Brenner, a 57-year-old New York-born social worker, Reform Jew and feminist, is at the epicenter of the latest halachic earthquake shaking Israel. Her downstairs neighbor is Dov Dumbrovich, the Orthodox chairman of the local religious council, who is defying a Supreme Court ruling and refusing to let her take her seat on the council.
After a raucous six-hour debate, 55 legislators registered their confidence in Netanyahu, 50 voted against, and an unprecedented 15 abstained or absented themselves from the ballot. The government\’s paper support is 66 out of 120 Knesset members, plus two far-right sympathizers from Rehavam Ze\’evy\’s Moledet.
Binyamin Netanyahu this week put the Bar-On affair behind him. The Supreme Court endorsed as \”not exceptionally unreasonable\” the law officers\’ reluctance to indict the prime minister and Justice Minister Tzachi Hanegbi for the abortive appointment of an underqualified party hack as attorney-general.
The conversion bill compromise was based on a position paper presented to the prime minister and his colleagues by a Reform and Conservative delegation.
After a year of licking the wounds of electoral defeat, the Israeli left has crowned a new leader who radiates an aura of victory and an appetite for power. The campaign of the year 2000 has begun.
Israel is preparing a package of gestures designed to revive the Mideast peace negotiations that have been frozen since work began on a contentious Jewish housing project at Har Homa in East Jerusalem two months ago.
Despite its propaganda success in the United Nations General Assembly, where 134 countries last weekend denounced Israeli construction on the disputed Har Homa site in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority is in despair over the stagnant peace process.
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