Yom Shnee
Monday
21 Sivan 5782
June 20 2022
The News on the Israeli Street
On the Palestinian front . . .
Palestinian terrorists hurling Molotovs, IEDs, and “rocks” tried to murder Israelis near Beit Omer on the Gush Etzion Road (1 wounded), near Jaba Tzurif, beside Ummer, Al-Aruv, north of the Halhul Junction, in the vicinity of Beitar, and at dozens of other locations.
Two Palestinian terrorists from Gaza, armed with IEDs, tried to infiltrate into southern Israel overnight but were captured by IDF troops.
Cyber attack . . .
On and off for the last 12 hours, incoming missile alarms have been sounding in northern Jerusalem and Eilat sometimes for as long as an hour at a time.
It is suspected that Iranian hackers are behind the attack.
The impending teacher’s strike . . .
As you may not know, with 10 days left until the end of the school year, Israeli teachers are now striking two hours every day.
The main issue is money: a teacher’s aide receives an average of 5,287 shekels (about $1,537) per month.
A full time teacher receives on average 14,000 shekels ($4,067) per month.
With the skyrocketing cost of living here and with the increasingly difficult job teachers face, they deserve a raise.
Will they get one or go on full strike before the end of the school year?
The daily Corona update . . .
4,954 Israelis tested positive yesterday (out of only 12,271 tested) bringing to 50,833 the number of active patients in the country.
The positive test rate was 40.37%; the coefficient of infection was 1.3%.
166 Israelis are seriously ill; 43 are critically ill—37 of these are on ventilators.
10,904 have died, 8 since 24 hours ago.
Relatively few Israelis got tested but of those who were yesterday, an astonishing 40.37% tested positive. This suggests that the virus could be far more widespread than the figures show.
TODAY’S BLOG:
Knesset To Dissolve: New Elections 10.25.22:
Yair Lapid To Become Prime Minister
In a blockbuster announcement to come at 8 pm Israel time tonight, PM Bennett and FM Lapid will announce that their attempts to stabilize the Coalition have failed. As a result, the Knesset will dissolve this week or next, and Yair Lapid will take over as prime minister until the election because of an agreement that he and Bennett had when the Coalition was formed.
That election will come on October 25, after the holidays have finished here.
The simple fact is that all of this was caused by a member of Bennett’s Yamina Party, Nir Orbach who informed Bennett yesterday that he would vote to dissolve the government.
Left with the choice of Orbach possibly forming a right-wing government without an election, or dissolving the Knesset and having a new election, Bennett and Lapid chose the latter.
Disingenuously, Bennett said this afternoon that he opted for new elections when he was faced with the possibility that the extension of Jewish law to Judea and Samaria would not pass the Knesset. Of course this is nonsense–there is no way that the Jewish community members in Judea and Samaria would have ever been hung out to dry.
We will have more on this in tomorrow’s blog, but frankly, the challenge will be for the right-wing in Israel to stop Lapid and his leftist cohorts from disastrous steps during the next 4 months.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.