In response to a report of some 20 Eritrean migrants trapped between the Israel-Egypt border, Interior Minsiter Eli Yishai declared, “We will not bring the Eritreans into Israeli territory.” “It is hardest for me, of anyone, to see these pictures, and return families to their homelands. It is hard for me to see these pictures,…
Even as a high-profile round-up targets illegal African immigrants, the Israeli government may be laying the groundwork for a softer policy toward the estimated 60,000 undocumented newcomers whom lawmakers have branded “infiltrators” and a “cancer.” Independent human rights groups and academic experts say the government knows it cannot deport the vast majority of immigrants because…
Always diplomatic, Israel’s Interior Minister has come up with another gem. He told Israel Radio today that he questions whether Eritrea is actually more dangerous that Sderot, the town on the Israel-Gaza border that is subject to Palestinian rocket attacks. Eli Yishai, who leads the Haredi Shas party, was on the offensive against asylum seekers…
It never ceases to amaze me how some so-called leaders will use women’s issues to advance their own agendas that have nothing to do with women. The overtly racist statements coming from the Shas government minister Eli Yishai last week in light of a Tel Aviv rape case were particularly troubling. When the police arrested…
The foreign policy chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton, is under furious attack for a speech she gave March 19, several hours after the deadly shootings at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, in which she mentioned the Toulouse attack and deaths of Palestinian youths in Gaza in the same sentence. First Israeli Foreign…
What would be your attitude toward someone who had plotted to kill you? I can’t help thinking that I’d be more than a little broiges. You would imagine that the stakes are upped a little when the target of the murder plot is the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of…
Shas, the Sephardic Orthodox Israeli political party founded by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, is experiencing what looks increasingly like an internal power struggle. The rebels represent something that most people didn’t even know existed: the party’s progressive wing. Shas was launched in 1984 by Yosef and his protégé, Aryeh Deri. The platform included strict Orthodoxy coupled…
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