The Supreme Court is hearing Sunday morning an appeal from representatives of Arab parties who argue that the Knesset law raising the limit of the number of votes needed for a party to elect Knesset Members violates human rights.

The Basic Law on Human Rights gives the court power to overthrow Knesset laws it thinks don’t meet its standards of equality, which are totally subjective.

The Knesset this year raised the “threshold” from 2 percent to 3.25 percent for a party to be represented in the Knesset.

The law was sponsored by Yisrael Beitenu and hoped to do away with a lot of little parties vying to be in the coalition. The higher limit theoretically discourages tiny parties from running but it also could mean that the Arab parties, unless they unite, will not win enough votes to return to the Knesset.

In the 2013 elections, 32 parties ran, of which, 20 did not win enough votes to enter the Knesset.

Among them were Moreshet Avot, which won a grand total of 461 votes, the Pirate party, with 2,076 votes, the Greens and Youth, which garnered 8,117 votes, and the Green Leaf pro-marijuana party, with 43,734 votes but still only a little more than half the number needed for representation.

All told, approximately 240,000 votes., worth three Knesset seats, went to losers.

There are two Arab parties in the outgoing Knesset, one with four MKs and the other with three MKs. An Arab-Jewish party – Hadash – has three MKs.

Lawyers for the Arab parties argued that the higher limit violates their human rights and equality.

They didn’t mention it, but it also increases the extortion capabilities of the mid-sized parties that become far more important for their electoral size.

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein approved the law and told the court that it was not aimed at the Arab parties but was designed to make the elections and the government more manageable.

If the court overturns the law, it would make it easier for a third Sephardi party to enter the race and would increase the chances that the right-wing Otzma, headed by Michael Ben-Ari, will win Knesset representation.

If so, its seats would come at the expense of the Jewish Home party, making it harder for Binyamin Netanyahu to form a coalition if the Likud wins the election. Otzma is not likely to join a government that talks about “two states” and does not make it clear that all of Judea and Samaria is part of Israel.

A five-justice Supreme Court panel verbally attacked Arab Knesset Member Hanin Zoabi during a hearing on her appeal to overturn the Knesset’s banning her for six months for speech that included identifying with the kidnap-murderers of three yeshiva students last June.

The justices’ questioning was unusually political, and the harsh criticism of the rabble-rousing MK suggested that it will uphold the Knesset Ethics Committee’s decision when the court hands down a ruling on her appeal.

One after another, the justices scored Zoabi for her claims that she backs non-violence while identifying with the Hamas kidnap-murders of the yeshiva students in a radio interview last June, before it was known that the boys had been murdered.

She told the interviewer that the kidnappers were not terrorists and simply are your average Joes, or Mohammeds, who “see no other way to change reality.”

Wouldn’t she be great on a Reality Show?

Some of her other exploitation of free speech have been to back a “siege on the State of Israel instead of negotiating with it.”

By the way, Zoabi lives in Nazareth, in the Galilee and has not professed that she would prefer to live in the Palestinian Authority and try her “free speech” approach to criticize Mahmoud Abbas.

More likely, she is waiting for the Palestinian Authority to take over all of Israel.

And what does Madame Zoabi have to say about today’s judicial lesson that free speech does not cover direct incitement?

She was very surprised at the justices’ line of questioning and is optimistic they will rule in her favor and against the Knesset Ethics Committee.

If the court were to rule against her, she said, “racists and bigots will wipe out any chance of peace co-existence.”

Speaking to the press, Zoabi said she was surprised by the political nature of the discussion, but hoped that the court finds in her favor. “Otherwise, the racists and bigots will eradicate any chance of peaceful coexistence in this country,” she said.

She was not holding a mirror in front of her face when she made the statement.

Two Jewish groups joined a friend of the court brief on behalf of a Muslim woman whose right to wear a headscarf in a retail job is under consideration by the Supreme Court.

The court on Thursday agreed to hear the case, Politico reported.

The American Jewish Committee and the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism joined an amicus with Christian, Muslim and Sikh groups. The Anti-Defamation League and the Orthodox Union also are considering amicus briefs.

The federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission brought the suit against Abercrombie & Fitch on behalf of Samantha Elauf, who had been recommended for hiring at an outlet in Tulsa, Okla. The outlet subsequently reversed its recommendation.

A lower court, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, ruled against Elauf, saying that she needed to give “explicit notice of the conflicting religious practice and the need for an accommodation for it, in order to have an actionable claim for denial of such an accommodation.”

That decision described Abercrombie & Fitch’s “Look Policy,” which, the court said, the retailer considers “critical to the health and vitality of its ‘preppy’ and ‘casual’ brand.”

Elauf contends that wearing the headscarf during her interview and communications with managers through a friend who worked at the store was sufficient.

The friend had checked with one manager who, citing the case of an employee who had worn a yarmulke, said there should not be a problem.

Elauf interviewed with another manager who was not certain of the policy and after consulting with her superiors dropped her initial recommendation to hire. Elauf did not explicitly raise her faith as an issue during the interview.

The religious groups argue in their brief that requiring an explicit notice of religious requirements is overly stringent.

“Hiring processes are often technologically structured in a way that precludes the employee from even raising the issue during the application process,” the brief argues.

The corruption trial of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — this one relating to wads of cash from Long Island businessman and philanthropist Rabbi Morris “Moshe” Talansky — has reopened in Jerusalem District Court.

Talansky founded The New Jerusalem Fund together with Olmert. He told the Jerusalem District Court in past testimony that over a period of 13 years he gave the former prime minister about $150,000, most of it in cash, earmarked for campaign and personal expenses. Some was intended as a loan, some not.

The court was set to hear testimony from former Olmert aide Shula Zaken, who has turned state’s witness, as well as from Olmert in defense of himself.

The Israeli leader was convicted of breach of trust in the Holyland Complex affair in 2012 and given a suspended sentence of one year in prison and a fine of NIS 75,000 ($21,000). This year he was convicted of lying to the court in testimony about the case, and was convicted again on one count of breach of trust in the same case.

Olmert was sentenced on May 13, 2014, to six years in prison and fined NIS 1.5 million ($430,000), and was to begin serving his sentence yesterday, September 1.

He was acquitted in the Rishon Tours and Talansky affairs, but due to new evidence the Talansky affair was also re-opened today.

All three cases span Olmert’s tenures as mayor of Jerusalem, Minister of Industry, Trade and Labor, Finance Minister and finally as Prime Minister – a period from 1993 to 2009.

A worldwide legal earthquake is about to begin in Brooklyn, where the Jordan-based Arab Bank goes on trial today (Monday) for authorizing money transfers from terror entities to Hamas members abroad.

The case, a lawsuit by the families of US victims of terror, has been 10 years in the making and revolves around ‘martyr payments’ to the relatives of Hamas suicide bombers via the Jordan-based Arab Bank through its New York branch during the second intifada.

The plaintiffs claim in their suit the Bank has violated Section 2339B of Title 18 of the US Code, which makes it illegal for an entity within the United States to provide material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations. Hamas is included on that list. Attorney Gary Osen of Osen LLC is the lead attorney in the case.

This is the first-ever civil trial targeting terrorist financing, one that has dragged on for a decade because Arab Bank has worked just that hard to fight it — or at least to delay the proceedings as long as possible. When the Supreme Court rejected the Bank’s petition to hear the case in June, the way was paved for today’s hearing in Brooklyn.

In April 2013, a New York Federal Court penalizing the Bank with an order imposing sanctions for refusing to submit documents for review by the plaintiffs to determine whether they could be used as evidence in the case.

That order raised Cain between three agencies at the federal level in the Obama administration – the US State Department, the Justice Department, and the Treasury Department – as officials tried to decide just how to deal with this delicate but dirty matter that affects not one, but at least two or more of America’s closest allies in the Middle East.

The Bank claimed it refused to submit the documents because it could have violated bank secrecy laws in Jordan and Lebanon. The lower US court was having none of that and ruled a jury could interpret that to mean an automatic admission of guilt on the part of the Bank.

In a pre-trial statement to Forbes, the Bank commented, “The facts show that Arab Bank provided routine banking service in compliance with applicable counter terrorism laws and regulations, and had no intention of providing support to Hamas or any other known terrorist organization.”

The Bank is accused of facilitating massive money transfers from 1998 to 2004 to Hamas leaders and institutions, as well as to the families of jailed Hamas members and suicide bombers. The money allegedly came from insurance benefits provided by the Saudi Committee and the Hezbollah al-Shahid Foundation. Both supported the intifada by providing benefits to the families of those who “martyred” themselves or who became injured or captured by the IDF in the process.

The insurance was “ultimately designed to provide substantial material support to Palestinian terrorist organizations and to provide a meaningful incentive both to prospective recruits and to individuals contemplating the commission of independent acts of violence in the name of the ‘popular resistance’,” according to the complaint, as quoted by Business Insider.

There were five attacks specified in the complaint in which Arab Bank allegedly facilitated money transfers to the relatives of Hamas terrorists. One was the October 2003 case of John Linde Jr., murdered with two other security officers while escorting US diplomats to interview Palestinian Arab candidates for Fulbright Scholarships. The three were killed by an IED (improvised explosive device, also known as a ‘homemade bomb’) in northern Gaza. A second involved 3-year-old Tehilla Nathansen, killed while sitting on her mother’s lap when terrorists blew up the No. 2 bus in Jerusalem in August 2003. A third child, 8th grader Jacob Mandell, was killed in a hail of rocks hurled by attacking Palestinian Arabs along with another friend while hiking in May 2001. And so on.

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal submitted by six terrorists release in the Gilad Shalit deal. The state is asking for legal sanction to re-arrest the killers and to jail them for the rest of their sentences. Chief Justice Asher Grunis said the appeal would be correctly submitted to the Haifa District Court, but did not voice an opinion of the legality surrounding returning the murderers to prison.

The Haifa District Court will hear the case tomorrow.

It’s been a rough day for Palestinian supporters: Yet another unversity-based divestment attempt failed dismally at the University of Washington at the same time as an Israeli court was set to rule on the latest appeal in the decade-long legal saga of local girl Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old activist who was crushed by an IDF bulldozer in 2003 when she made the mistake of standing in front of it.

Corrie, a member of the radical, terror-supporting International Solidarity Movement (ISM) was killed while serving as a human shield in a closed military area in the Gaza Strip, near the border with Egypt.  She refused to comply with IDF instructions to vacate the area, and was then crushed to death by a military bulldozer in Gaza  because the soldier driving the bulldozer could not see her from where he was seated, high up in the cab.

For the past eleven years, her parents have pursued a lawsuit in Israel’s courts to have her death declared a murder, something Israeli courts have repeatedly refused to do. Today (Wednesday) the Supreme Court will rule on the family’s  appeal of a lower court ruling absolving the IDF of culpability for the incident.

IN 2011 a lower court ruled the IDF was not negligent, nor was it responsible for Corrie’s death. Moreover, the court ruled the IDF had fully and credibly investigated the circumstances surrounding the incident. By entering a closed military zone, and attempting to block the work of military bulldozers, Corrie was responsible for her own death, the court ruled.

BDS keeps on kicking, despite rejections

Sources on campus described the UW boycott issue as one of the most heated campus debates in recent memory, with furious comments both for and against the resolution in the university’s Slog news website. “Intentional or not, BDS [movement] singles out Jews for treatment that no one else gets, even countries that behave far worse. You don’t think it would be practical to aim against Syria (hmm, when was the last time Israel gassed its own citizens?)?” responded one writer.

Ironically, the University of Washington is located not far from Rachel Corrie’s hometown of Olympia, Wash.

Following the UW campaign, The Jewish Press has learned that students at the University of South Florida are also pressuring the school’s foundation to divest from companies linked to Israeli companies based in Judea and Samaria. Students this month presented a petition with 10,000 signatures to the school’s foundation urging the school to divest from corporations such as Motorola, HP and Caterpillar.

Boycott supporters have not indicated whether-or-not they will stop using cellphone, computer and internet technologies, all of which were developed in Israel, to protest the “brutal oppression” of the world’s only “apartheid” victims with the right to vote, run for office and full access to Israel’s Supreme Court.