TV report says Netanyahu warned of Bedouin growth as ‘existential threat’

At a recent cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allegedly warned of the fast growth in the Bedouin population in the Negev, saying it was an “existential threat” to Israel, according to a television news report that was immediately denied by Netanyahu’s office.

Netanyahu told the ministers at the closed-door meeting that the Bedouin population was the fastest-growing in Israel, with 5 percent annual growth, that this figure “amazed him,” and that this posed an “existential threat” to Israel, according to a report Tuesday by Channel 1.

The meeting discussed widespread polygamy among the Bedouin, who are a conservative Muslim community concentrated in the northern Negev desert and in northern Israel.

Ministers also debated the connected problem of widespread welfare fraud, especially among women who are married, in either monogamous and polygamous marriages, but file single-mother claims to the National Insurance Institute.

Arab Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi lashed out at Netanyahu over the report, comparing the prime minister’s alleged comment to his warning on the eve of the March 2015 election that “Arabs are thronging to the polls.”

In a Hebrew-language tweet, Tibi wrote, “2015: Arabs are thronging. 2017: The Bedouin are giving birth. The scaremongering changes but the incitement and racism do not.”

2015: הערבים נוהרים
2017: הבדויים יולדים.
ההפחדה משתנה ההסתה והגזענות לא https://t.co/SLnBQV3Sjh

— Ahmad Tibi (@Ahmad_tibi) June 20, 2017

Speaking to Channel 1, Tibi accused Netanyahu of “unmitigated racism. Netanyahu no longer even tries to hide his hatred of Arabs.”

The Prime Minister’s Office emphatically denied the claim, saying in a statement that “Prime Minister Netanyahu did not address the Bedouin birthrate in the discussion, but rather the phenomenon of Palestinian women who are brought from the West Bank, married, and then [registered] dishonestly [as] divorced, allowing the women to claim welfare grants and income subsidies from the National Insurance Institute.”

At the meeting, Netanyahu assigned ministers Ze’ev Elkin, Yariv Levin and Uri Ariel to draft a plan that would be presented to the Knesset as a bill upping enforcement of anti-polygamy laws and tackling welfare fraud in the Bedouin community.

The ministers’ staffs did not immediately return comment on the proposed plan.