The Health Ministry announced that from Tuesday the requirement for masks to be worn indoors will be lifted, marking the end of one of the only major coronavirus restrictions remaining in Israel.
The Ministry said there were three exceptions. Workers or guests who have not been vaccinated or recovered at welfare institutions, long-term care facilities or homes for the elderly, individuals en route to quarantine, and travelers on a flight.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/308102
"I have therefore stated several times in the past that the coalition agreement, although it includes key and burning issues for our society and unprecedented achievements and budgets, is the starting point and not the end point, and therefore we must continue to work to achieve all our society's demands and address the historical injustice that has been our lot for years due to discrimination, based on a clear vision and long-term strategy," Abbas explained.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/naftali-bennetts-broken-promises-and-the-betrayal-of-the-right/
Those words are now hauntingly prophetic. Naftali Bennett of June 2021 seems to have not only betrayed many of his right-wing voters, but also his own words and right-wing principles…
Meanwhile, Prime Minister-designate Naftali Bennett tweets a photo of himself praying with tefillin ahead of his expected swearing-in as prime minister. We assume the photo is from today.
Bennett still wears a small yarmulke, or skullcap — in Israel, normally a signifier of devout Orthodox Judaism — which clings to his bald pate in a precarious manner that even admirers sometimes lightly mock. But his degree of religious observance is sometimes described by Israeli observers as “modern Orthodox lite.” His wife, Gilat, a high-end pastry chef, is reported to be secular but a keeper of the Sabbath.
https://yated.com/the-big-eyes-and-the-small-kippah/
We saw that this past week. We saw how he was even willing to sell out the very public who voted for him. His voters, virtually all right-wing, even more right than the Likud, relied on him as a heretofore unabashed representative of the right, of not selling out to those leftists who want to make “peace” with the Palestinians at any cost, not selling out to Lieberman who wants a completely secular country, and not including unreliable Arab parties who might be closet members of the Muslim Brotherhood. He repeatedly promised that he wouldn’t during the previous election…but he did! He sold out.
Why? Ambition trumps all. As Rav Ovadiah prophetically saw, “his eyes are bigger than his kippah.”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/236944
Bennett corrected Dayan's assertion that he experienced a crisis of faith. "I never felt like I was having a crisis - I simply removed my kippa," Bennett asserted.
Bennett said that he returned to religion after witnessing the anti-religious sentiment that was rife in Israel after Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was killed in 1995 by an Orthodox Jew. "I was already a Company Commander when Rabin was assassinated, an admired commander I would say," he recalled. "There was a very difficult period after the murder. It was as if the entire religious world was blamed for it."
By the way, that is not something new. The last Netanyahu-Gantz government was also pilloried when presented to the Knesset last May, and Lapid – then head of the opposition – said that government was born in sin and vowed to bring it down as swiftly as possible.
Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas, whose support provided the key backing needed for the incoming change government’s majority, vowed to reclaim land in Israel that was “expropriated” from Arab Israelis.
“We will reclaim the lands that were expropriated from our people, this is a national cause of the first degree,” Abbas said in Arabic in his speech before the Knesset plenum Sunday evening.
Switching to Hebrew for the end his speech, Abbas noted that “we come from different nations, different religions, and different sectors. There is one thing that connects all citizens of Israel and that is citizenship.”
The coalition deal signed between Ra’am and Yesh Atid includes the formal recognition of three Bedouin communities in the South, as well as extending the freeze of the Kaminitz Law — which cracks down on on illegal construction — until the end of 2024.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/13/middleeast/israel-knesset-vote-prime-minister-intl/index.html
After touting his accomplishments throughout his years in office, Netanyahu assailed his rivals.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s record-breaking term as prime minister ended on Sunday night when the Knesset voted to approve the new government formed by Yamina leader Naftali Bennett and Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/307997
Abbas also vowed, in Arabic, that his party would "return the lands which were appropriated from our people."
"This is a national act of the highest order."
Religious Zionist Party chief Bezalel Smotrich responded to Abbas' comments, saying: "So Abbas is once again putting on a spectacular show of hypocrisy, with a nationalistic speech in Arabic in which he says the truth; a speech full of soothing words in Hebrew intended for Jewish listeners who are blind and deaf, especially those who make themselves so."
A Court of Appeal in Australia dismissed a challenge by prosecutors to extend the sentence of the murderer of Israeli student Aiia Maasarwe to a life sentence on Friday, keeping the murderer's sentence at 36 years with a chance for parole at 30 years, according to Australian media.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/09/dark-side-enlightenment-fleming-review
But these aren't the lines that Fleming returns to. Instead, he quotes the much less well-known opening sentence to Kant's magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. "Human reason," Kant wrote there, "has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which … it is not able to answer."
