A political cartoon depicting Tzipi Livni, Stav Shaffir, Merav Michaeli and Shelly Yachimovich sitting around a kitchen table while Yitzhak Herzog washes dishes. “First things first,” Livni says, “we’ll give him the right to remain silent.” Screenshot via Facebook. In some ways the past few years have been very good to women in Israeli politics….
Many Israelis breathed a sigh of relief last month when the Israeli satire show Eretz Nehederet (A Great Country) came back just in time for the elections. The popular TV show is one of the only safe places in Israeli TV — by this I mean that nothing is off limits, and even the most…
Two GOP lawmakers asked the Obama administration to explain the involvement of a State Department-funded dialogue group with an Israeli get out the vote effort. “There appears to be a danger that U.S. taxpayer funds are being used to directly shape the outcome of the upcoming Israeli election–and specifically to campaign against Prime Minister [Benjamin]…
Screenshot vis YouTube Women like to talk about men. They also like to exercise. And often do these two things at once. At least that’s what I learned from Naftali Bennett’s new campaign video. In it a pair of attractive seemingly secular women appear in five vignettes. In each vignette they are shown conversing about…
On a cool winter evening in 2012, a senior delegation of ultra-Orthodox rabbis and politicians — members of Israel’s Ashkenazi religious party, United Torah Judaism, and the Sephardic religious party, Shas — convened in Bnei Brak, a predominantly Haredi city near Tel Aviv. The host was a 98-year-old rabbi, Aharon Shtainman, spiritual leader of the…
How did Benjamin Netanyahu do in West Bank settlements? Considering his party’s pro-settlement policies and the staunch pro-settlement positions of its leading Knesset members, you’d expect Netanyahu’s Likud-Beiteinu list to perform better among West Bank settlers than it did in Israel proper. It didn’t. Surprising as it may be, overall, only 19 percent of the…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday took on the job of forming a new government and said its most important task would be to ensure that Iran does not gain nuclear arms. President Shimon Peres formally called on Netanyahu to assemble a new coalition following the Jan. 22 general election in which Netanyahu’s rightist…
The recent Israeli elections ended with a predictable scene: a victory speech delivered by Benjamin Netanyahu to hundreds of Likud party supporters. But if this moment of triumph appeared to be a foregone conclusion, there was much that was new — and alarming — about this recent election campaign. It saw the birth of a…
