MK Ahmed Tibi slammed Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett following a speech Thursday at the Israeli Democracy Institute in which Bennett praised Israeli ingenuity and promoted start-up businesses. Tibi told reporters that Bennett “thinks with his backside.” “My apologies for the terminology,” he added. During his speech, Bennett surprised his listeners by pulling out a cucumber. He explained that it was from a farm in India with special ties to Israel. “There’s a problem with Bennett’s grasp of concepts,” Tibi charged. “Cucumber, shrapnel, backside… This is what happens when your brain is in your backside.” Bennett used the cucumber as a prop while discussing Israel’s agricultural exports. “We’re training 20,000 Indian farmers each year, and selling them Israeli products,” he announced. “It’s the best combination.” He visited a farm in India three weeks ago, he related. “There was an Indian doctor there who told me that two years ago, they produced one kilogram of cucumbers per square meter. Today, the average farmer produces 10 kilograms of cucumbers per square meter.” “That’s the state of Israel, that’s the narrative,” he declared. “Imagine if we had not only 10 agricultural companies in India, but 800, and in China and Africa, too.” “Everyone wants to see the Israeli miracle. I agree that there’s a difference between imagining it and making it reality… but that’s how it is with start-ups,” he concluded. The extremist Arab MK has been criticized in the past for his use of aggressive or offensive language. In an interview in September, Tibi said that Jews who visited the Temple Mount were "contaminating" the holy site. Earlier this week he was involved in an angry confrontation between Arab and Jewish MKs, in which he hurled personal insults at Jewish MKs for promoting equal prayer rights on the Temple Mount.
