A large elections photograph of MKs Avigdor Lieberman, Benny Elon and Zvi Hendel - the heads of the National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu - covers the picture of MK Ahmed Tibi (who is running on the Hadash-Ta'al list, following the Supreme Court decision yesterday) at the entrance to the village of Rama. The population of Rama is 6,500, one-third Druze and two-third Muslim and Christian Arabs.

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A visual illustration of the complexity of the situation can be found opposite the house of Akram Fares, a Druze man who hosted Lieberman in his home in a campaign visit to the mixed locale. Half of a ragged Israeli flag, torn by the ravages of time or the weather, flew proudly opposite the house.

"We've decided to go with Ivet [Lieberman]," said Fares. "All the governments have not helped us, and only Ivet as minister of infrastructure put in sewers here. As you know, Ivet has affection for the Druze sector and for soldiers."

"The Jews are behaving as if we are living on the border of France and Switzerland," said Lieberman to the dozens of Druze who crowded into the house to meet the man who has done so well by them. "It must be made clear that anyone who is partner to us has taken the right step; he deserves everything. The burden of proof is on us, on the Jews. Over the years he has only lost: We have proved that [to] anyone who has linked his fate to ours, from the first King Abdullah to the South Lebanon Army [SLA] and the collaborators in Yesha [the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza]. We behaved like madmen."

Sharansky's visit in Taibeh does not look strange to the visitor and his hosts. This is already the second round of Knesset elections in which he has been active in the Arab sector, and he has supporters there from his days as interior minister and minister of industry and trade.

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Jaber Riad and Salim Mahmud, two residents of Taibeh who came to the meeting with Sharansky, say that not everyone in Taibeh was really angry about the CEC disqualification. "There are all kinds," they say. "Last time we voted for Tibi so he would help us, and he went to help Arafat. What did we get out of this?" Now they are with Sharansky.

I have to be interested in the closing of gaps and in equality no less than you. I came from a country where we were a persecuted minority, and today even President Putin admits that the greatest mistake of the previous regime was that they tried to bend the minorities. If they have understood this in Russia, this certainly must be the case in a democratic country.

In the 2003 elections, the right is not exactly the right and the left has not been the left for a long time. Everyone here talks about how all the governments of the left never accomplished what Lieberman accomplished in one year during which he brought Druze into government companies, directorates and even the board of the Israel Lands Administration.

On the way out of the Taibeh area in the direction of Upper Nazareth, they again change cars. Now it is possible to go back to the usual official car. At the same time, they also pull off the masking tape that had concealed part of the inscription on the side of the armored vehicle. "This car was purchased with the help of the Yesha Council," it says beneath the masking tape. Now this can be revealed.

Bronfman is... a passionate supporter of Jorge Haider's Austrian Freedom Party. For years, Bronfman has had a close relationship with the former secretary-general of the party, Peter Sichrovsky. On various occasions, while all of Europe was boycotting the Viennese coalition government in which the Freedom Party played a key role, Bronfman met publicly with its leaders: former deputy chancellor Susanne Riess-Passer and former finance minister Karl Heinz Grasser. He did this even though it was clear that the meetings served Haider's people as a European and international stamp of kashrut at a time when the European and international community was boycotting them.

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It's worth remembering who exactly is Riess-Passer, with whom Bronfman forged an alliance. She is someone who claimed the "Nazis were not all bad." It's worth remembering that Grasser, with whom Bronfman has cooperated, is someone who refused to participate in memorial services commemorating the Holocaust and objected to Austrian politicians going to Israel "to take on collective responsibility for the horrors of World War II." It's especially worth remembering that Haider, whom Bronfman has so enthusiastically recommended, is the person who praised Hitler's employment policies and defined the men of the Waffen SS as "decent people, of character, who even in the face of powerful opposing winds, stuck to their beliefs and remained loyal to their nationality to this very day."

Why did Roman Bronfman choose to become their ally? Why did an Israeli man of the left decide to serve the interests of the extreme Austrian right? Bronfman claims he exploited the noise around the Freedom Party to hold up a mirror to Israeli society. He says Israel is no less - and perhaps more - racist than Austria.

The dark connection between Bronfman and the Freedom Party is an expression of a certain longing to treat Israel as a nearly neo-Nazi phenomenon when the real neo-Nazis are treated as an innocent or meaningless phenomenon. However, whatever Bronfman's motives, the result is clear: number five on the Meretz list for the 16th Knesset describes the chilling Haiderist longings as nostalgia for the era of national pride. Number five on the Meretz list describes the racist policies of the Freedom Party as representing the interests of the native population.

That same edition of the Times also produced the single lamest piece of article-assigning I’ve seen since I was a regular reader of my high school newspaper. Under the headline "A Digit and a World Apart: At 565 Park Ave., Living the Dream; at 1565, Still Dreaming," reporter Alan Feuer examined two apartment buildings: one at E. 62nd St., the other at E. 112th St. Feuer is probably not to be blamed for this. Cannily, the Times was able to ferret out that the building in the heart of the east side, across from the Colony Club, was rich, while the tenement known as the James Weldon Johnson Houses in Harlem was poor. The article was full of compare-and-contrast—diamonds and champagne here, urine in the stairwells there! In our edition of the Times the photo caption ran, "At 565 Park Avenue, above, an elegant co-op apartment building at 62nd Street in Manhattan, there is a liveried doorman. At the brick-faced public housing tower at 1565 Park Avenue, several miles to the north, there is a broken door buzzer."

So what next from the Times? Maybe "1492 and 1942... Despite the Superficial Similarities, Two Very Different Years." Or "Greenwich and Greenland: Behind the Names, a World of Difference."

The Falashmura claim Jewish ancestry, despite having converted to Christianity over the years. Emissaries of Shas mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef have visited Ethiopia during the past year and were convinced that the Falashmura have returned to Judaism and have close relatives already living in Israel.

Anyone with a family connection to Ethiopian Jewry on their maternal side, the plan determines, will be permitted to enter Israel.

With regard to "mixed families in which one of the parents is the child of a non-Jew," the decision will be delayed until it has been reviewed by Rabbi Yosef.

No matter which candidates and slates the Supreme Court decides to approve or disqualify Tuesday, it is already clear that the law permitting parties and individuals to be banned from running for the Knesset is problematic.

This is not because the law's aims are improper. It is perfectly reasonable for Israel to deny a seat in parliament to individuals or parties that fail to accept the country's ground rules: that reject its identity as a Jewish and democratic state, that support armed attacks against it by enemy states or terrorist organizations, or that incite to racist hatred against part of the population.

Unfortunately, however, there appears to be no way of making such decisions that would cause a substantial majority of the country to deem the outcome fair. The party-based Central Elections Commission is clearly vulnerable to charges of politicized decision-making. Yet involving the judicial system whether as an appellate body (the current system) or as the sole authority (the latest popular reform proposal) not only fails to solve this problem, it further undermines the judiciary's status by forcing it even more deeply into the political game.

When the issue at stake is so politically charged, when most of the evidence consists of public statements that everyone has heard and evaluated for himself, and when the public is split down the middle over the proper conclusions (as the CEC's votes demonstrate), it would be difficult even for a far less politicized Supreme Court than Israel's to convince most of the public that its decisions were uninfluenced by political considerations.

Thus it seems that whatever method is used, any decision either to disqualify or to approve a controversial party will only sow more discord in an already deeply divided society.

How, then, can the law's vital aims be achieved without this negative consequence?

Dr. Alex Epstein, an Associate Fellow at the Shalem Center and a lecturer in sociology and political science at the Open University, offered a novel solution in an interview with Ha'aretz last week: simply raise the electoral threshold.

Israel, Epstein noted, has a much lower electoral threshold than do other parliamentary democracies a mere 1.5 percent, or 1.8 Knesset seats, compared to 4 to 5 percent or even higher in other countries. This means that radical fringe groups that would never make it into another country's parliament are routinely elected here.

Four to 5 percent (five or six Knesset seats) might be too high a threshold for Israel, as it would wipe out most sectoral parties: All the Arab parties, two of the three religious factions and the one remaining immigrant party all hover around four or five seats.

But even a threshold of 3.5%, or 4.2 seats, would be enough to knock out almost every party and individual whose disqualification has been seriously considered. Azmi Bishara won two seats in 1999; this time, the most generous polls give his Balad Party three seats. Baruch Marzel's Herut Party is expected to win two seats at most. Only Ahmed Tibi might still be elected and only thanks to his merger with the more popular Hadash.

THE ADVANTAGES of this system are obvious. Banning someone like Bishara turns him into a persecuted martyr. But if he simply fails to pass the electoral threshold, he is reduced to his true proportions a radical who enjoys almost no support among the community he claims to represent. And raising the threshold also has an attractive fringe benefit: With fewer two- to three-man factions, the Knesset will operate more efficiently.

The heart of the decision lies in the interpretation of two articles in the Basic Law for the Knesset that fell victim to the politicians' demagoguery, nationalistic passions, distortions and ignorance. Even if the CEC had some good intentions, the adoption of its position could pave the way to a small hell for this conflicted country.

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The truth is that the CEC ban was partially based on words that do not even appear in the law. What prompted the CEC majority was the banned politicians' position that Israel should, of course, be a democracy, but as such it must behave as a "state of all its citizens" or alternatively as "the state of the Jewish people and its citizens." On this issue, Bishara gave the CEC and the Supreme Court explanations that only a few MKs are capable of formulating and documenting the way he can. Justice Mishael Cheshin, the chairman of the CEC, rightly commented that he had his doubts whether its members could intellectually digest the material.

It's worth reading Bishara's detailed argument, because there are things said in it that Israelis cannot allow themselves not to know. Its main argument - in a synopsis that does not do the argument justice - is that Israel, as a democracy, must grant equal rights to all its citizens. No other developed state in the world has religion determining the rights of its citizens. Yet, those demanding the "all its citizens" formula, including Bishara and Tibi, do not reject the essence of the state as having a Jewish majority.

As opposed to the public impression, Bishara did not invent the phrase. It apparently was first brought up by the then-MK Tawfik Toubi when the Knesset debated the Basic Law in 1985. It also appears in the Meretz platform. It is supported by the left, the "post Zionists" and, of course, all the Arab MKs.

But the formula does not only refer to the Arab state's citizens. It is unavoidable in the eyes of those who think that Israel, especially since its Jewish majority has grown to a "European" size, can now allow itself to absorb some of the foreign workers in an orderly process of naturalization such as takes place in any properly run country.

And if Israel were to cut the problematic, unique connection between religion and nationality through the use of the "state of all its citizens" formula - in spite of the Haredim and the National Religious Party - it could also integrate hundreds of thousands of immigrants who suffer humiliation because of nationalistic-religious skepticism about their Judaism.

Here's Labor's optimistic scenario for the election outcome: Likud wins 30-31 seats, National Union gets 8, Shas 9-10, the National Religious Party 4, and United Torah Judaism gets 5. That's less than 61 seats in the Knesset, making it impossible for Sharon to form a government without Shinui.

Given the assumption that Tommy Lapid et al will stick to their longstanding commitment not to sit in the same government with the religious, Sharon will have to turn to Labor Party Chairman Amram Mitzna.

The next assumption is that Mitzna will stick to his commitment not to participate in a government headed by Sharon.

But based on a third assumption, that Shinui won't join a government that depends on the Arab parties, Miztna also won't be able to form a coalition of 61 seats.

Adding up all those assumptions leads to the conclusion that Lapid will be the person who decides who will be the next prime minister. If he recommends to President Moshe Katsav that Mitzna form the next government, the Labor Party leader will be able to offer Sharon a return to the Foreign Ministry, taking consolation in the fact that by doing so he'd be pushing Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out.

The Central Elections Committee and the Supreme Court must examine not only the events of the past, but the likelihood of future events... The ban does not come as a punishment, but in order to prevent danger. It is the last resort, and not the first: Only when it has been proven that there is a likely possibility that the state, the democratic regime and the prohibition on racist incitement will be undermined as a result of approval of the list or the candidate, can we use this extreme weapon.

Most of the members of the elections committee didn't even ask themselves these questions. Therefore the Supreme Court should explain their mistake to them, and prevent the banning of any candidate and any list contending in the next elections. Israeli democracy is strong enough to deal even with the most infuriating and disgusting phenomena. The banning of a list is a means from which there is no return; on the other hand, if borderline lists and candidates are approved, in the future it will be possible to remedy the distortions: to put someone on trial, or to remove him from the Knesset (after he has been convicted). The Knesset Speaker also has the authority to prevent damaging proposals from being brought up for discussion.

I tend to agree with Ha'aretz that Israel has a strong enough democracy that it doesn't need to be disqualifying parties.

In any case, [the CEC] should at least follow its own internal rules and judge Jewish and Arab candidates using the same yardstick. While it is strange that an Israeli MK is advising a man who harbors dreams of destroying Israel, no one has presented hard evidence that Tibi supports terrorism. Bishara has supported terrorist organizations tacitly and less-than-tacitly in the past and openly works to undermine Israel as the Jewish national home. Therefore a case could probably be made for disqualifying him. Marzel is a clear-cut racist with a semi-terroristic past who has not openly renounced his former beliefs. He should have been disqualified along with Bishara.

This week's shenanigans were clearly political in nature. By giving a kosher stamp to an odious figure like Marzel while disqualifying Tibi and Bishara, the CEC seems to be sending a very bad message to Israel's Arabs.

Throughout the long period from the beginnings of the settlement in the land and until the destruction of the first Temple in Zedekiah's reign, the tribes of Israel enjoyed independence or, at least, autonomy in their internal affairs when they were under foreign rule. That ended with the failure of a rebellion against Nebuchadnezzar. The Temple was razed, Jerusalem went up in flames, and much of the nation was exiled to Babylon. The situation became even worse after the assassination of Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the Babylon-appointed governor of the remaining Jewish population in the country.

After these events, David's dynasty would never return to power. The idea of Jewish monarchy was over, to be revived four centuries later by the Hasmoneans, and that only for a brief interlude... Thereafter, Jewish existence centered on religious life, and the question arose as to how Jewish identity is to be preserved after political authority had been lost.

In its days of independence Uriah the Hittite could join the nation of Israel by enlisting in David's army and showing loyalty to the political entity headed by the king. Ruth the Moabite could join the Israelite people by staying with Naomi, the mother of her first husband, declaring "Where you go, I will go..." The declaration sounded more like personal loyalty than conversion, but it sufficed. In Ezra's time, the picture changed completely...

...the Registrar must record under the item "nationality" whatever the citizen tells him, as long as it is told in good faith and is not patently false. Accordingly, the children of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, who grow up in Israel and are loyal to the State, can be registered under nationality as "Jews," even though the halakhah does not recognize them as such.

Either we have something to offer the world or we don't. If not, we might as well dwindle into nothingness. But if so, we should be looking beyond shifting Jews around, from the Diaspora to Israel, and sifting among the small pools of people with lost ties to Judaism from bygone ages (though those with Jewish roots should surely be welcome as well).

[T]he proposal would institutionalize the exclusion of Israeli researchers from scientific committees, conferences and scientific journals. It would kill international research projects involving Israeli scientists and academic hosting programs for university faculty. It would ban international student exchange programs.

About one-third of the women in the second year of studies are Shas voters. It was people from this movement who laid the foundations for opening academic frameworks for the ultra-Orthodox - the first of them was Touro College, which was initiated by Shas activist Gabi Abutbul and eventually fell apart. Some of the students continued at the Kirya Akademit. The rest of the women in the class belong to various Hasidic groups, especially Chabad, a movement that has always been open to the outside world. According to Hadassah Zwebner, of the Sarat-Vizhnitz Hasidic group, a mother of four children who works in marketing, the rabbis give permission on an individual basis to women who want to study. There are also women who belong to the more Orthodox wing of national religious Zionism. The fact that only very few of the women come from the Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox community can easily be explained: The Lithuanians are the conservatives of ultra-Orthodox society. For them, there is still a stigma on anyone who works and the fear of the threat of non-religious education.

Israeli intelligence indicates that Arafat has been urging the acceleration of terrorist attacks against Israel in order to topple Sharon's government in the coming Jan. 28 elections.

Arafat, according to officials, wants to show Israeli voters that Sharon cannot deliver on his promise of security, thereby tilting the election to the Labor Party, under Amram Mitzna, who has indicated his willingness to recommence peace negotiations.

Blumenthal's case is small fry compared to other scandals arising out of the miasma of the Likud Central Committee. Blumenthal's name has not been linked to the criminal underworld, which gives her an advantage compared to a few other candidates who snared secure spots on Likud's election list. There is no suspicion that Blumenthal aspired to sit with Israel's 119 other legislators so that she could represent shady interests; and this cannot be said about a few of the others on the Likud list.

For the first time in the history of the state, there is evidence suggesting that some Trojan horses are running for the Knesset so they can slip into the corridors of power and promote dubious, if not criminal, interests.

From 1942 onward, the United States abducted some 3,000 people of Japanese, Italian and German ancestry from Latin America, shipped them to the United States and placed them in internment camps. These prisoners were never charged with crimes.

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In 1999 the United States issued an apology for its treatment of the Peruvian Japanese and provided them with a token payment of $5,000 for their ordeal. It never admitted, however, that it had violated international law by abducting noncombatant civilians from another country during wartime.