RAMALLAH, West Bank: Hours before Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak leaves for the United States, the Defense Ministry yesterday notified the High Court of Justice that in accordance with a 1996 government master plan for the construction of 1,450 housing units in a new neighborhood in the West Bank settlement of Adam, the ministry has at this stage approved 190 units, of which 50 have received final approval.
The government informed the court that the 50 housing units in Adam, a settlement located near Jerusalem, are intended to house the Jewish occupiers expected to be evacuated from the unauthorized Migron settlement outpost, near Ramallah. This number does not include public buildings and roads.
“The understandings were approved by senior government officials, Council of Settlements representatives and West Bank settler leaders,” the ministry wrote in the statement submitted to the court.
The timing of the notification could complicate the defense minister’s goal to reach an understanding on the issue of settlement construction with US Middle East envoy George Mitchell, whom he is expected to meet in New York.
Six Israeli Cabinet ministers met yesterday morning to discuss US and European demands to freeze the settlements. Israeli sources said that the government is leaning toward saying any move to freeze construction can only be part of renewed dialogue with the Palestinians.
Barak on Sunday denied reports that Israel had decided to freeze all construction in the West Bank for three months, including for natural growth, saying there had been no agreement on this yet.
The Palestinian Authority has made peace negotiations conditional on Israel enforcing a total settlement freeze, something that has never happened since the first Jewish settlement, Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, was founded 42 years ago.
Palestinian Minister of Jerusalem Affairs Hatim Abdulqader said that the Israeli decision was like “throwing a spanner in the wheels of the peace process.”
THE report on life in Gaza just issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross six months after the brutal Israeli attacks which killed between 1,100 and 1,400 people makes bitter reading.
According to the ICRC, there has been almost no improvement since the Israelis stopped their brutal onslaught. The daily round of killing may have stopped but Gazans are still condemned to living in a war zone. It remains a bombsite. Even if they had the money to rebuild their shattered homes and lives, they cannot get hold of the equipment. The reopening of the Rafah checkpoint on the border with Egypt has slightly improved matters — some trucks with medical aid have got through but it is a tiny fraction of what is needed. Israel’s blockade of the strip remains devastatingly effective. Gaza is, as the ICRC report so horrifyingly points out, a state of despair. Imprisoned by the Israelis, still mourning the deaths of family and friends (there is hardly a family that did not lose someone), with woefully insufficient medical care, a destroyed economy, no hope of a job and living in what looks like an earthquake zone (the reports’ own words), there is a hopelessness that shocks.
A state of despair... facing, on the other side of the prison wires, a state of arrogance. For over 60 years now, the Israelis have treated the Palestinians with contempt and hatred. Time after time, the latter’s human rights are trampled over, their political aspirations crushed, UN resolutions ignored, international outrage scorned and efforts to mediate peace spurned.
It is not merely a state of arrogance, it is a state of insanity. The despair sown by the Israelis in Gaza breeds militancy and hatred. It breeds, too, a counter arrogance which displays itself in a refusal to countenance Palestinian-Israeli cohabitation, indeed to countenance anything other than Israel’s complete destruction.
The Israelis blockade Gaza to punish the Palestinians for electing Hamas and to force its supporters from firing rockets at Israeli towns and settlement; it does the exact opposite. It fuels hatred of Israel. It ensures the rockets continue. It pushes the Gazans into the rejectionists’ embrace and creates a breeding ground for a fresh generations of suicide bombers. Only a lunatic would claim that it is in Israel’s interests. The cycle of oppression and misery has to be broken if Israel is to have the security it claims it wants. As a first step, it has to lift the restrictions and allow Gaza to start working and living again. Israel can never live in peace while it grinds the Gazans into the dust, while it keeps the territory as one giant prison whose inmates are forced to live in misery and squalor and humiliated daily. Nor should it.
The only way forward is the two-state solution proposed by the then Crown Prince and now Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah and adopted by Arab states in 2002 and again revived at the Riyadh summit two years ago in which, in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from all lands occupied in 1967, Arab states would recognize it. The whole world understands that, including the US; only the Israeli government baulks at the idea and consistently finds reasons to block it — which calls into question its claims it wants peace. It seems far more interested in wanting mastery — brutal mastery if necessary — over the Palestinians.
Gaza seems proof of that.
The financial crisis
EXCERPTS from an editorial in The Guardian yesterday:
Last October, Gordon Brown was furious with bankers. “I’m angry at irresponsible behavior,” he told GMTV, as he unveiled a £500bn plan to rescue a banking system near collapse. “Where there is excessive and irresponsible risk-taking, that has got to be punished. The day of big bonuses is over.”
Last week, the angry man of politics nodded through a huge bonus package for the boss of one of the worst-hit British banks. RBS is 70 percent owned by the government, which makes its chief executive Stephen Hester a civil servant in all but name — yet if he plays his cards right he will pocket nearly £10 million. So much for Brown’s righteous anger. Just a few months ago, the prime minister flew to Washington and called on Congress to “outlaw shadow banking systems and offshore tax havens”. Today, the Treasury will publish a new voluntary code of conduct for banks, to dissuade them from constructing intricate tax-avoidance schemes. Again, Brown’s fine words translate into too-little action. This is not the general anti-avoidance principle tax campaigners have been demanding. Banks that duck out of the new gentlemen’s agreement will face no sanction more severe than a bit of closer attention from Her Majesty’s tax inspectors. As a government tax source told this paper a few months ago, “There are less than 100 inspectors actually tackling avoidance, against thousands of professionals advising companies on how to do it.” Barclays — which has a huge structured-capital markets arm devoted to helping customers with tax — or any other bank may well decide that these are odds worth taking.
As the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, puts it in an essay for this week’s New Statesman: “The bankers can’t believe their luck.” After plunging the world into recession, and having had to be rescued by the taxpayer, the financiers are being asked for little more onerous than a commitment to do better next time. Cable suggests that MPs’ expenses have derailed the reform process, by distracting Brown’s government and by stripping Westminster of its authority to tackle banker excesses. But it is easier too for an enfeebled government not to make any more enemies by taking on the City.
Certainly, next week’s Treasury white paper on financial regulation looks as if it will be a modest document; a policy package better suited to 2003, say, rather than 2009. Brown’s pre-election gambit is clear: Hold out for those fabled green shoots, float a stake in Northern Rock or another state-owned bank and claim the credit as firefighter-in-chief. Were they in power, the Tories would not do much better. George Osborne may sound tough about overly large banks being broken up, but the rhetoric is not matched by policy. Nor is it likely to be, going by yesterday’s story in the Sunday Telegraph about bumper City donations to Conservative Central Office.
Wall Street has also returned to business-as-usual.
The UN panel heard emotional testimony from residents during the inquiry on Sunday
A UN human rights mission on the Gaza conflict is hearing from a range of experts on the social and the psychological effect of Israel's 22-day war on Gaza.
On the second of the two-day inquiry on Monday, a child psychologist told the panel that an estimated 20 per cent of children in Gaza suffer post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of witnessing violence.
Dr Iyad Sarraj said: "The amount of killing and blood that they have seen or that their relatives have suffered from ... is a huge amount, and this leads to negative psychological feelings, to radicalism and a cycle of violence."
Lost livelihoods
Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros in Gaza, where more than half of the population of 1.5 million people is under 18-years of age, said Sarraj told the panel that six months after the war the trauma is still present among children.
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"During the war we spent the night with a family and we saw first hand the kind of trauma that Dr Sarraj was talking about in terms of the children and how frightened they were when the bombs were going off," she said.
The panel also heard from the head of a women's group in Gaza City, who said that most of those who died in the conflict were men, leaving behind the women they provided a livelihood for, Tadros said.
"Even months after the war the women are still suffering because they have lost their livelihood and have to go out and work," she said, adding that this was flagged up as a "major problem".
The hearing, which is being broadcast live for the public, will also include testimony from experts on the military operation on the Palestinian enclave.
The panel is to hold a second round of public hearings on July 6 and 7 in Geneva where it will hear from the victims of alleged violations in Israel and the West Bank.
The UN chose the Swiss city as the venue of the second round of hearings because the fact-finding mission did not receive permission to enter Israel.
The public hearings were called for by Richard Goldstone, the head of the 15-member team and previously a member of the South African constitutional court.
The mission is due to complete a report with its findings in August.
Israeli offensive
Israel launched its offensive against Gaza on December 27, citing rocket attacks from the enclave that caused injuries to residents and damage to property in Sderot and other towns.
The military operation killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 900 civilians, among them scores of children, according to Palestinian officials and human rights groups.
It also destroyed thousands of homes and heavily damaged Gaza's infrastructure.
Israel says the death toll was lower and most of the dead were Hamas fighters.
Thirteen Israelis were also killed during the fighting.
Gaza's reconstruction is being hampered by Israel's blockade of Gaza, which dates back to June 2007 when Hamas took control of the territory.
Since then, Israel and Egypt, which control Gaza's only border crossing that bypasses Israel, have kept the territory of 1.5 million aid-dependent people sealed to all but essential humanitarian supplies.
Israel has insisted that the blockade is necessary to prevent Hamas from arming itself. Human-rights groups say it is a "collective punishment" that wrongly hurts ordinary civilians.
The fact-finding mission is mandated by the UN to investigate all violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations conducted in Gaza.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
Times become tough for rich Israelis as a new report shows that the number of Israeli millionaires has fallen 28 percent since the global economic crisis.
The Merill Lynch Investment Bank and Capgemini's World Wealth has released a gloomy report that shows more than 3,000 Israelis have sustained heavy losses in the world financial meltdown -- to an extent that they can no longer be defined as millionaires.
The report adds that there are currently 5,900 millionaires living in Israel, a sharp decline from the 8,200 in 2007.
According to the report, a millionaire is defined as a person with net assets worth more than $1 million, and those falling in the ultra-rich category have an estimated fortune of more than $30 million.
Sigal Shapira, the head of Global Wealth Management for Merrill Lynch in Israel, said the nosedive in the number of Israeli millionaires stems from the collapse of international financial markets along with investment losses, particularly those in income-producing properties.
The number of global millionaires fell by 14.9 percent, the report said. In the United States, the number fell by 18.5 percent. Hong Kong lost the most millionaires, 61 percent, from the previous year.
The postwar humanitarian crisis in Gaza takes a turn for the worse with the Israeli Navy intercepting a relief ship headed toward the coastal strip.
A group of 21 activists sailing to Gaza said Tuesday that Israeli forces had threatened to gun down their boat unless they changed direction.
"There is a patrol boat around us and we were told that if we did not turn back they would open fire," Reuters quoted Irish activist Derek Graham as saying.
"We are continuing our course to Gaza," he added.
The Free Gaza Movement activists had left the Cypriot port of Larnaca earlier on Monday to deliver three tons of medical supplies, some tool kits and copper wiring to Gaza.
The activists onboard included an Irish Nobel peace laureate and a former US congresswoman.
Tel Aviv has tightened a blockade on Gaza, which is home to some 1.5 million people, since the democratically elected government of Hamas took power of the strip two years ago.
Israel's consistent blockades have cost Palestinians dearly with unemployment and poverty rates in the territory being amongst the highest in the world.
According to the official statistics agency of the Palestinian Authority, a steady decline is to be expected in the economy of the West Bank and Gaza.
With more than six months after Israel's three-week attack on the Gaza Strip, Palestinians are fighting to survive the acute shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Friday that Israel's full-scale offensive on Gaza has taken a heavy toll on the territory's agriculture sector and has heightened risks of food insecurity and undernourishment.
A new report by Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of violating the international law in using armed drones against civilians in the Gaza Strip.
Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the group, said on Tuesday that the drone operators had fired at least six times before verifying their targets during the Gaza War and killed at least 29 civilians, among them 8 children.
In six cases documented in the report, three attacks hit children playing on rooftops in residential neighborhoods and three others hit an elementary school serving as a refugee center, a group of students at a bus stop, and a metal shop near a refugee camp.
The report says in each case, high-resolution video from the drones should have told operators there were no gunmen in the area.
Drones, operated by remote control by pilots watching their targets on a video monitor, are called "the most precise, the most distinguishing of all weapons that any military has in its arsenal".
"We were quite surprised during our mission in Gaza to actually find so many civilians killed by these weapons," Garlasco said.
While Palestinian witnesses and defense experts have reported seeing Israeli drones attacking targets on the ground, Israeli military has denied the report saying it appeared to be based on "unnamed and unreliable Palestinian sources" whose military expertise were "unproven," said a military spokesman on Tuesday.
The group however said it found a particular type of shrapnel and a neat dispersion of the missile parts consistent with a drone-fired Israeli Spike missile.
Israel launched its three-week war against Gaza in late December. Some 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 900 civilians, were killed, according to Gaza health officials and human rights groups.
In another act of piracy outside its territorial waters, the Zionist regime's navy seized a foreign vessel carrying humanitarian assistance for Gaza and forcibly diverted it and all onboard to Israel on Tuesday.
The “Spirit of Humanity” was carrying 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Maguire and former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.
The crew was detained by the Israeli military, who said they would "be handed over to the proper authorities."
According to an International Committee of the Red Cross report released Monday, the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip are “trapped in despair.”
Ten of thousands of Gazans, whose homes were destroyed during Israel's December 2008-January 2009 onslaught against their blockaded enclave, are still without shelter, despite pledges of almost $4.5 billion in aid because the Zionist regime refuses to allow cement and other construction material into the Gaza Strip.
The report also notes that hospitals are struggling to meet the needs of their patients due to Israel's disruption of medical supplies.
Just before being kidnapped by Israel, Huwaida Arraf, the Free Gaza Movement chairperson and delegation co-coordinator of the voyage, stated, “No one could possibly believe that our small boat constitutes any sort of threat to Israel.”
He explained that they were carrying medical and reconstruction supplies, and toys for children. “Our boat was searched and received a security clearance by Cypriot Port Authorities before we departed, and at no time did we ever approach Israeli waters.”
“Israel's deliberate and premeditated attack on our unarmed boat is a clear violation of international law and we demand our immediate and unconditional release,” Arraf said.
The Zionist regime army has handed out demolition orders for the destruction of Palestinian homes and structures located in Al Kahder town in the occupied West Bank.
The demolition plans are in accordance with Israel's policy of changing the demography of Jerusalem (al-Quds) and the surrounding area in order to turn Islam's third-holiest city into a "Jews only" region.
Israel's military civil administration officers on Tuesday have called for the demolition of six homes, four aquifers, and one greenhouse owned by Palestinians south of the city of Bethlehem, in the southern West Bank.
The houses are homes to six families of around 40 people, local sources reported.
The Zionist army claims that they lack the necessary building permits and are too close to the nearby settlers' road.
In response, the Bethlehem Committee Against Settlements and the Illegal Wall announced next Saturday to be a day of solidarity with the families and called on all members of the community to gather at the homes of these six families.
In addition, the Zionist authorities threatened on Sunday to demolish a further 500 buildings owned by churches in the Old City of Jerusalem (al-Quds), Greek Orthodox and Catholic church officials said.
The church buildings are mainly homes owned by the church and leased to Palestinian Christian priests, nuns and their families.
Israel has demolished a Palestinian house in eastern Jerusalem (al-Quds) without a prior warning, injuring nine people living in the building.
The incident occurred on Monday when Jerusalem (al-Quds) municipality authorities tore down a house on the Mount of Olives on Monday morning.
The Israeli police forces who accompanied the bulldozers clashed with those residing in the house and wounded nine people, including four women. Two of the women were taken to the nearby al-Maqasid Hospital.
The home was 150 square meters in size and belonged to Samir Abu Juma'a.
Juma'a said the demolition came without any warning and just a day after the municipality declared that it would withdraw 70% of the demolition orders.
Israeli officials continue to engage in the destruction of Palestinian houses on the grounds that they were built without permits, which are almost impossible to obtain.
According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), the Jerusalem municipality issued only 18 permits in 2008 for construction in the Palestinian parts of the city, denouncing the policy of few permits for forcing the Palestinians either to construct illegally or leave the city.
ICAHD also reports that in 2008 the municipality demolished 87 Palestinian homes, issued 959 demolition orders and collected 3.6 million US dollars in fines from Palestinians.
There are some 270,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem (al-Quds), 70% of whom live below the poverty line.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak downplays the differences between the US and Israel over the issue of settlements as "only one component" in the peace process.
"We must put this issue in perspective, bearing in mind that it is only one component in the context of an overall agreement for peace with the Arab world," Barak told Israeli public radio on Wednesday.
The remarks followed his meeting with the US special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, in New York.
Mitchell repeated the White House's demand for an end to Israel's settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank.
The former premier acknowledged the disagreements between Washington and Tel Aviv on the issue. "We have not been at an impasse and we are not at one now."
Following years of silence, the US is now at odds with its closest Middle East ally over the issue of Israeli settlements with President Barack Obama pressing for a complete halt in the expansion of settlements.
This is while Hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected Obama's call, saying the "natural growth" of existing settlements should be enshrined in any peace deal.
The rift became deeper after a meeting between Netanyahu and Mitchell was cancelled last week.
According to Barak, however, Israel and the US are inching their way toward a compromise on settlements, which would avoid the complete freeze that President Obama has demanded.
Currently some 280,000 Israelis live in over 100 settlements scattered across the West Bank, causing major obstacles to the creation of a viable Palestinian state and compromising the prospect of peace negotiations.
Palestinians refuse to hold talks with Israel as long as it continues its illegal settlement activities.
Nearly a day after the detention of former US lawmaker Cynthia McKinney by Israeli forces, Washington has yet to make a reaction.
Israeli Navy detained former US congresswoman and Nobel Prize laureate Cynthia McKinney and twenty other human rights activists on board a relief boat outside Israel's territorial waters on Tuesday as they were heading to Gaza on a humanitarian mission.
Tel Aviv claims the boat was trying to break Israel's two-year siege on Gaza.
Ms McKinney -- the 2008 Green Party nominee for President of the United States-- has accused Tel Aviv of violating the international law by seizing an aid vessel in international waters.
"This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip," McKinney said in a statement.
Green Party leaders have called on the White House and the US State Department to intervene and demand the immediate release of all the activists.
On Monday, the International Committee of the Red Cross warned of dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, saying 1.5 million Palestinians living in the coastal sliver are 'trapped in despair' because of the continuing Israeli blockade on the territory.
Since June 2007, when Israel imposed a blockade on the territory, no raw material has entered Gaza, stalling any attempt to rebuild the strip.
According to the humanitarian agency report, seriously ill patients were not receiving the treatment they needed and thousands of Gazans whose homes were destroyed during Israel's three-week Christmas war were still without shelter.
The Palestinian Authority's minister for Jerusalem (al-Quds) affairs steps down over the government's failure to defend Palestinian interests.
Hatem Abdel Qader said Wednesday that he had decided to resign from his post in protest to the level of funding allocated to help Palestinians, whose homes in Jerusalem (al-Quds) are being destroyed to increase the number of Jewish settlements.
Abdel Qader, who was appointed six weeks ago in a cabinet reshuffle, said the finance ministry was holding back payments to lawyers and engineers fighting cases in Israeli courts against demolition orders issued for Palestinian homes.
"Homes are being demolished because we cannot pay for court appeals," Abdel-Qader said.
"This indicates that they wanted me to be there as decoration, and I won't be. My decision has been welcomed by the people of Jerusalem [al-Quds] because they never received any aid from the government," he added.
While the municipality claims it is simply enforcing the law, several rights groups have repeatedly said that the demolition order, which forces hundreds of Palestinians to leave their homes in East Jerusalem (al-Quds), is politically-motivated and aims to increase the number of Jewish settlements.
Abdel Qader says Israel has ordered the demolition of over 1,000 Palestinian homes since the beginning of 2009, indicating that the pace of the destruction of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem (al-Quds) has increased in recent months despite worldwide condemnation.
Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has not commented on the issue yet.
Amnesty International says Israel used Gaza children as "human shields" during its recent offensive in which over 1,400 people lost their lives.
In a 117-page report on the Israeli war against the Gaza Strip, the London-based rights group accused the regime of war crimes saying Israeli forces inflicted "wanton destruction" in attacks that targeted civilians.
Based on the report, Israeli troops forced Palestinians to stay in one room of their home while turning the rest of the house into a base and sniper position effectively using the families, both adults and children, as human shields and putting them at risk.
"Intentionally using civilians to shield a military objective, often referred to as using 'human shields' is a war crime," Amnesty said.
"Hundreds of civilians were killed in attacks carried out using high-precision weapons, air-delivered bombs and missiles, and tank shells," read the report.
Confirming the death of at least 300 children in the Israeli war on the strip, Amnesty said "women and children were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers."
"Willful killings of unarmed civilians are war crimes," the rights group concluded.
In its report, Amnesty also criticized Hamas's rocket attacks on Israeli targets. The Palestinian movement fired rockets at Israeli communities in retaliation to the Israeli non-stop aerial and ground invasion on the Palestinian territory.
The rights group, however, rejected Israeli allegations that Palestinian fighters used civilians as human shields.
Spain's National Court has turned down a request by The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights to investigate a 2002 bombing by Israel in the Gaza Strip.
The report on Tuesday comes a day after court papers announced that the country's highest court would try seven Israelis, including a former defense minister, for bombing that killed Hamas leader Salah Shehade and 14 others.
Seven children were among those killed in the July 22 attack that left more than another 150 injured.
Judge Fernando Andreu had argued that it could constitute a crime against humanity, which allows the persecution of the foreigners under Spanish law.
The suspects named by Andreu included former Israeli defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, currently serving as the industry ministry, and six current or former army officers or security officials.
The case had created some diplomatic tension between Spain and Israel.
The decision is in line with a preliminary approval by parliament of legislation limiting the right of Spanish judges to hold trials on the world stage.
Israeli Justice Minister Ya'akov Ne'eman ridiculed the Palestinian plaintiffs' "cynical" efforts to "exploit the Spanish judicial system in order to advance a political agenda against Israel."
He expressed Tel Aviv's conviction that “the Spanish government and judicial system will do their utmost" to stop the proceedings.
Under the new legislation, the Spanish National Court can only investigate in cases where the victims or the charged parties are Spanish citizens.
The development comes as Israel's devastating winter military offensive on the densely populated enclave prompted the UN to hold unprecedented public hearings in Gaza City and Geneva this week following an international outcry over war crimes during the conflict.
The non-stop air, land and sea strikes on the impoverished Palestinian territory left over 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis -- 10 soldiers and three civilians.
IDF chief rabbi says women shouldn't serve
By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: Israel News
Women ought not to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, IDF Chief Rabbi Avichai Ronski said at a conference two weeks ago.
The conference was attended by several dozen religious women soldiers, and the topic was supposed to be the special problems they face. Most religious women opt to do civilian national service instead of army service.
But Ronski told the women, "I personally think that a priori, women should not serve in the army," adding that no rabbinic rulings authorize women to do so. He has since denied making the comment.
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Most Orthodox rabbis, his predecessors included, would agree with Ronski. But most of the others have been careful not to say so while in uniform.
And some of those present, including some Orthodox rabbis and educators, were furious at Ronski's statement.
"I'm not surprised that this is his opinion," said one woman. "But that he chose to say it in front of dozens of religious women soldiers, who have done something that is not easy for them - that is insensitivity."
Several women said they found his remarks particularly outrageous because he met his own wife while she was serving as a company clerk in his army unit.
Rabbi Ohad Tohar-Lev of Midreshet Lindenbaum, one of the few religious institutions for women that offers a program combining Torah study with army service, said he personally believes "there are some army positions that a woman should serve in a priori." He added that he has no objection to Ronski expressing the contrary opinion, "but one has to ask the leaders of the army whether there isn't a problem with the very appointment of someone who holds this view."
Yet Tohar-Lev, along with several others who criticized Ronski's remark, all praised him for the fact that despite his views, he tries to help religious women solve any problems they encounter in the army.
"The message is that it's better not to be drafted," said one religious woman soldier. "But from the moment we are in uniform, there's a great deal of assistance."
In this, Ronski differs sharply from his predecessors, many of whom refused to help religious women soldiers on the grounds that they should not have enlisted to begin with.
Several women at the conference complained that the religious education system does not support them in their decision to serve. "Do you want me to speak with your school principals?" Ronski responded.
Ronski also discussed the rabbinic prohibition against physical contact between unmarried men and women, noting that some religious women observed this prohibition while doing their army service, but others did not.
Ronski has spoken out in the past against integrating women into combat units, arguing that women cannot realize their full potential in combat units, that putting men and women together under such difficult conditions creates all kinds of sexual problems, and that having women in these units offends the sensibilities of male religious soldiers. But he has said he favors using women as instructors in the army, because they tend to have personality traits appropriate for this job, such as "delicacy, patience and persistence."
The IDF Spokesman said Wednesday night that Ronski denied making the comment, and said he merely had commented on the difficulties facing some women during their military service.
"The IDF chief rabbi told those attending the conference that during his visits to IDF units, he witnessed the difficulties that religious women had in integrating, due to the inability to permit them to serve in accordance with Jewish law," the office said.
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