Right-wing rabbi: Israel's first LGBTQ Knesset Speaker is 'infected with disease'

On Tuesday, LGBTQ Nation reported that a right-wing rabbi with ties to Israel's incoming conservative government has pushed homophobic conspiracy theories about Amir Ohana, the newly appointed Speaker of the Knesset, or Israeli Parliament, and the first openly gay man to hold the position.

Ohana, who previously served as Israel's Minister of Justice and Minister of Public Security, is himself a member of Likud, the right-wing party led by Trump-aligned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Last Saturday, Rabbi Meir Mazuz — a Haredi rabbi at the Kisse Rahamim Yeshiva, an orthodox seminary — told students attending an online lecture that Ohana was 'infected with a disease' and that his sexual orientation was responsible for a 2021 crowd crush that killed 45 people," wrote Daniel Villareal. "Mazuz insinuated that Ohana’s 'disease' had caused the outcome of a deadly crowd crush that occurred in 2021 during the annual pilgrimage to the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yocha in Mount Meron, Israel. Ohana was the public security minister at the time and oversaw policing at the event, The Middle East Eye noted."

“Two years ago, something happened at Lag B’Omer and people say … that there was some minister there in charge of Meron who is himself infected with this disease," said Mazuz. "So do we even need to question why it happened to us?”

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Netanyahu has condemned the remarks, and Ohana — who has pledged not to let his fellow conservative lawmakers gut recently enacted LGBTQ civil rights — responded by saying Mazuz has "baseless hatred."

Israel has held five elections in four years, as voters repeatedly elected a bare majority of right-wing parties, only for these parties to refuse to work with each other. The country was most recently governed by a fusion coalition of left- and right-wing parties, only for the most recent election to hand control back to Netanyahu, who had previously been prime minister for over a decade and was plagued with corruption scandals and a protracted bribery and fraud trial.