Tel Aviv - An outspoken Arab-Israeli lawmaker, Hanin Zoabi, was suspended Wednesday for six months from the Knesset for condoning the June abduction of three Israeli teenagers and calling for Palestinian protests against Israel.
The vote to suspend Zoabi followed a ruling on July 29 by the Knesset Ethics Committee to expel her for six months over the statements.
Of the 120-seat Israeli parliament, 68 lawmakers on Wednesday rejected her appeal against that decision, a Knesset statement said.
Only 16 legislators - members of the left-liberal Meretz and Arab parties - supported the appeal, while one lawmaker abstained.
Zoabi called the decision to suspend her “unprecedented, vengeful and disproportionate,” charging that those supporting it were “raising their hands in favour of political persecution.”
Never in its history had the Knesset suspended a member because of a political statement, she told the plenum, in an address interrupted several times by loud heckling.
One lawmaker yelled back, “also the things that you did have never been done” and was removed from the hall by security guards.
Zoabi sparked a storm of controversy in June, when, shortly after three Israeli teenagers were snatched by Palestinian militants from a West Bank hitchhike stop, she declined to condemn the abduction.
In a radio interview, she said the abductors were “not terrorists.”
“They are people who don't see any opening to change their reality and they are forced to use these means - until Israel sobers up a little, until Israel's citizens and society sober up a little, and feel the suffering of the other side,” she said.
The three teens' bodies were found two weeks later shot in a Palestinian field. Their slaying and that of a Palestinian teenager from East Jerusalem by a radical settler seeking revenge sparked a wave of violence that culminated in the July-August Gaza war.
At the height of the fighting, Zoabi in a Facebook post also spoke out against Palestinian security coordination and peace negotiations with Israel, and called for “popular resistance” against it instead.
Zoabi has appealed to Israel's supreme court against her expulsion.
Her three-mandate Balad party on Monday boycotted the opening of the Knesset's winter session over it.
Sapa-dpa