Smotrich: ‘My voters don’t care if I’m a homophobe… they don’t give a damn about the gays’

Israel’s new Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich boasted he could take measures against the LGBTQ community without suffering any repercussions from his political base because his voters “don’t give a damn” about “the gays,” according to a recording from a few months ago broadcast on Monday.

Without saying where the conversation took place, or whether it was before or after the November 1 national election, Kan said Smotrich had told a businessman who supports him: “A Sephardic, traditional person, you think they care about gays? They don’t give a damn. They tell me ‘I don’t have a problem with them,’ [but] do you think they care about me being against them?”

Asked specifically about active steps he might take against the LGBTQ community, Smotrich said supporters of his Religious Zionism party — including the head of the merchants union in Jerusalem’s popular Mahane Yehuda Market — are far more interested in his policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in his blanket refusal to join a coalition that relied on the Islamist Ra’am party, an ideological stance that sent Smotrich and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the opposition for 18 months as Ra’am joined forces with the opposing political bloc.

The recording, published by the Kan public broadcaster, reveals Smotrich — the far-right head of the Religious Zionism party and a key figure in the new government  — saying his voters know about his longtime anti-LGBTQ positions but are more interested in his opposition to bringing Arab parties into government.

“I may be a far-right person, a homophobe, racist, fascist, but my word is my bond,” he says in an apparently sarcastic attempt to use his detractor’s words.

“Listen, [the voter] knows I’m [against LGBTQs]. It doesn’t matter to them. I’m the only one who didn’t go with Ra’am and safeguards the Land of Israel for their grandchildren. They will have my back,” says Smotrich, who is now part of a hardline Netanyahu government widely seen as the most right-wing in Israel’s history.

He then appears to lay out the limits of how far he is willing to go in applying biblical mandates, in an apparent reciprocity: “I won’t stone gays [to death] and you won’t force me to eat shrimp.”

The recording comes to light with the government planning to change anti-discrimination laws — at Smotrich’s demand — in a way critics warn could enable private companies to refuse service to certain groups. A clause in the coalition deals stipulates that the law will be amended “in a way that will prevent harm to a private business that refrains from providing service or a product due to religious faith, on condition that it is a service or product that is not unique and for which an alternative can be found nearby and for a similar price.”