It has emerged that Israel racially segregates its maternity wards by race, with one Israeli Member of Parliament saying that this is done because “Arabs are my enemies and that’s why I don’t enjoy being next to them.”
Like many other racial segregation measures in Israel, the Jewish state has kept news of the segregated hospital wards secret until now—an incredible feat given that most Jews in that state will have had contact with the hospital system for decades.
According to a report in the Times of Israel, the revelations started with a report on Israeli Radio saying that hospitals have been separating Arab and Jewish mothers in maternity wards “when the mothers request it.”
Then, a Knesset member, Bezalel Smotrich, took to Twitter to support the racial segregation measure.
“My wife is truly no racist, but after giving birth she wants to rest rather than have a hafla”—a mass feast often accompanied by music and dancing—“like the Arabs have after their births,” the Knesset member tweeted.
After his tweet received negative replies, Smotrich went a step further, writing: “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie down [in a bed] next to a woman who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby twenty years from now.”
He then added that “Arabs are my enemies and that’s why I don’t enjoy being next to them.”
His wife, Revital, later told Israel’s Channel 10 that she had “kicked an Arab obstetrician out of the [delivery] room. I want Jewish hands to touch my baby, and I wasn’t comfortable lying in the same room with an Arab woman.”
“I refuse to have an Arab midwife, because for me giving birth is a Jewish and pure moment,” she said.
