1,879 eligible voters stranded overseas pending High Court ruling
One week from Election Day, court has yet to issue final ruling
A legal brief by the state to the High Court of Justice on Monday revealed that 1,879 Israelis are stranded overseas and waiting to find out if they will get into the country in time to vote in next week’s election.
The brief was filed as part of an ongoing legal fight over whether the government can maintain limits on how many overseas Israelis can come into the country in anticipation of Election Day on March 23.
Despite already issuing two interim orders to pressure the government over the issue, which has been before the court since early last week, the justices had still refrained from a final order to fully open Ben-Gurion Airport at press time.
The Movement for Quality Government in Israel said that with the state finally showing more flexibility regarding which overseas locations can send flights to Israel and the limited number of 1,879 Israelis who want to come to vote, it saw no reason why the state is maintaining a 3,000 person per day limit.
In other words, the movement said that the 3,000 people per day limit seemed unnecessary given that the demand for overseas Israelis who want to come to vote is significantly less than that.
At the same time, the NGO rejected the limit on principle, continuing to note that no other country is putting such limits on its citizens who are returning home, let alone for exercising the fundamental right to vote.
It was unclear if the High Court would continue to drag its feet on the issue
until it was so close to Election Day that its order to open Ben Gurion to overseas Israelis would be too late and have little impact – and whether the justices thought the state had already shown enough new flexibility or if they were worried about being blamed for a potential fourth coronavirus wave.
Last week, the High Court seemed to signal that it would rule against the government and order Ben-Gurion Airport to be fully opened to overseas Israeli citizens who wish to vote in the March 23 election.
The justices last week issued a conditional interim order demanding that the government explain by Sunday why it was legal for it to limit the amount and
schedule of Israeli voters who want to come into the country to vote.
THE AGGRESSIVE schedule set by the court – which stated that the government must respond by 11:30 a.m. Sunday March 14 and the petitioners must counter no later than 2:30 p.m. – suggested that the justices might rule by Sunday afternoon or evening. Late Sunday evening the justices ordered the state to provide a Monday update regarding the number of stranded Israelis.
However, it seems that the justices are still having hesitations about how much their order might impact the coronavirus trends nationwide, and they may also be concerned about being blamed later for causing a fourth wave and fourth lockdown.
Early last week, multiple parties filed a petition with the High Court demanding that it order the government to allow all Israelis overseas who want to return to vote in the upcoming election to come back into the country.
The petition said that the recent government expansion of how many Israelis can return was inadequate as it is limited the numbers to 1,000 per day at certain points with a maximum on some days of 3,000.
Further, the Movement for Quality Government in Israel took the government to task for limiting entry points for returning citizens.
On these two points, the state, after several days of delay which could impact traveling, did finally meet the requests by the NGO.
This is not the only petition the movement has filed regarding entry controversies at Ben-Gurion Airport.
Two weeks ago, it filed a petition to compel the government to publicize its decision-making process for granting special permits to enter the country through Ben-Gurion during the recent lockdown.
The movement warned that “there is a suspicion that the decisions were made with preference to people who have special connections in the corridors of power.”
According to the NGO, the special committee for granting exemptions must publicize in detail the justifications for its various decisions in order to confront allegations of “systematic discrimination” and “giving preference to certain sectors.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has decided to cut off funding to the Yasser Arafat Foundation, a nonprofit organization headed by Nasser al-Kidwa, a nephew of the former PLO leader, the London-based Al-Araby Al-Jadeed media outlet revealed on Monday.
Last week, Abbas dismissed Kidwa from the ruling Fatah faction because of the latter’s decision to form his own list to contest the upcoming Palestinian general elections.
Abbas accused Kidwa of violating Fatah’s internal regulations by deciding to run outside of the faction’s official list.
Kidwa recently announced that he would run in the elections as part of a new list named National Democratic Forum. He invited jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti and other Palestinian activists to join his list.
Barghouti was sentenced to five life terms in Israeli prison for his role in terrorist attacks against Israel during the Second Intifada.
Palestinian sources said that Abbas was also considering dismissing Barghouti from Fatah should he run in the elections on a separate list.
The decision to expel Kidwa from Fatah was taken after he was given a 48-hour deadline to backtrack on his intention to form an independent list. The ultimatum was issued on March 8 by the Fatah Central Committee, the faction’s highest decision-making body, which is headed by Abbas.
Kidwa condemned the decision to expel him from Fatah as “sad and pathetic.”
Established in 2008, the Yasser Arafat Foundation states that its mission is to “preserve, benefit from, and pass on to future generations the memory and heritage of the late leader and president, Yasser Arafat, as well as to continue his legacy of benevolence.”
According to the foundation, “the preservation of Arafat’s heritage contributes to the historical record and documentation of this phase of the contemporary Palestinian struggle in its political, social, economic, humanitarian, local, regional and international dimensions.”
Among the foundation’s goals: collecting, organizing, and presenting Arafat’s written, oral, and visual archives; contributing to his annual commemoration; and managing his mausoleum and a museum carrying his name.
The foundation has been receiving financial support from the PA government.
The decision to cut off funding to the foundation was taken by the Palestine National Fund (PNF), which was established in 1964 to finance the activities of the PLO in the political, military, social and cultural fields.
A letter signed by PNF director-general Ramzi Khoury instructs PA Minister of Finance Shukri Bishara to halt all direct and indirect payments to the Yasser Arafat Foundation on orders from Abbas as of March 11.
The letter was published on Monday by Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and some Palestinian news websites.
Kidwa said that he learned about the decision to cut off the funding to his foundation through the media.
Describing Abbas’s decision as illegal, Kidwa said that there should be a separation between him and the foundation.
He revealed that the PA has decided to withdraw the bodyguards assigned to protect him after his decision to form a new list.
When the Netanyahu-Gantz government fell on December 22, hurtling the country to yet another round of elections, attacking the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) seemed certain to become the low-hanging fruit of the election campaign.
Why? Because anger, frustration and resentment toward the haredi community was running at fever pitch as segments of haredi society were flouting the coronavirus restrictions: sending their children to school, while the general public’s children were stuck at home; attending mass funerals for rabbis, while funerals for the loved ones of others in the country were severely restricted; and seemingly going on with life as if there was no corona – or, even more galling, as if there was no central government telling them what they could or could not do.
After years of slow advances in haredi integration into Israeli society – spearheaded by haredi women moving en masse into the workforce, where they both learned about Israeli society and had Israeli society exposed to them – the coronavirus hit and set that whole process back many years.
All of a sudden, the discussion in the public square stopped being about integrating haredim, and instead became concerned with teaching them a lesson, putting them in their place, and forcing them to play by the rules of the state. Enough codling the haredim: time for the cudgel.
With that as the atmosphere, it could have been expected that the political parties – especially those that have waved the banner in years past of greater religious pluralism, of separating church from state, of haredi enlistment into the IDF, of public transport and commerce on Shabbat – would have seized the opportunity and launched a full-court press against the haredim.
For the most part, these parties – Meretz, Labor and Yesh Atid – did not take the bait.
For the most part, their campaigns have not been blatantly anti-haredi. Yes, in favor of store openings on Shabbat. Yes, in favor of breaking the ultra-Orthodox monopoly over personal-status issues. Yes, in favor of greater haredi enlistment into the army. But their campaigns have not been anti-haredi per se.
The one exception has been Yisrael Beytenu’s Avigdor Liberman.
Liberman has run a nasty campaign against the haredim, depicting them as only concerned about funding, and as parasites living off the sweat and toil of others. And the campaign seems to have worked, since Liberman’s poll numbers are remaining steady at between seven to eight seats.
Liberman’s anti-haredi rhetoric is finding an audience. On Friday night, he opined on a popular television talk show that “the haredim and Bibi [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] are on a wheelbarrow together to the garbage dump.”
While that comment was widely condemned, Liberman – being Liberman – doubled down. Speaking of the haredim in an Army Radio interview on Sunday, he said they have turned into a cult, that their behavior is pig-like, and that they are desecrating God’s name.
Referring to an advertisement run by the United Torah Judaism Party last week depicting Reform and Conservative Jews as dogs, Liberman said that it was hypocritical of them to now complain about his speech.
But Liberman is missing the point. True, the UTJ advertisement against a High Court of Justice ruling allowing non-Orthodox conversions in Israel was deplorable. But so too are his comments against the haredim.
What did everyone’s mother tell them at one time or another growing up? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Defending slander against one group of people by saying “well, they do it too” is not an overly convincing line of defense.
That Liberman is the main fomenter against the haredim should come of no surprise. In the past, he aimed his incendiary rhetoric at Israeli Arabs. The former foreign and defense minister’s rhetoric hasn’t changed, just his target – following his shifting read of the political map.
THERE ARE a myriad of reasons why Israel must not go to a fifth election, a plethora of reasons why the country needs to put this dizzying election dance behind us and settle down.
The country needs a stable government so it can plan, so it can make decisions which are not immediately suspect of being motivated overwhelmingly by political considerations, so it can set goals and try to attain them. It also needs to avoid a fifth election to avoid yet another round of the divisive and poisonous rhetoric that election campaigns inevitably breed.
On the positive side of the ledger, however, is the fact that for the most part, Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu Party is the only one that has slid into the morass of anti-haredi messaging.
In October, even before the elections were called but when they were very much in the air, Meretz posted a campaign poster on its Facebook page depicting haredi politicians with blood on their hands, an indictment of the behavior of haredi politicians during the pandemic.
The post was roundly condemned, and Meretz took it down shortly afterward. Neither that party – whose opposition to haredi control of the religious establishment goes back to the days of Shulamit Aloni in the 1980s – nor Labor, nor Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid – which entered the Knesset in 2013 on a plank of wanting to alter the religious status quo in the country – have gone after the haredim during this campaign like Liberman has.
Why? Perhaps because they realize this type of discourse is unseemly. Or perhaps because they want to keep open the option – slim as it may seem now – of one day sitting in a coalition with the haredim.
Whatever the reason, their restraint is welcome. As were the words of Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid following Liberman’s “trash heap” comment, following a statement by UTJ MK Yitzhak Pindrus saying that IDF female soldiers converting in the army are shiksas (a disparaging term for non-Jewish women), and following a recent put-down by Netanyahu of New Hope MK Yifat Shasha-Biton:
“The haredim do not need to be thrown to the trash heap,” he said. “The reform do not need to be thrown to the dogs. IDF soldiers are not shiksas. Leftists are not traitors. Rightists are not fascists. Female MK members are not ‘paka paka Shasha Shasha.’
“We must begin to start to speak differently, to act differently, to argue differently. The politicians are dragging Israeli society to the abyss. The time has come for sane discourse.”
With Israel now just a week away from the election, those are the types of words the county needs to hear – not that a segment of the population should be carted out to the trash.
After the students returned to study at school, an extraordinary photography exhibition was created around the theme of “uniform.” This is a new and intriguing fashion exhibition that compliments and enhances Israeli blue and white designs. The exhibition is open to the public in the Ramat Aviv Mall March 18-26.