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Showing posts from April, 2019

Jewish and Arab Israelis Want to Coexist

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A mixed couple - Mulim woman and Jewish man. Do all Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs hate each other, and does each group hope to eradicate the other from the State of Israel?   No, not all Israeli Jews and Arabs hate each other, and not all of each group wants to remove the other from Israel.   Donna Rosenthal gives many examples of tolerance and acceptance, while Pew Research Center’s study shows a downward trend, and +972 Magazine publicizes a poll that shows an upward trend.   These are not to say that there are some Arab communities within Israel that are utterly anti-Semitic, and there are some Jewish communities with hostility towards Arab Israelis, but this aggressive mentality is chiefly limited to highly religious Muslim communities.   Rosenthal describes the relationship between Muslims and Jews in her book The Israelis .     The Muslims chapter, in particular, she tells the story of a physician Yasser Mansour, an Israeli Arab Muslim who lives in Haifa.   Through the

A Member of Otzma Yehudit Might Become a Member of the Knesset

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Itamar Ben Gvir (left) with Michael Ben Ari (right) Journalists in the Agence France-Presse, an international news agency, along with the staff of the Times of Israel jointly assembled an article that discussed a far-right wing politician.  The politician they focused on was Itamar Ben Gvir.   Ben Gvir has been indicted 53 times, and has been cleared in 46 of these cases.   The authors raise concern over the fact that he may end up becoming a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, due to a deal brokered by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The article says that the purported deal repulsed many Jewish communities in and away from Israel because it puts a party whose reputation for racism, Otzma Yehudit , on Israel’s electoral slate.  In building a coalition, Netanyahu made a political decision in not allowing right-wing votes to be wasted – without this alliance, the Otzma Yehudit party might not obtain enough electoral votes in order to qualify for any seats in the