MK Yulia Malinovsky calls out those who are not stopping UNRWA activities, which are now against the law.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The United Nations agency charged with providing relief to Palestinians and barred from operating in Israel over the agency’s links to terrorist groups, including Hamas, continues to function in Israel, a Knesset member from the opposition claimed.

One of the MKs who initiated the law barring the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) from working in Israel due to its collaboration with Hamas has charged government ministers with not upholding the law and thereby cooperating with terrorism.

MK Yulia Malinvosky was very specific in her criticism.

“Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich did not sign an order instructing the Bank of Israel to close UNRWA’s accounts in banks operating in Israel,” she wrote. “Infrastructure and Energy Minister Eli Cohen did not give instructions to disconnect UNRWA facilities from electricity and water networks.”

Both these actions could indirectly speed up the agency’s departure, but even more direct action mentioned by Malinovsky could be taken as well, she said.

“Minister of Education Yoav Kisch did not send his staff to close UNRWA schools operating in Jerusalem, contrary to the law,” she wrote, while “Health Minister Uriel Busso did not order the closure of UNRWA clinics and pharmacies in Jerusalem.”

In addition, “Minister of Housing and Construction Yitzhak Goldknopf did not give orders to empty the UNRWA compound in Ma’alot Dafna in Jerusalem.”

The parliamentarian from the Israel Beiteinu party also called out Transportation Minister Miri Regev, who, she said, did not instruct her office “to revoke the vehicle licenses registered in UNRWA’s name.”

“So who will be the next scapegoat for the incompetence of this government of dishrags?” she asked sarcastically. “The attorney general? The head of the Shabak (Israeli Security Agency, aka Shin Bet)? The Supreme Court, or perhaps the new Chief of Staff?”

The law banning UNRWA operations within Israeli territory, including Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, passed overwhelmingly in October with a 92-10 vote. It also prohibits the organization’s staff from operating in or entering Gaza.

The aim was to dismantle the agency that provides aid to Palestinians but has been documented encouraging indoctrination against peace with Israel in its schools for decades. Hundreds on its payroll are members of terror groups, some of whom participated in the October 7, 2023, invasion and allowed Hamas to build and use terror tunnels underneath  its facilities in the Gaza Strip.

The government was given three months to implement the law, but little was done except for ordering the UNRWA in late January to vacate its main headquarters in Jerusalem and cease its operations.

Malinovsky stated just a few days later that she would not rest until UNRWA was completely gone.

“I will pursue them like Elie Wiesel pursued the Nazis,because they are Nazis,” she said, standing in front of the shuttered compound. “This organization is a Nazi organization that supports terrorism, and we know the examples.”

“The Foreign Ministry is still living in La La Land that this is an organization that has diplomatic immunity,” she said. “The State of Israel will first and foremost take care of its own national interests, its sovereignty, and its national pride.”

In mid-February, Malinovsky sent a warning letter to Prime Minister Ntanyahu and other senior government officials, threatening to petition the High Court of Justice over their failure to apply the anti-UNRWA law.

The post Israeli government allowing UNRWA to continue operating despite law, MK charges appeared first on World Israel News.

The preliminary reading of the bill against terrorist murderers passed 55-9 in Knesset.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Palestinian Arab terrorists will not be deterred if Israel passes a new law making easier to impose the death penalty on terrorist murderers, a Hamas spokesman told the Al-Risala news site Thursday, saying such a law would only serve to ‘open the gates of hell’ for Israelis.

“If the occupation implements its decision, it will open the gates of hell on itself, and it will face an uprising that uproots its existence,” said Hazem Hasanein, a spokesman for Hamas’ Palestinian Prisoners Information Bureau. “It will realize that it has committed the greatest foolishness in its history, and then it will see the death bags containing the bodies of its soldiers, settlers and bandits.”

The Hamas terrorist organization, which rules the Gaza Strip, regularly uses the death penalty. The death penalty is applied for offenses such as crimes against Islamic law, land sales to Israelis, and treason, such as by collaborating with Israel. Just last September, it announced that it had executed five men, two for such collaboration and three following criminal convictions.

The government passed the preliminary reading of the death penalty bill in the Knesset Wednesday 55-9, with most of the Opposition absenting itself from the vote.

The bill’s explanatory notes said its aim was “to nip terrorism in the bud and create a weighty deterrent.” The practice of “all the murderers receiv[ing] comfortable conditions in prison and salaries from the Palestinian Authority” had to end, it said, as did the phenomenon of releasing terrorists “who have served half their sentences.”

MK Limor Son Har-Melech (Otzma Yehudit) sponsored the bill, while attaching to it a similar bill written by MK Oded Forer of Israel Beiteinu, a party now in the Opposition, which passed in its preliminary reading in 2018 but then went no further. Israel Beiteinu voted in favor of the bill Wednesday.

Son Har-Melech, whose first husband was killed in a terrorist attack in which she was wounded, called the bill “the moral, just and necessary demand to fight back against anyone who tries to undermine our existence here in the State of Israel, and to murder Jews and annihilate us only because we chose to live here, on our homeland’s soil.”

“This demand has come after decades of disgraced national pride and thousands of people murdered, until the nation of Israel cried out: Enough. Enough with the national humiliation, enough with the terror, enough with this absurd reality in which murderers of Jews continue to live on this earth,” she continued.

Her party’s leader, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, called the measure “a morally appropriate punishment” even if it “will not eradicate terrorism entirely.”

“In a place where terror has become a national plague, where Jews are afraid to walk the city streets, where a vile terrorist opens fire near a synagogue, and keeps firing – we have a duty to institute the death penalty,” he said in the plenum. “If we do not enact this law, we will not be moral and humane towards our children and families.”

The Ministerial Committee for Legislative Matters had rejected the opinion of Attorney-General Gila Beharev-Miara, who opposed the bill on several grounds, including that ideological terrorists would not be deterred by the threat of death.

The Palestinian Authority put out a statement calling the bill a “cruel, barbaric, and inhumane” one that is “rooted in Jewish supremacy.” If it is passed into law, Palestinians will be “arbitrarily…put on death row,” it said.

The bill stipulates that the death penalty would be mandatory for anyone who “intentionally or out of indifference causes the death of an Israeli citizen when the act is carried out from a racist motive or hate to a certain public… and with the purpose of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland.”

It would also apply in Judea and Samaria, which is formally under military law. Only two of three military judges would have to agree to apply the death penalty in terror cases under the new bill, rather than the unanimous agreement currently required.

The post Hamas says death penalty for terrorists will ‘open the gates of hell’ against Israel appeared first on World Israel News.

Ayelet Shaked reveals that over 90% of Ukrainian nationals admitted to Israel since fighting broke out are not Jewish.

By World Israel News Staff

Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked said Sunday morning that Israel is accepting Ukrainian refugees, the vast majority of whom are not Jewish, at unsustainable rates and that the government must take steps to curb the influx.

During a government meeting focusing on Israel’s strategy for absorbing and integrating potential refugees, Shaked said that Israel has already admitted more than 2,000 Ukrainian nationals.

More than 90 percent of them do not qualify for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return — meaning that they do not have at least one Jewish grandparent.

If Israel continues to admit Ukrainians at the current rate, Shaked stressed, some 15,000 mostly non-Jewish refugees will be present in the country within a month.

“It’s impossible to continue with a rate of entry like this. We need to create a policy,” Walla News quoted Shaked as saying.

“Relative to its size, Israel has brought in more [Ukrainians] than any state in Europe besides those bordering Ukraine.”

Numerous Russian nationals have also requested temporary refuge in Israel as well, Shaked said.

Israel is anticipating a wave of mass immigration from Ukraine by Jews and people with Jewish heritage, with some 100,000 expected to settle in Israel in the coming months, she added.

According to Shaked, there are an estimated 26,000 Ukrainian nationals without Israeli citizenship currently in the country.

Some 2,500 were already in Israel on tourist visas when the fighting broke out. Israel granted a blanket extension of their tourist visas for an additional three months.

Four thousand Ukrainians have applied for political asylum or refugee status. Another 13,000 are believed to be residing and working in Israel illegally, typically after overstaying student or tourist visas.

The remaining 6,500 are living in Israel legally, under a foreign or guest worker visa.

MK Yulia Malinowski of the Israel Beitenu party said the Israeli government should provide emergency aid to Israeli citizens who were abruptly forced to leave Ukraine – mostly Ukrainian-born people with dual citizenship.

These Israelis are encountering major challenges upon returning to Israel, she said.

“We need to examine what to do [to help them] because some of them don’t even have a place to stay,” she added.

The post Israel accepting Ukrainian refugees at ‘impossible’ rate – interior minister appeared first on World Israel News.

Liberman, leader of the Israel Beiteinu party, scored high among the Druze for several reasons. 

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

In an election surprise, a party that not long ago was known mainly for its hardline views against the Palestinians garnered strong support from the Druze community, Hebrew website N12 reported Tuesday.

With vote counting at 95%, the Israel Beiteinu party has dropped one seat from the last election, to six Knesset seats.

However, Israel Beiteinu’s share of the vote in many Druze towns jumped hundreds of percentage points in Tuesday’s election. In some cases, it led all parties even when, in the last several elections, the towns voted far more for centrist parties like Blue and White.

For example, in Beit Jann in northern Israel, it garnered a whopping 34% – more than double its nearest rivals, Meretz and Yesh Atid. The highest an Arab party scored there was 4.4%, for the Joint List. But even in Asfiya near Haifa, where the Joint List placed second, it was soundly beaten by none other than former Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman’s faction, receiving nearly 32% of the vote to the Joint List’s 18.2%.

In Daliyat al-Karmel, where Israeli Beiteinu edged out Yesh Atid to win the town, local council chief Rafik Halabi told N12, “Liberman is the star of the election. He had a very active campaign and Hamed Amar is the only [Druze] candidate in the field.”

Halabi also provided a more current reason for supporting Liberman, since Amar, now No. 6, has been an Israel Beiteinu MK since 2009, only losing his seat between the second and third election rounds in 2019 when his party received five mandates.

“The explanation is simple: there is no right and left in Israel anymore, 85% are in the center,” he said.  “Liberman clearly stated that he would do everything to change the Nation-State Law and promised to work to repeal the Kaminitz Law.”

The Nation-State Law, a quasi-constitutional Basic Law passed in 2018 to anchor Israel’s identity as the nation state of the Jewish people, offended the Druze sector. As loyal citizens who serve in the IDF, they perceived the law as undermining their rights as equal citizens, even though other Basic Laws codify all Israelis’ individual rights. They also did not like that the law removed Arabic as an official language of the state, seeing it as another slap in the face.

Liberman, who had backed the Nation-State Law, said in his campaign that he saw it was a mistake in that it did not strengthen the Jewish State and harmed the Druze public.

The promise to junk the 2017 Kaminitz Law is even more of an about-face for Liberman, as he was the one who proposed it in the first place. The law, which is really an amendment to Israel’s Planning and Building Code, aims to rein in illegal construction by slapping high fines on offenders and giving the government more power to demolish such structures.

Such illicit building is especially rampant in the Negev and Galilee, where Arab Israelis and Druze are the majority, and they claimed that it targets their communities disproportionately. Last November, Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit announced that major parts of the law would not be enforced for the next two years.

The post Avigdor Liberman pulls surprising support from Druze community appeared first on World Israel News.

Several parties say that the best way to help unseat the prime minister is for Blue and White to disband.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Left-wing parties have rejected the lead that Blue and White leader Benny Gantz tried taking to unite the opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his Monday night admission that he had erred in joining a Likud-led coalition following last March’s elections.

Leader of the Opposition Yesh Atid swiftly responded by saying that it would be the party to spearhead such a move.

“We will make every effort to [forge the] connections that will lead to a sane and liberal government that will change the country,” it said.

Meretz head Nitzan Horowitz, possibly referring to the crashing poll numbers of Blue and White, said “Every morning someone decides that he is establishing a party that is a nothing. Whoever gets fractions of percentage points should retire and not waste votes. We are Left and this time we will run alone,” he said.

Avigdor Liberman (Israel Beiteinu) attacked Gantz, who had led the opposition before the last election, but then joined with Netanyahu in a government after promising during the campaign not to do so.

“We already had the chance to unseat Bibi [Netanyahu], but you chose to become a reserve prime minister,” he tweeted. “The only thing that you can do now for the sake of the country is to announce that you are not running in the next Knesset.”

As head of an amalgam of parties united under the name Blue and White, Gantz had come closest to unseating Netanyahu in three successive elections over the course of 2019-2020. He would have been the undisputed leader of the opposition had he not joined the emergency government last March. He explained his decision, saying that the country could not afford fourth elections when it had to fight the global Covid-19 pandemic that had just hit Israel’s shores.

Gantz had called out the names of the leaders of all the parties who have taken a firm public stand against Netanyahu. This included established ones such as Meretz, Israel Beiteinu and Yesh Atid, that last of which will undoubtedly be in the next Knesset, and newly formed parties such as The Israelis, Tnufa, the Economy party, and Telem, which just broke away from Yesh Atid to run alone.

Out of these, only Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai’s Israelis is currently polling above the electoral threshold.

“Let’s meet, we’ll find the method, the way. Let’s go into a room already tomorrow and we’ll find solutions,” he said.

“At a time of emergency, we cannot run with shards of parties. Let’s unite for the good of the state without fear and ego,” he said, adding that he didn’t have to be the one to lead such an umbrella group. The important thing was to “ensure that Netanyahu is finished as prime minister and we lead the next government in a unified way that respects all Israeli citizens.”

The post Israeli opposition parties deride Gantz’s call to unite against Netanyahu appeared first on World Israel News.

The group running the “Danger from our Home” website is also being physically threatened by party sympathizers.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beiteinu party has filed a police complaint against a group of Russian immigrants opposed to the party’s anti-religious line, Israel Hayom reported on Tuesday.

The party charged that the “Danger from our Home” website “serves as a basis for spreading false and anonymous propaganda against Israel Beiteinu, including through bots.”

It specifically named website founder Natalia Rothenberg in its complaint. According to the news1 website, the party told police that a professional cyber company discovered that she was an agent for a company based in St. Petersburg that is operating a “fleet of bots” to defame the Russian-immigrant-dominated party.

The report said that Israel Beiteinu was charging her with receiving funding for the website from anonymous sources in contravention of Israeli law.

The Danger from our Home site translates Russian campaign material into Hebrew to expose to the Israeli public the hate-filled rhetoric party supporters use regarding the ultra-Orthodox population, which Liberman has attacked in the last year in an effort to gain more mandates in the Knesset.

According to Rothenberg, all those who work for the site are volunteers who are opposed to the divisiveness this kind of language is bringing to the Jewish state, and are afraid of the possible violence that could be directed at religious citizens as a result of it.

“We began to act because we felt that Liberman was hurting our life’s work,” the former Soviet refusenik told Israel Hayom.

“We came to a Jewish state that is supposed to be a Garden of Eden, without anti-Semitism. We were horrified when we saw what he’s doing on the Russian street, and who he is leading – boors who don’t know Hebrew and write nonsense about Judaism.”

The group has also been suffering threats ever since they translated and spread in social media a video made a few months ago by an Israel Beiteinu activist that gave false information regarding the ultra-Orthodox lifestyle.

“We get threats all the time,” she said, adding, “we know who these people are.”

Russian-language media also incite against her group, she says.

“They don’t write anything about our activity. They say it’s not anti-Semitism, just anti-hareidi. This website is so threatening to Liberman, it’s unbelievable.”

The group is planning a conference on Thursday called “No to hate, Yes to unity.” One of the organizers told the Hebrew daily that one person reacted to his posting an ad for it on Facebook by threatening to wipe out whoever comes.

The post Liberman sympathizers threaten website exposing his ‘anti-Semitic’ Russian-language campaign appeared first on World Israel News.

The messaging from the party’s politicians in Russian is much more violent and hateful than their Hebrew language campaign, says online group.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Israelis with a Russian background are warning the wider Israeli public that Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beiteinu party is engaging in hateful rhetoric against Orthodox Jews when targeting Russian-speaking voters that frankly borders on anti-Semitism, Makor Rishon reported on Friday.

Natalia Rothenberg established her “Danger from our Home” website, a play on the name of Liberman’s party “This is Our Home,” in order to educate the Hebrew-speaking public about what the party, which draws its main support from Russian immigrants, is saying in Russian.

She is joined by veteran Russian immigrants who sift through the party’s official Facebook page to translate what they call its “poisonous” messaging. The examples they give could easily come straight out of a primer on anti-Semitism.

In one campaign video, Aryeh Deri, chairman of the Orthodox Shas party, dances under a shower of dollars while a narrator warns, “They want to help him [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] but we’ll all pay the price, from our pockets.”

In another post, Israel Beiteinu accuses the ultra-Orthodox parties of registering dead voters to inflate their numbers in the Knesset.

On her official Facebook page, Israel Beiteinu MK Yulia Malinovsky wrote that the haredim (or “ultra-Orthodox”) are “dangerous” because they spread diseases and don’t vaccinate their children.

The reactions on social media to these posts are even more worrisome, according to Rothenberg.

“Israel Beiteinu’s campaign is arousing dormant anti-Semitism that exists here in Israel,” the secular former refusenik said. “When they say that ‘the hareidim are parasites’ and are ‘destroying society,’ the direct result is horrific anti-Semitic reactions online against the ultra-Orthodox and the religious public.”

Just a few of the names that the ultra-Orthodox sector are being called in these talkbacks are “pedophiles,” “scum,” “a cancer on society” and “cockroaches.” There is outright incitement to violence according to the translators.

Haredim should be “beaten,” “choked,” “thrown out of Israel.” One even wrote, “We should have carried out pogroms against the haredim a long time ago. We have to silence them, otherwise they’ll soon force us to keep their ceremonies. Sign me up for a pogrom.”

Rothenberg’s group says it fears that the incitement may move from words to action, the paper reports.

They hold Liberman responsible.

“In Israel Beiteinu, everything comes from the top,” explained Ilya Levin, a former Israel Beiteinu activist. “In this party, nothing moves without Liberman’s authorization, so he understands everything. Even party representatives in local authorities don’t move without approval from on high.”

Rothenberg agreed, saying, “I think Liberman knows exactly what he’s doing and what he is awakening.”

The post Is Liberman’s campaign to Russian-speaking voters arousing anti-Semitism in Israel? appeared first on World Israel News.