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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Racist bill is killed in Israel |
Current rating: 0 |
by Haaretz, via gehrig
(No verified email address) |
14 Jul 2002
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In a comment to another post a few days ago I predicted that this bill would die quickly. I didn't know how quickly! @%< |
Cabinet kills bill on land for Jews only
By Gideon Alon
A week after it voted 17-2 in support of MK Haim Druckman's (National Religious Party) bill that would allow Jewish-only communities, the government yesterday voted 22-2 to bury the bill in a committee, headed by former finance minister Yaacov Ne'eman, examining Basic Law issues.
Last week's government vote in favor of the bill, which proposed amending the Israel Lands Law to enable the government to allocate land for Jews only to the Jewish Agency, sparked a storm of controversy, which the government's NRP Yitzhak Levy yesterday termed "leftist screaming."
All the Likud and Shas ministers who voted in favor last week, voted against the bill yesterday, apparently under the influence of the public outrage against the bill and Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein's warning that the bill could further shred the "delicate fabric" of relations between Israel's Jews and Arabs.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon forbade Levy from proposing the government allow the bill to pass a preliminary reading in the Knesset plenum and then freeze it until the Ne'eman committee make its recommendations.
Sharon said he was not willing to spend any more time on the bill until it had been reviewed by the Ne'eman Committee.
The prime minister backed the decision to send the bill for review, saying, "It is not right to make this into a law if we are not certain it is completely necessary," adding that enacting the bill would have an impact on Arab-Jewish relations in Israel as well as inter-Jewish relations.
Defense Minister and Labor Party Chairman Benjamin Ben-Eliezer last Tuesday asked Cabinet Secretary Gideon Sa'ar to schedule a new debate on the bill, after Labor's ministers missed the vote last Sunday when the bill was approved.
The debate on the bill began in July 2001, when the cabinet decided to support it in order to bypass a High Court of Justice ruling asserting that the state may not directly discriminate on a religious or national basis in the allocation of state land. On December 2, 2001, the ministerial committee on legislation decided the government would support Druckman's bill in its preliminary reading in the Knesset. Minister Dan Meridor appealed, and on December 24, the committee accepted the appeal.
Six days later, Education Minister Limor Livnat (Likud) submitted an appeal to the full cabinet on the committee's ruling. The subject was not placed on the cabinet agenda until the Knesset presidium decided that, notwithstanding the bill's racist thrust - which made the Knesset's legal adviser suggest the bill be dropped from the parliament's agenda - it could be submitted to the Knesset. The subject was then added to the cabinet agenda last week. |
