A new bill concerning Israelis living abroad is to be presented in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) this coming week. This bill, if passed, will enable expatriate Israelis to vote abroad in coming elections, and naturally there are different opinions on this subject. As far as I can gather, most citizens here (I too) are opposed to it, saying rightly that people who leave the country, who bear none of its burdens, pay no taxes, don’t serve in the army should not be the ones who decide what happens here.

The “Likud” and “Israel Beiteinu” parties are for this new law, whilst “Shas” and “Labour” oppose this bill, saying there are a huge number of ex- Israelis living in countries all over the world who no longer have any connection with Israel.The current version of the legislation, would allow any Israeli passport-holder around  the world to vote. But evidently Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu wants first to consult other coelition parties about how to diminish the bill’s scope. “People who live abroad and don’t intend to come back within a reasonable period of time should not decide our fate,” Netanyahu said,”But there are people who are abroad temporarily, and they shouldn’t be punished for it. The period of time for expatriates to be allowed to be abroad while maintaining the right to vote should be four to six years, enough to allow them to obtain two academic degrees.”  He also suggested that expatriates be required to visit Israel to prove their connection to the state.”  Well, we’ll have to wait and see how the Knesset voting will go.

And again in the news is the Goldstone report , which Israel has firmly rejected, but which says that Israel  committed war crimes during its military incursion into Gaza from December 27, 2008-January 21, 2009.The report  angers us all. Last Wednesday, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and current head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs Dore Gold, a known critic of the Goldstone Report, held a Jerusalem press conference specifically to talk about  the main military analyst  Col. Desmond Travers’ (who is from Ireland) contribution to the report, as well as comments he has made to the media and who  claimed that Hamas fired only two rockets at Israel in the month prior to Operation Cast Lead, in an interview he gave this month to the Middle East Monitor. Gold charged that Travers was unprofessional, “fundamentally biased” against the IDF and that some of his statements had “anti-Semitic overtones. ”Travers’ participation, ” Gold said,“raises serious questions about the reliability of the whole military analysis in the Goldstone report . According to Israeli military sources there were 32 rockets fired from Gaza at Israel between the 16th and 18th of December alone, not the  two during the whole month, which Travers mentioned. But  as I have surely mentioned before, this is not all. Israel is accused of deliberately shooting civilians, whilst most of these victims were Hamas terrorists dressed up in civilian clothes and shooting from public buildings. Our side of the story is hardly mentioned in the report.

I’ll end with a very small news item.The 18 year old son of New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bronner, has volunteered for a stint in the Israeli army and this has caused a rather disturbing hullabaloo. It is said to be a conflict on interests, and there are demands that Bronner be reasigned somewhere else. That may be called “Punishing the father for what is considered his son’s “so-called sin”.Shalom from Irene

 

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