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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (278269)	7/20/2002 10:41:19 AM
From: Emile Vidrine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

By Jean Shaoul 18 July 2002 The Israeli government has voted 22-2 to sideline a bill instigated by Knesset member Rabbi Haim Druckman and the National Religious Party that would allow Jewish-only communities. The bill proposed to amend Israel’s Lands Law to enable the government to allocate land for Jews-only to the Jewish Agency. It was endorsed by the cabinet last week by 17 votes to two against, but will now be buried by being sent to a committee headed by former finance minister Yaacov Ne’eman with a remit to examine basic law issues. The Likud ministers and members of the ultra-orthodox Shas party who voted in favour of the bill last week, subsequently voted against. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was anxious that any debate in the Knesset was prevented as the bill had sparked widespread outrage, though he made no criticism of its proposals. “It is not right to make this into a law if we are not certain it is completely necessary,” he said. The bill’s transparently racist character meant that it was a full year before cabinet could be allowed to debate it openly. Druckman hailed the initial vote in favour as a “victory for Zionism”. A member of both the National Religious Party and Gush Emunim, the right wing settler movement, he was one of Sharon’s staunchest allies in the 1982 war against Lebanon and a vigorous opponent of any inquiry into the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. His proposal got through cabinet virtually unopposed because, despite the fact that the agenda for the meeting had been circulated in advance, all the Labour Party cabinet members—with the exception of Ephraim Sneh who voted against it—were absent from the vote. None had either submitted written proxies nor asked the prime minister to postpone the discussion in their absence. It was only after three days after the event that Defense Minister and Labour Party Chairman Benjamin Ben-Eliezer asked Cabinet Secretary Gideon Sa’ar to schedule a fresh debate on the bill. The Labour ministers’ absence gives the lie to their oft-repeated claim that their membership of Sharon’s government is a restraining force on the Israeli right. Sharon also absented himself from the first vote. The bill may have been buried, but the anger it provoked will not go away. Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset, said “the bill emphasises the new trend in Israeli policy and political culture to turn discrimination into something legitimate, by cementing it into law. Racism has been turned from political culture into the ruling official ideology, with the support of the government and the coalition’s approval.” Druckman’s objective in introducing the amendment was to overturn the High Court’s landmark decision in March 2000. The court ruled that the Zionist state could not discriminate between Palestinians and Jews in the allocation of land within Israel, whether the agency involved was the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) or the Jewish Agency (JA). The court did not totally rule out discrimination, saying that there might be circumstances such as security why land might be designated for Jews-only. That case had been brought by the Ka’adan family in 1995, and was backed by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. The Ka’adans claimed that the Jewish Agency’s refusal to allow them to buy land to build a home in Katzir because Adel Ka’adan was a non-Jew was illegal as it discriminated against Israeli Palestinians. Read All At_