Knesset speaker to oppose bill giving communities right to reject whom they please

[mudplanet]

The bill permitting communities to reject candidates for residency who do not meet their criteria will be brought unchanged for its second and third readings in the Knesset in the coming week, after talks between its sponsors and Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin collapsed. Haaretz has learned that Rivlin informed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he intends to vote against the bill.

The talks aimed to find a more moderate wording for the bill, which in its current form applies to communities of up to 500 households, or 68 percent of all Israeli communities. On Thursday, one of the authors, MK David Rotem (Yisrael Beiteinu ), rejected a compromise offered by Knesset legal adviser Eyal Yinon and attorney Sigal Kogot of the Knesset legal office. The compromise proposed the bill would apply only to communities of up to 400 households, and only to those in the Negev and Galilee, rather than throughout the country.

The changes would have reduced the number of communities that could reject potential members from minority groups such as Arabs, recent immigrants, single-parent families or families with same gender parents.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/knesset-speaker-to-oppose-bill-giving-communities-right-to-reject-whom-they-please-1.335958

[azurnoir]

1. Absolutely fasinating some non-Arab or Israeli majority communities want the right to exclude GLBT

families from living their communities, kind of puts a 'kink' into the 'Pro-Israeli' groups unabashed pandering of GLBT peoples, but then the GLBT community has been pandered for other questionable causes too, such as the effort to ratchet up anti-Black sentiment after the Proposition 8 was defeated in CA, by attempts to blame that on CA's Black population I would rate this effort right up there with that one

It should be noted that IDF completely changed it's rules on Gays in the military in 1993 when the Oslo accords were ramping up, it has been used as a 'why we're better than Arabs' and why liberals should side with us propaganda ever since, but it keeps missing the point that military occupation and oppression of a minority groups are not 'traditionally' liberal values

Israel is one of 24 nations that allow openly gay individuals to serve in the military. Since the early 1990s, sexual identity presents no formal barrier in terms of soldiers' military specialization or eligibility for promotion.<34>

Up until the 1980s, the IDF tended to discharge soldiers who were openly gay. In 1983, the IDF permitted homosexuals to serve, but banned them from intelligence and top-secret positions. A decade later, Professor Uzi Even,<35> an IDF reserves officer and chairman of Tel Aviv University’s Chemistry Department revealed that his rank had been revoked and that he had been barred from researching sensitive topics in military intelligence, solely because of his sexual identity. His testimony to the Knesset in 1993 raised a political storm, forcing the IDF to remove such restrictions against gays.<34>

The chief of staff's policy states that it is strictly forbidden to harm or hurt anyone's dignity or feeling based on their gender or sexual orientation in any way, including signs, slogans, pictures, poems, lectures, any means of guidance, propaganda, publishing, voicing, and utterance. Moreover, gays in the IDF have additional rights, such as the right to take a shower alone if they want to. According to a University of California, Santa Barbara study,<35> a brigadier general stated that Israelis show a "great tolerance" for gay soldiers. Consul David Saranga at the Israeli Consulate in New York, who was interviewed by the St. Petersburg Times, said, “It's a non-issue. You can be a very good officer, a creative one, a brave one, and be gay at the same time.”

This page was last modified on 8 January 2011 at 23:06.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Defense_Forces#LGBT_People