Tag: Knesset

Israeli spymaster warns against right-wing leaders who think they are the messiah

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A former Israeli spymaster has branded the country’s leaders as “messianic” and unfit to tackle the Iranian nuclear program, in the strongest criticism from a security veteran of threats to launch a pre-emptive war.

Other retired officials have also criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, but the censure from Yuval Diskin, who stepped down as head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service last year, was especially harsh…

“I have no faith in the prime minister, nor in the defence minister,” Diskin said in the remarks broadcast by Israeli media on Saturday. “I really don’t have faith in a leadership that makes decisions out of messianic feelings…”

World powers, sharing Israeli suspicions that Iran has a covert bomb-making plan, are trying to curb it through sanctions and negotiations…Perhaps they could stop being the tail on the Israeli ass.

Diskin spoke days after Israel’s top military commander, Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, told Haaretz he viewed Iran as “very rational” and unlikely to build a bomb, comments that apparently undermined the case for a strike.

The former Shin Bet chief was specifically damning of Netanyahu and Barak, who have often crafted strategy alone and whose rapport dates back four decades to when they served together in a top-secret commando unit.

“They’re creating a false impression about the Iranian issue,” Diskin told a private gathering on Friday, where the comments were recorded. “They’re appealing to the stupid public, if you’ll pardon me for the phrasing, and telling them that if Israel acts, there won’t be an (Iranian) nuclear bomb…”

Netanyahu’s former Mossad foreign intelligence director, Meir Dagan, last year also ridiculed the Israeli war option…

Anyone think Congress will have a thoughtful and serious discussion of this criticism? Think anyone in Congress or the White House would have the chutzpah to challenge the ideology of a right-wing Israeli government even though it’s an election year?

Oh.

Israel prepares to revoke citizenship of uppity Israeli Arabs

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Israel has passed a law that eases the process of revoking citizenship in a step denounced as a move to threaten primarily its Arab minority.

The amendment to a so-called “Citizenship Law” was the latest in a list of parliamentary measures taken this past month that civil rights activists denounce as undemocratic but Israeli rightists see as essential to the Jewish state’s defense.

The measure, which passed by a vote of 37 to 11 after a stormy debate, empowers Israeli judges to deny citizenship privileges to anyone convicted of espionage or committing violence with nationalist motives.

Some of the delights of the McCarran-Walters Act that made life in McCarthyite America such an “adventure”.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose ultra-nationalist party sponsored the measure, proclaimed victory after the vote, saying he had fulfilled a pledge to voters to crack down on any “citizen who sides with the enemy.”

Israel’s Association for Civil Rights issued a statement in protest saying that “in a democracy you don’t deny citizenship” and that the measure sends a “humiliating and discriminatory message that citizenship for Israeli Arabs is not automatic…”

Israeli Arabs, who make up about a fifth of Israel’s population, are descendants of Palestinians who remained in what is now Israel when hundreds of thousands were driven away or fled in a 1948 war over Israel’s establishment.

Unlike Palestinians living in territory Israel captured in a 1967 war, Israeli Arabs are fully enfranchised though many complain of discrimination…

Not an important topic for the Israeli government. Or their allies in our Congress. In fact a few of the latter are preparing similar legislation for the United States.

Israel – step by step – further to the Right

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Leaders of the Bund of Brothers
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Israeli Knesset has approved a preliminary reading of a bill that would outlaw calls for the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

The measure, approved 47-37, was sponsored by Habayit Hayehudi party MK Zevulun Orlev and calls for the year-long imprisonment of anyone making public comments that would “cause an act of hatred, scorn or disloyalty to the state,” The Jerusalem Post reported.

The bill came hard on the heels of another measure proposed this week by Yisrael Beiteinu MK Alex Miller that seeks to outlaw commemorating Israel’s Independence Day as a day of mourning, as many Palestinians and some Israeli Arabs do now…

MK Afo Agbaria told the Post, “The State of Israel has declared jihad on the Arab population. Israel is gradually becoming an apartheid state. I won’t be surprised if in the future the Netanyahu-Lieberman government imposes additional restrictions on Arab citizens, including forbidding the use of the Arabic language.”

No surprise. How sad it is to say this.