Israel Racially Segregates Maternity Wards

The New Observer
April 7, 2016

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.

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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.

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Smotrich in the Knesset.

The resultant publicity has forced the Israeli Health Ministry to quickly back down from its segregation policy, and issue a statement saying that such a practice was “not allowed.”

Despite the official condemnation, the reality remains that there has been—and most likely still is—such segregation “upon request.”

The real issue is, once again, not if Jews in Israel want to be segregated from Palestinians or not. From their point of view, there are possibly good reasons for doing so in order to preserve their identity and culture.

However, it is when Jewish activists in Israel and other nations start agitating against any Europeans who dare to suggest that they also have a right to protect their identity, that the problem comes in.

For, if Europeans dare to suggest that they should have a right to a European state—in the same way that Jews have the right to a Jewish state—then these same Jews are the first to attack them as being “Nazis” and “haters.”

Proof of this can be seen in the complete silence by the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations about Smotrich and his wife’s public comments. Any European politician who had dared say anything similar—about non-Europeans or Jews, for example—would immediately have been condemned by the ADL and lambasted in the Jewish-dominated media in the West.

But, as usual, that media remains silent on outbursts by Jews and racial segregation measures in Israel.

There always seems to be one rule for Jews, and another rule for Europeans.