(Video by Eli Mandelbaum)

“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful,” Samuel Beckett wrote. The same sentiment applied on Wednesday, when Knesset reporters waited in vain for protesting African migrants to be allowed into the building.

“Don’t leave, you’ll miss all the excitement,” a writer from Ma’ariv advised me.

It was five minutes after a group of eight migrants from Sudan and Eritrea along with the four MKs who invited them were supposed to arrive in the Knesset’s dingiest, oldest conference room. And the only people there were five reporters, about a dozen cameramen and one parliamentary aide who had no idea what was going to happen.

People are just running late, I thought optimistically and stayed put. Continue Reading

Segment begins at 3:50

The time has come to stop using chauvinist language in the press. It’s legitimate to criticize female politicians – but only on equal grounds with their male counterparts.

The situation of women and feminism in Israeli politics is full of contradictions. It seems to be getting better all the time, yet there is plenty of room for improvement, particularly in the language we use to describe women in positions of power.

A woman, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, is at the head of our peace talks staff, a job that could impact the future of everyone between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and even beyond, but she’s always the only woman in the negotiating room, though that mostly is not Israel’s fault. Three lists in the Knesset are led by women – Livni’s Hatnua, opposition leader Shelly Yacimovich in Labor and Zehava Gal-On in Meretz – but the same number of parties refuses to have female representatives. There are more female MKs than ever before – 27 – but that’s only 22.5 percent of parliamentary seats, as opposed to 50% of the population. And, of course, we had a female prime minister, but that was 40 years ago.

Perhaps the foremost contradiction is that females have held many of the most senior government positions, but are unable to escape condescension and derogatory language from men. Continue Reading

Israeli politicans are using social media in ways that reflect the dynamism, creativity, and tech savvy of the Start-Up Nation. Is it good for the West’s political culture?

Someday, historians may look back and say that the social media revolution finally conquered the Israeli political scene at the end of July 2013. One evening, the Knesset was working hard to pass the new Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s first budget in a marathon all-night session. At the end of a seemingly interminable series of speeches, all Members of Knesset had to do was press the “for” or “against” button in front of them as article after article of the seemingly endless bill was read.

As is usually the case with such bills, party-line discipline had been imposed, and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni was even flown in from peace talks in Washington to bolster the coalition’s vote. But as the button-pushing stretched into the night, the MKs were mostly bored out of their minds. Plenty of them brought books, strategically tilted so the press could see them and admire their intellectual proclivities. Continue Reading at The Tower

Photo credit: Elad Gutman, Yesh Atid

Lahav discusses Yesh Atid’s new bill.

Coalition chairman Yariv Levin describes the challenges ahead and encourages coalition parties to compromise to avoid a deadlock.

With haredi enlistment, electoral reform and Beduin land claims in the Negev coming to a vote in the next few months, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein encourages MKs to act with decorum in the legislature’s turbulent winter session – but won’t hesitate to make his own positions felt.

Sometimes, a Knesset speaker is like the captain of a ship, working day and night to make sure the vessel stays on course in even the stormiest of weather. After a little more than six months on the job, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein has already safely sailed through rough waters, but he expects the turbulence to continue in the Knesset’s winter session, which begins on Monday and continues until Passover. Continue reading

From Commentary: The fight over a law to enshrine Israel’s nationalist nature.

For all the controversy about Israel’s status as a “Jewish state,” the country’s own legal framework establishing it as such is surprisingly tenuous. Israel, unlike the United States, has no constitution that defines its national goals and values. Its collection of 11 Basic Laws, which were intended as a blueprint for an eventual constitution, contains no definition of Israel as a Jewish state. The Independence Scroll of May 1948, deliberately designed by David Ben-Gurion to serve as Israel’s version of the Declaration of Independence, does; it makes the case for Jewish statehood by focusing on history and the return of Jews to the land. But even though the Independence Scroll has been cited in Israeli Supreme Court rulings, it was never ratified as law. And while Israel was built on the principles of the “law of return,” which allows all Jews and all people with at least one Jewish parent or grandparent to become Israeli citizens, it is not one of the 11 Basic Laws. At the moment, in fact, there are no laws truly cementing Israel’s status as a Jewish state. Continue reading