A far right-wing Israeli lawmaker was briefly blocked from Twitter following a post saying teenage Palestinian Ahed Tamimi should have been shot for scuffling with Israeli soldiers on her family’s property in the occupied West Bank. “In my opinion, she should have caught a bullet, at least in the kneecap. That would have put her…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — A rabbi who is a leader of the Jewish Home Party has threatened to leave the party because a spokeswoman for its leader, Naftali Bennett, is a lesbian. Rabbi Yisrael Rozen, the head of the Zomet Institute, which researches how technology can be used under Jewish law, on Wednesday resigned from the…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — A Knesset committee has approved a bill that would make it difficult to divide Jerusalem in a peace deal. The Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved an amendment to an existing Basic Law that would require a majority of at least 80 Knesset members to pass a decision to give up land in…
The Jewish Home party has filed a police complaint over threatening comments posted to chairman Naftali Bennett’s Facebook page. The posts call for violence against Bennett, Israel’s education minister, and other politicians with the right-wing, pro-settler party, accusing them of being murderers. The comments amount to incitement, the complaint said, according to reports Wednesday. They…
(JTA) — When haredi Orthodox political parties Shas and United Torah Judaism entered Israel’s governing coalition, they vowed to roll back a raft of recent religious reforms. In turn, the secularist Yesh Atid party raised its voice in protest. But now, the haredi parties have a more surprising opponent: Jewish Home, a fellow religious party…
Right now, after finishing seven weeks of infuriating, hairpin coalition negotiations, Benjamin Netanyahu must be wondering what would be a worse fate for the impossibly shaky and extremist government he’s assembled: that it collapses the moment some disgruntled back-bencher decides to walk out — or that it survives and leads Israel into as-yet unimagined recesses…
In the end it wasn’t even close. Pre-election polls had Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud trailing the Zionist Union of Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni by four Knesset seats, nearly 4% of the popular vote. Analysts around the world were falling over each other to write Bibi’s political obituary. Then came election day. Exit polls found he’d…
The final deadline passed this afternoon for Israel’s political parties to register for the March 17 Knesset elections. Several last-minute decisions will substantially affect the map in the weeks ahead: Kahanism Redux: Eli Yishai, the former Shas party chairman who quit in December and formed his own religious-right party, Yahad-Ha’am Itanu (“Together – The People…
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