Muslim candidate in Netanyahu’s party gets cut off from her family

Muslim Likud candidate Dima Tayeh’s family will have no contact with her “until she states allegiance to her religion and the people to whom she truly belongs.”

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

The family of Dima Tayeh, a patriotic Muslim-Israeli who announced her candidacy in Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party this week, has cut her off, issuing a public statement that her ideas are far removed from their values.

“We, the members of the Tayeh clan of Qalansawa, inform the people that we are cutting off Dima Seif Tayeh Zidan [Tayeh’s full name]. We absolutely condemn and reject all her statements in the media, which have nothing to do with us, not even remotely,” Yediot Aharonot reported.

Stressing that Tayeh’s opinions do not represent them, the statement added that they will have no contact with her “until she states allegiance to her religion and the people to whom she truly belongs.”

Referring in the statement to the destruction of 11 illegal structures in Qalansawa in July 2017, the family censured Tayeh’s “silence in response to the move” made by the Likud-led government.

In an October 2017 interview on Musawa TV, an Israeli Arabic-language channel, Tayeh, then a member of an anti-BDS delegation to U.S. campuses, stated, “Israel did not recruit me to improve its image in the world. I’m proud of my country….

“I wish that all Arab communities could live in a democracy like Israel.”

“Israel is not an apartheid state, and anyone who says it is should be ashamed of himself,” she declared.

After announcing her candidacy, she told Hadashot News, “I’m proud to run in the Likud primaries, as an Arab, as a woman, as a Muslim who is extending a hand to her community and trying to help them and the State of Israel, and to improve its image.”

She also defended the recently-passed nation-state law, which states that Israel is “the national home of the Jewish people” and that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

Tayeh “found nothing racist or discriminatory” about the law.

“Israel is a Jewish state and democratic and there is no other country in the Middle East that respects its citizens and gives them as much equality as possible and democracy for all,” she said.