Pfc. Aluf Benn spent his years in the army in the Military Police in Lebanon. Yesterday, with commendable courage, he revealed his military routines in these pages ("When I was Eden Abergil"). He handcuffed and blindfolded people countless times and led many detainees to their cages. He saw detainees eating like dogs, as he put it - crouching with their hands tied behind their backs - and smelled their sweat and urine.
Immigration police arrested Charlene Ramos two days after her wedding celebration, saying that marriage is grounds for revocation of legal work permit.
Legal Fillipina foreign worker Charlene Ramos faces deportation from Israel due to getting married to another foreign worker.
Photo by: Ariel Shalit
A migrant worker who arrived in Israel legally from the Philippines four years ago to work as a nurse is currently facing deportation over her marriage to another documented migrant worker in Israel.
Charlene Ramos married her husband, Judser Maclenda, also from the Philippines, earlier this month.
Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger has ordered a complete halt in importers' sale of non-kosher meat to Israeli chains.
Metzger's decision has great implications for meat importers, who rushed to stop all sales after hearing it, according to him.
In the debate held at the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, Metzger mentioned that the original permit to sell non-koshered meat – or meat that is not salted in order to remove all traces of blood – was given for the benefit of non-Jewish consumers in order to cut costs.
But recently the rabbinate has discovered that many Jews were buying non-kosher meat precisely because it is cheaper, thus creating a situation in which rabbinate-approved non-kosher meat was being consumed by Jews who did not realize the meat had not undergone the proper process according to halacha.
An influential Israeli rabbi is coming under criticism after he gave a sermon Saturday in which he prayed for all Palestinians to perish in plague. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is the founder of the Shas party, part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef: "May our enemies and haters end. Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth. God should strike them and these Palestinians—evil haters of Israel—with a plague."
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's comments come just days before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas are scheduled to begin direct talks in Washington. Palestinian Authority spokesperson Ghassan Khatib condemned the Rabbi's remarks. Ghassan Khatib: "The statement that we heard from Ovadia Yosef is a racist incitement statement that is responsible for increasing the hatred and deepening the racist attitude among the Israeli society."
This N.Y. Times video of the Bedouin inhabitants of Al Araqeeb, chronicles the violent extinction of their village and their struggle to revive it. I’ve posted here on the deeply moving story filled with the barbarity of 1,500 Israeli soldiers with helicopters and other advanced weaponry being deployed to roust 400 poor Israeli Bedouins from the ancestral land. But the dogged determination of the victims not to accede to the thief attempting to steal their inheritance from them, is riveting.
