Octopus Overlords

Israel's President Isaac Herzog called the boycott of Israel "a new kind of terrorism" on Wednesday, in light of the U.S. ice cream company Ben & Jerry's decision not to sell their products in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

"The boycott of Israel is a new sort of terrorism, economic terrorism," Herzog said at a ceremony commemorating prime ministers and presidents of Israel who have passed away. "Terrorism tries to harm the citizens of Israel and the economy of Israel. We must oppose this boycott and terrorism in any form."

malchior wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 8:05 pm Let me get this straight now. Somehow this is 'economic terrorism' but it is not economic terrorism to contact 35 states in a foreign country and urge them to stop doing business with that company.

Trump: "evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews" in the US

"it used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress"

"the Jewish people...in the US either don't like Israel or don't care about Israel"

"they're Jewish people that run the NYT"

Texas can’t forbid an engineering firm from boycotting Israel as part of its contract with Houston City Hall, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen on Friday stopped short of fully blocking a state law that prohibits government agencies from doing business with certain companies that boycott Israel. But his ruling said the free speech rights of A & R Engineering and Testing Inc. would be violated if its contract with the city included a clause saying the company will refrain from such a boycott. Hanen also said that Texas could not enforce its law against the company or the city.
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Texas passed an anti-BDS law in 2017. In 2019, it was rewritten to exclude individual contractors and only pertain to businesses with 10 or more full-time employees and when the contract is for $100,000 or more.

Before the law was rewritten, a federal court temporarily blocked the original law statewide in a lawsuit involving a speech pathologist who worked in the Pflugerville Independent School District. In that case, the U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled that the statute suppressed “unpopular ideas” and manipulated “the public debate through coercion rather than persuasion.

“When someone donates $50 million to an institution and asks you, along with others, to sign a letter — I don’t see a decent person declining.” These were the words of Tel Aviv University President Ariel Porat in reference to the letter calling on the United States to refrain from financial sanctions on Russian-Israeli oligarch Roman Abramovich.

Porat, who made the comments in a closed meeting of the university’s senate, also harshly criticized the United Kingdom's decision to sanction Abramovich and other Russian businessmen following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, calling it “a very odd populist approach.”

The president’s position has drawn internal opposition and has reignited discussions on the connection between philanthropy and ethics. “Signing the letter for oligarch immunity stains our institution,” Prof. Jonathan Goshen-Gottstein charged at the meeting.

Defiant wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 6:45 pm Israel just had it's fourth election in two years and at this point, I'm just going to start recycling my previous posts:

Defiant wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2019 12:49 pm It's still way up in the air as to who's going to win

El Guapo wrote: ↑Mon Jun 20, 2022 12:55 pm Interesting. The thread doesn't really explain why this is happening now, though. I know that the current coalition is a little crazy in its ideological diversity (it being in some ways a "let's all just agree on throwing Netanyahu overboard finally" coalition, so I guess it's inherently unstable. Just curious whether there was some spark or something.

Israel’s government suffered a defeat at the hands of the opposition on Monday when it voted down a push to uphold Israeli law in settlements on the occupied West Bank, posing a challenge for the ruling coalition.

In force since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank, the law, giving settlers there the same rights as citizens in Israel, is automatically ratified by parliament every five years. But two members of the broad coalition, a member of the Arab Ra’am party and a member of the leftist Meretz party, voted at first reading against the bill.

Their rebellion does not for the moment call into question the continuation of Israeli law in the West Bank, but rather the stability of the government led by the prime minister, Naftali Bennett.

The previous four elections, focused on Netanyahu’s fitness to rule while facing a corruption investigation, ended in deadlock. While opinion polls project Netanyahu, who is now on trial, as the front-runner, it is far from certain that his Likud party can secure the required parliamentary majority to form a new government.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a former ally and aide of Netanyahu, formed his government a year ago with the aim of halting the never-ending cycle of elections. But the fragile coalition government, which includes parties from across the political spectrum, lost its majority earlier this year and has faced rebellions from different lawmakers in recent weeks.
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Many of the parties had little in common beyond a shared animosity to Netanyahu. Often described as a political “experiment,” the coalition made history by becoming the first to include an Arab party.
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Despite its successes, the coalition eventually unraveled, in large part because several members of Bennett’s own hard-line party objected to what they felt were his pragmatism and moderation.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, whipped up the opposition by accusing Bennett of cooperating with “terror supporters” — a reference to his Arab partners in the coalition.
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Although Netanyahu himself had also courted the same Islamist party last year, the criticism appeared to make some of the hard-line members of Bennett’s coalition uncomfortable.

The final blow to the government was the looming expiration of a law that grant Israel’s West Bank settlers special legal status.

Max Peck wrote: ↑Thu Jun 16, 2022 11:30 pm Too bad they don't see the Jewish connection to Ukraine.

waitingtoconnect wrote: ↑Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:11 pm

They do. They have welcomed many Jewish refugees from Ukraine under the law of return. (But turned non Jews away.)

As of June 15, 32,958 Ukrainians have entered the country, of which 5,888 are new immigrants, and another 4,730 are in the process of aliyah, bringing the grand total of Ukrainian immigrants to 10,618.

In addition, another 22,340 Ukrainians who are not eligible for immigration, meaning they are not Jewish or don’t have at least one Jewish grandparent, have come to the country. Nearly 8,000 Ukrainian nationals have left.

Details and screenshots of a prototype version of the Pegasus spyware designed for Israeli police back in 2014 reveal the tools and far-reaching capabilities of a system that was slated to be deployed in everyday police work.

The spyware's suite of tools, which were supposed to be presented to the security cabinet headed by then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, included various capabilities sought by police – ranging from listening to any phone call on an infected phone, reading text messages, to remotely opening the microphone and the camera without the phone owner's knowledge. ...

...In spite of the former police commissioner Roni Alsheich's claim that "The Israel Police doesn't have Pegasus, to dispel all doubt," the Merari team discovered that even though there had been no eavesdropping without court orders, a spyware had indeed been used, though the police referred to it by a different name: Seifan.

The Merari team concluded that the spyware was operationally deployed as early as 2016, when Alsheich was still the commissioner, using technology that went beyond its legal authority. The phone data collected exceeded what was legally permitted by court orders and the group is still holding the information in the databases of its cyber department.

According to information obtained by Haaretz, the slated cabinet presentation highlighted the potential police applications of the spyware, which included covertly monitoring "protected messages" as well as voice and text chats on advanced cell phones. Police investigators gained access to all of these features after a suspect's phone was "infected."

The police intended to further present the reach of the spyware in a hacked device which included location, contact list, messages, emails, instant messaging, outgoing and incoming calls, calendar, remote recordings, remote camera use, microphone use and other information.

El Guapo wrote: ↑Thu Nov 03, 2022 2:21 pm Can you imagine a modern democracy returning to a destructive leader who was in power in the late 2010s after finally managing to get rid of him?

El Guapo wrote: ↑Thu Nov 03, 2022 2:21 pm Can you imagine a modern democracy returning to a destructive leader who was in power in the late 2010s after finally managing to get rid of him?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on Tuesday for the first time advanced a plan to overhaul the country’s legal system, defying a mass uproar among Israelis and calls for restraint from the United States.

The vote marked only preliminary approval for the plan. But it raised the stakes in a political battle that drew tens of thousands of protesters into the streets, sparked criticism from influential sectors of society and widened the rifts in an already polarized country.

The 63-47 vote after midnight gave initial approval to a plan that would give Netanyahu’s coalition more power over who becomes a judge. It is part of a broader package of changes that seeks to weaken the country’s Supreme Court and transfer more power to the ruling coalition.

Netanyahu’s ultrareligious and ultranationalist allies say these changes are needed to rein in the powers of an unelected judiciary. Critics fear that judges will be appointed based on their loyalty to the government or prime minister — and say that Netanyahu, who faces trial on corruption charges, has a conflict of interest in the legislation.

The showdown has plunged Israel into one of its most bitter domestic crises, with both sides insisting that the future of democracy is at stake in their Middle Eastern country. Israeli Palestinians, a minority that may have the most to lose by the overhaul, have mostly stayed on the sidelines, due to discrimination they face at home and Israel’s ongoing 55-year occupation of their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank.

El Guapo wrote: ↑Sun Feb 26, 2023 1:26 pm Has Netanyahu's corruption trial advanced at all? Feels like he's been "facing corruption charges" for years now.

During an on-stage interview at a confab organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations last week, Friedman — who is one of Netanyahu’s most ardent backers in the Republican party — took particular issue with the coalition’s legislative effort to allow the Knesset to override decisions made by the Supreme Court. “That to me is offensive to my idea of how courts should work,” he said.

“You compare this to the US, but it doesn’t work like that in our system,” he told Rothman to applause from dozens in the room.

Friedman said that in the US, the courts exist to protect minority rights, and an override clause would prevent Israeli courts from doing the same.

A member of the audience told Axios that Rothman looked embarrassed when Friedman finished speaking.

Nearly all of the 40 reservist pilots from 69th Squadron have refused to join a one-day training exercise this week.

It is seen as an unparalleled political move by some of Israel's most strategically important reservists.

It is also a sign of growing opposition to the ruling nationalist coalition's plans to overhaul the legal system.

One unnamed pilot told the Ynet news website that the squadron was "signalling that we won't be prepared to serve a dictatorial regime".