The faction whip of the Israel Our Home party, MK Robert Ilatov, said Monday that the faction would automatically vote against all bills proposed by members of the Labor faction. This, in protest of Labor's apparent sabotage of Israel Our Home's attempts to have the Ariel University Center officially recognized as a university.
Ariel University is in the Shomron city of Ariel. Israel Our Home is led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
"As long as the Labor Party does not begin to honor agreements that it has signed, all of its parliamentary activity will run into the wholesale opposition of 15 Knesset Members,” MK Ilatov said. “The matter of the college is being torpedoed out of pettiness and an unwillingness to respect a signed agreement. We will insist upon our demand to turn Ariel College into a university.”
Academic Freedom Hurt?
MK Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) said that Defense Minister Ehud Barak's decision to postpone the declaration of Ariel University Center as a university is "not based on relevant considerations but on petty politics.”
"The institution at Ariel meets all objective academic criteria," she said, "and any attempt to delay the declaration impinges on academic freedom in Israel. The Defense Minister has forgotten that he is part of a Likud-led coalition and that he is not running an independent policy on behalf of the Labor party.”
The heads of the Council for Higher Learning and the committee responsible for allocating budgets to academic institutions stated in 2007 that they would not recognize the announcement by the Judea and Samaria College – as it was known until then – that it had changed its status to a “university center.”
Nationalists see a political motivation behind attempts to keep the institution at Ariel from upgrading its status, and claim that the Left is discriminating against it because it is situated on land liberated in 1967.