from tossing the Likud MK out.

Hazan on Tuesday insisted he didn’t insult Elharar’s disability, but was protesting Frej’s violation of Knesset procedure: “It wasn’t about her. If MK Elharar was offended by me, then I apologize to her,” he said in an Army Radio interview.

Hazan then tweeted that Lapid and opposition leader MK Isaac Herzog (Zionist Union) were “competing in whining.”

“A braggart whose nightly defeats don’t do him well ran to cry about me to the Knesset speaker: ‘Get him out… get him out…’ Does anyone have a tissue?” he tweeted about Lapid’s complaint to Edelstein.

Herzog wrote on Twitter that Hazan’s conduct “stains the Knesset. But the real embarrassment is that [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, as usual, makes zero effort to remove the stain.”