Since I’ve been slamming fundamentalist Jews and Israeli politics over the women-praying-at-Western-Wall nonsense, I was wryly pleased to read this, in yesterday’s Times: Israeli Court Rules for Women at Western Wall – NYTimes.com.
I note it was a magistrate’s court judge who decided that five women “who had been detained at the Jewish holy site that morning for wearing prayer shawls and singing aloud were not disturbing public order, as the police had asserted … The judge said the people disturbing public order on Thursday were a group of ultra-Orthodox protesters who were demonstrating against the women.”
In any sane country — a country in which church and state are distinctly separate territories and in which secular law is the determinant in any dispute between these two irreconcilable entities — it should be a court that decides.
And let me point out that the judge, Sharon Lari-Bavli, is a woman.