Forget the pre-election spin from enthusiastic Israeli lefties and despondent righties. Forget the three-day-old polls. Don’t start popping the champagne or sitting shiva (whatever your preference). At the voting booths, it’s still anybody’s game. Overall turnout, which was expected to be high due to the intense emotions surrounding the campaign, has been unexceptional. As of…
Tzufim settlement outpost, western Samaria, October 2012 / Getty Images The chairman of the Knesset’s law and legislation committee on Thursday postponed, for the second time in two weeks, a scheduled vote on a bill requiring transparency in government funding of West Bank settlements. The bill has majority support in the committee, whose membership mirrors…
A space center that opened in the Arab-Israeli city of Taybeh was not named for the late Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon following opposition from city residents. The Taybeh Space Center was dedicated Tuesday. It was to be called the Ilan Ramon Space Center. Instead, under the name of the center it will be inscribed, “To…
In 1988, Israel’s Central Election Commission banned the extremist lawmaker Rabbi Meir Kahane from running again for Knesset, on the grounds that his party was racist and undemocratic. Since then, he’s never been seen at the Knesset podium… apart from yesterday. An Arab lawmaker, Ahmad Tibi, held up a photograph of Kahane at the podium,…
Ahmad Tibi, one of the liveliest, not to mention most controversial, lawmakers in the Knesset, is squaring up to Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Oren. Oren penned a piece in Foreign Policy praising Israel’s democratic nature, in which he wrote: Israel has tolerated acts that would be deemed treasonous in virtually any other democracy….
This week’s column, you should be warned, is X-rated. Don’t blame me for it. You can blame firebrand Anastasia Michaeli and gasoline-tongued Ahmad Tibi, both members of Israel’s Knesset. Soviet-born Michaeli — an ex-telecommunications engineer and fashion model who married an Israeli, immigrated to Israel in 1998 and converted to Judaism — belongs to Foreign…
When a government probe into allegations of treason caused the charismatic Arab politician Azmi Bishara to resign his Knesset seat and flee Israel in 2007, Dr. Ahmad Tibi, a former aide to PLO leader Yasir Arafat, leaped easily to the fore as his community’s most prominent national advocate. Like Bishara, he gained notice, too, as…
Outrageous and, yes, hilarious: Knesset member (and onetime Arafat adviser) Dr. Ahmad Tibi got himself suspended for one week from Knesset debates (though not from votes) for reading an outrageous little poem he had made up in honor of fellow lawmaker Anastasia Michaeli. Michaeli, a member of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, was herself suspended…
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